Moose Medicine: Healing Wisdom from the Natural World

Copyright © 2013 Robyn Bridges.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1-(877) 407-4847

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6984-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6986-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6985-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013904020

Balboa Press rev. date: 6/26/2013

Contents

Introduction

Part I The Medicine of the Elements

1 Animal Dreams

2 Sound Bites

3 Buffalo Ribs

4 Mountain Magic

5 The Good Earth

6 The Standing People

7 The Stone People

8 The Air We Breathe

9 Mysteries of the Deep

10 River Songs

11 Fire in the Earth

12 The Power of Place

13 The Fairy Councils

Part II The Medicine of Animals, Plants, and Place

14 Returning to the Open Trails

15 All That Renews

16 The War Within

17 No Longer a Poultice

18 Whose Greed?

19 All on the Same Rope

20 Arid Passageways

21 The Nature of Time

22 No Earthly Escape

23 The Shaman’s Way

24 When You Believe

Part III The Medicine of Two-Leggeds

25 From Shadow to Light

26 From Abandonment to Belonging

27 From Shame to Consciousness

28 The Art of Loving and Letting Go

29 Intimate Broken Places

30 Reconstructing Conflict

31 Recognizing Your True Purpose

32 The Medicine of Conscious Prayer

33 The Grandmothers and Grandfathers

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Terms of Transpersonal Living

Recommended Readings

for the wildness

and the wilderness

in all of us

Introduction

"O nce again I am strolling along the river’s edge in Montana’s backcountry, seeking solace from life’s disappointments. With any luck, soon I will happen upon a moose, seeing just the top of his long dusty-brown muzzle wrapping deftly around streamside branches as he breaks them off to chew. The damp and sheltering willows will camouflage the rest of his massive body. I know I can spot one if only by a lone willow whose top branches will wiggle with the thrill of the huge creature feeding off them. I will wiggle too, with the thrill of such danger and awkward beauty so close to my own. I am kin here to some ineffable knowing deep in my bones. Here, my sorrows quiet. Here, I belong.

Perhaps if my young adult life had not derailed so completely, I might never have discovered the restorative power of nature. I would never have hiked so far into the mountains alone and caught my breath as I rounded a bend and came face to face with a majestic moose. If I hadn’t lost my family, I might never have realized that I could pour my heartache into the winding stream that sustains the life of the magnificent four-legged, awkward creatures who revived my will to live.

Years ago, as a newly married young college graduate full of faith in my future and in God, I had only one dream: to create my own happy family. Every fiber of my being knew I could raise children with positivity, not like my own mother had, not with negative words and slaps and fingernails digging into my wrists to yank me here or there. But infertility and an increasingly infertile marriage began to gnaw at my soul. I had hoped that I might poultice my discontent with the adoption of three young children. Yet a few years later, as their own wounds forced them from our home back into special care, I found myself divorced, entirely shunned by family, friends, and pastors. I was unemployed, faithless, and broke.

Almost instinctively, I moved toward the one constant I intuited I could trust: the safe mountains surrounding my Montana home, where possibly a new god might dwell. During those years, I lugged the disappointment withering my heart into long days of hiking and sighing. Once a former weekend backpacker, I now contented myself with day trips sandwiched between three minimum-wage jobs. My only immediate relationship was with nature itself. I began to discover a new way of belonging. I started to hear everything in the natural world speaking to me in its own language—about itself, about me, about life. I breathed deeper. And I gratefully took it all in.

The realization that moose were becoming important teachers dawned slowly. During the first summer that witnessed my loneliness, one morning I had been aimlessly winding through willowed streamside trails. Upon rounding a sharp curve, I was amazed to see a large bull moose less than twenty feet away. I froze midstride, my fear turning to admiration. Moose! I’d never been so close to one before, and I felt myself becoming aware of a deeper reality. Having clearly heard my loud approach, the moose’s large, oblong ears were keeping me in antenna range, though his body remained at an oblique angle. He glanced my way only briefly, being more interested in browsing the middle of the slow-moving stream than in attacking. Sporting huge withers and in full rack, he clacked along the underwater stones while nibbling green fronds.

Gazing into his large brown eyes, watching his curiously rounded muzzle rising out of the water and descending back in, and hearing his quiet sloshing around the willow-side waters captivated me. He was alone and content. I leaned up against a small tree and soon hunkered down to sit on the other side of the narrow stream. Mesmerized, I began to glean something from him about the capacity to survive, even thrive, alone. His well-being infused my body and mind until my breath seemed to be his. We stayed close like that for some time, him grazing on long, green stream fronds and me transfixed, cross-legged and still.

He eventually ambled off with only one more casual glance in my direction. I breathed in air as though I’d been without it for centuries. That he was surviving so well in such solitude profoundly impacted me that day and has since informed my own ability to survive the unplanned solitariness of my own life.

This epiphany was what Native people the world over call a type of medicine. Many indigenous tribes (some prefer to be called nations) believe that humans can be adopted by the collective spirit of any species of animal. For example, the Grandmother Twylah, elder of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca Nation, taught me that when a person realizes a specific animal has important lessons for them, that animal is considered to be their teaching, or medicine. Though some indigenous tribes and nations are adamant about the privacy of any traditional teachings, Grandmother Twylah had a vision of the urgency to share such wisdom with all peoples. Her encouragement helped open me to the imaginal but subjectively real world of interspecies communication. I learned to invite numinous experience through an instinctive spiritual connection, including dialogue with plants, animals, and the elements of earth, wind, water, and fire. This capacity is not limited to a certain type of person or culture. Each of us can find our own unique animal medicine to help heal whatever ails us.

Moose specifically taught me many necessary qualities for my own life. That moose model the ability to thrive so well alone has become my greatest gift. Moose Medicine has become my guide.

In the years after my divorce, working with a brilliant therapist helped my psyche to heal. And a growing desire to help others heal in the natural world resulted in a master’s degree in counseling and participation in many psycho-spiritual conferences, eco-psychology workshops, and sacred healing methods. For the next twenty-five years, I helped others who had become lost, as I had, to find their way once again by journeying into the heart of nature. In the process, they rediscovered who they really were all along: spiritual beings having a human experience, with both animal and human allies.

Many city dwellers seldom have the chance to wander boggy streams and have the kind of wild encounters I have experienced. Yet most of us living a contemporary life style, no matter where we live on the globe, can still access a quiet park or sanctuary where the earth has been fairly undisturbed. It is here that we relearn the art of listening to sentient others all around us: earth, sky, trees, plants, and animals. This is our medicine, the spiritual antidote for what ails us. Recognizing the mysterious power of the natural world to teach, renew, and restore, we learn that whatever our life challenges, even through unimaginable sorrow, spring will surely follow winter.

The chapters that follow are mapped to assist navigation of your own life challenges as you traverse your own psychological and spiritual territory. Along the way, I hope you will discover—or rediscover—guidance, inspiration, and insight through nature that you can freely apply to your own life. Part I, The Medicine of the Elements, strolls through encounters with moose and attendant teachings from the elements of earth, wind, water, and fire. Part II, The Medicine of Place, Plants, and Animals, winds through paths with animal, plant, and geographic locations that prompt a variety of ecological and healing realizations. Part III, The Medicine of Two-Leggeds, explores humans’ true place in nature and seeks practical ways to live more naturally with ourselves and others based on the ways that nature organizes itself.

Through reading Moose Medicine, I hope you will be inspired to get up-close and personal with nature or to return to doing so if you have strayed from the practice. In the process, you may find yourself spending more contemplative time in nature, and as a result experience more of your own cadenced balance and sure steps. Moose Medicine seeks to wind you through the backcountry of your own consciousness, where a pristine remembrance thrives. May you track your own form of Moose Medicine well.

Part I

The Medicine of the Elements

The Universe is the Externalization of the Soul.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

T he earth, which houses my beloved moose, abounds in unabashed richness and wild diversity. From sleek rivers to timbered mountains, from echoing canyons to pounding waterfalls, through wind-swept desert and fire-swept prairie, the earth and the elements of earth, air, water, and fire offer a cornucopia for the senses and a sense of divine mystery.

The power of our life-giving elements speaks to us in contemporary culture as we negotiate political debate over air and water toxicity, or plan a vacation, or even consider what to wear to match the weather. The elements are deeply embedded in our human psyches; our ancestors had to understand and respect each one for their safety and sustenance. As a result, they developed a kind of relationship with them: rituals to assure a good harvest, oral teachings for when to plant, where animal herds move, and how to secure safe housing. They also believed they could actually hear and receive personal and community wisdom directly from the elements, teachings that would help them live both safer and more meaningful lives. Today we have lost so much of that intimate connection with the rawness of the power of these elements. Instead of being guided by oncoming winter, we see it as a bother. Instead of welcoming rain, we protect ourselves against it. A return to the insights that the elements offer helps us get back in sync with the power and essence of the natural world.

In stretching our earth-like minds to branch out into the natural world, we paradoxically grow deeper roots in our own lives. We enhance personal balance day by day through tuning into the seasonal and diurnal rhythms of the earth, listening for messages on the early morning wind, acting with the fluidity of water, and harnessing the power of fire to accomplish goals. I join with you in primal remembrance.

1

Animal Dreams

Let me notice my surroundings. Let me remember who I am. Let me be a good animal today.

—Native teaching

A s winter swirls around my safe home in the quiet mountains of southwest Montana, unplowed roads prohibit travel to my esteemed moose country. The relaxed luxury of summer tracking has become a cold reminiscence. With the onset of inclement weather and working too many hours indoors, I have once again fallen out of balance. The wild animals in my mind then go into hiding, it seems, and down forgotten canyons to wait for me to wake up and remember them. Can I call upon the memory of inspiration and sustenance I received from them in past encounters?

I let myself recall all I’ve felt, heard, seen, touched, and tasted in nature to bring past memory into present reality. I remember the long days of excitement and adventure I’ve known tramping around the mountains in my treasured state. An odd irony is that Montana is nicknamed the treasure state, which refers to mining. I refer to the treasure of our vast, still-protected wilds.

My most recent sighting of moose happened earlier this winter, before seasonal road closures. I’d arrived at midday to my favorite cozy cabin up the west fork of the Bitterroot River in southwest Montana. Having spent the afternoon inside curled up by a wood fire in my nightgown, I was dreamily watching wisps of snow skitter along the road. In spite of the idyllic ambiance, the setting sun was heralding a sense of approaching adventure, the kind where you know that even though the light is fading, an uncertain but appealing event is about to unfold.

As oncoming night swallowed the day, something called to me. My body, not my mind, shook me from the seductive warmth of the couch and beckoned me out the door and up the road, away from my winter cabin. Already in an altered state, I pulled on a jacket over my nightgown, slipped on my winter shoes, and without gloves or hat shivered toward the north stream in the setting sun. I was alone, half-afraid, and thrilled to be moving deep into the waiting silence. Soon I was approaching a nearby group of willows close to the now deserted road, crunching snow under my unlaced boots.

Massive pine and fir trees stood all around, bravely anchoring the quiet. Now I knew what, or who, had called me. I could feel the presence of moose—at least one, and maybe more. I stopped and stared for many minutes into the sheltering willows, listening so hard I started to hear my own heartbeat, staring so intently that the branches began to blur.

And then, only a stone’s throw across the stream from me and near an old county road, I saw him: the most perfect, healthy, robust brown three-year-old boy moose I’d ever seen, sporting his first small apologies for a rack (moose aficionados know to call these antlers racks). His dark auburn-brown coat sparkled brighter than the snow, and his eyes had none of the older bull moose’s God, you’re annoying me look, but held a new curious interest. I smiled and sighed at him several times, the way you would to a new lover.

I begged whatever god might care that the upcoming late-winter hunting permits would not affect him. He would be such an easy shot, there by the road and so trusting. I almost wanted to scare him away so he would flee from the next human he saw. But I couldn’t. Selfishly, I had to allow him to become comfortable with me, to take him in at such close quarters: his pungent smell, the shine in his unusually large eyes, his beautifully rounded muzzle. Then I saw her, and laughed aloud. She’d been standing even closer to me than he was in the willows the whole time, her lighter-brown round body holding perfect stillness as camouflage. This must be his mother. She was healthy and large, though her coat was rougher, and her belly showed what must be the eighth or ninth baby coming soon in her clearly long career. Before I could even adjust to this treat, I heard her grunt-woof and saw her ears swivel slightly toward the direction of a slight depression in the willows only a few yards away from her. There came junior, a first-year baby, toddling toward her as if just up from a late afternoon nap. She began nudging him away from the three-year-old with her long, rounded muzzle, as if not wanting these probable siblings to interact with each other. Protective as always, she kept one eye on the young bull and one on me. Soon satisfied that neither of us was going to be a problem, she began to graze, reaching the tops of the highest willows. Her baby tottered patiently beside her.

Though it is somewhat rare to find an entire family wintering together, and particularly rare for a mother cow to allow a young bull to stay on, there it was. They were with each other as old familiars, with the kind of comfortable and irritated interaction any family knows. And I was being accepted as a part of their end-of-day foraging. In that moment, I keenly felt my own lack of regular connection with family, and I was aware of the physical and emotional miles that lay between us. Yet here, even as an outsider, somehow I fully belonged, even if just for the moment. I felt myself caught between heaven and earth, immersed in the deep miracle of wildlife all around. Time stopped and expanded all at once. I was swept into an eternal flow of understanding and relatedness. Home could be found everywhere, but nowhere more than here.

Minutes later, it was with palpable regret that I decided I’d