A story about my journey using the monikers that have accompanied me
Like everyone else who has woken up in this world in these times my journey was precipitated by crisis.
My life was in crisis, and so was the world we make.
My personal crisis seemed massive, many fold and entirely complex. Same for the world crisis.
Enter Truth and Dare
Truth had always been my motto, but was I living it? I had a strong sense that truth was key to the trouble within and without. I felt moved to lean in for truth in a knowing that if I did, if we did, that dare would take care of itself. I had experienced many times how it feels when tension that comes from assumptions, unknowns, unconscious, overactive imagination, fear comes off — and how it vaporizes in an instant under the light of truth.
And so I began to align with the principle of truth. And things got worse, not better, or so it seemed. The impurities in everything, myself included, began to rumble and to scream, ‘look at me, look at me, no, look at me!”
I left my body many times during the process of seeing and clarifying. It took a very long time to reclaim competency in the here and the now and the true.
Big Medicine
At about the same time the truth and dare quest was bubbling up, I knew that what was wrong in our underneath was an imbalance of masculine and feminine frequencies and a way of walking with nature that was off course. I thought that it was an innocent misstep somewhere in our generating process creating a discord that prompted trouble that accumulated and expanded as time wore on.
I also started feeling terms rise within me that I had never used before. They were original medicine and big medicine. I knew that they referred to the unique offering and potency of the organic beings we are at the core. I started to use them and was surprised to learn from someone I met that they came from a book already in print: The Four-Fold Way by cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien.
I am an Aries. We are known for our strong minds, sharp tongues, fierce individualism and big energy. I have felt original and big medicine within me with great clarity most of my life. I spent a lot of time living with the terms in my being, in my activities and my relationships.
Truth, original medicine and big medicine are quite a threat to the status quo I learned. I naively thought that the world would be grateful to hear that our solutions were simple. I was about to spend many years in that truth quest being disillusioned and grieving the loss of life and soul I saw and felt in my quest. I had great natural instincts, AND was incredibly naïve about the way our world runs and who sets the stages, the writes the pages and outcomes.
Big medicine as defined in Angeles’ book and elsewhere describes a state of being where in presence we bring our full mental, emotional, spiritual and physical power forward. We are in the moment, fully activated, not drifting off to other lands and times with our beings and our minds. Here we have “the capacity to let others know where we stand, where we don’t stand, what we stand for, and how we stand up for ourselves.”* Here we have the ability to use the power of communication where we are skilled at bringing the right content at the right time in the right context.
(The quote is from Angeles Arrien in The Four Fold Way.)
Wild Soul Medicine
During my awakening I began returning to nature and outdoor activity in a bigger way than had become habit in my adult life. I had spent my teen years running around barefoot in a beautiful valley full of lakes, my prepubescent years running around barefoot in a little town on a rolling hill on the prairie with quite a bit of forest around, and my earliest years running around barefoot on an acreage near to a special lake called Little Manitou. My city years were spent in heels in office buildings stories off the earth, on blacktop and concrete, hustling and bustling, living on small lots surrounded by countless other small lots amid a burgeoning collection of towers polluting the ether with unnatural frequencies.
I had been slowly losing my nature connection over time.
It hurt at first. The effects of nature’s powers in contrast to the artificial state I had fallen into felt intense. Some days I would talk to myself the whole time, purging toxic thoughts and feelings. Sometimes, when I knew I was all alone, I would scream and wail as I walked. The intensity of my feelings were often extreme. But I kept turning up and as I did I could feel my wild soul turning back on over time. The tension was disappearing, the real me returning and rooting in with nature beginning again. This aspect of my awakening felt like wild soul medicine.
Big Wild Soul Medicine
At some point I felt a little schizophrenic with all the names for the facets of my awakening piling up. I decided to simplify and settled on Big Wild Soul Medicine awhile, rolling them all into one. This helped me immediately. I feel like we break apart pretty intensely when we awaken. Many of us spend time fractured and polarized, challenged to merge all of the inner and outer aspects coming up for review. As long as we keep on keeping on with the quest, we do eventually reconstellate our beings so that we can bring the crisis to fruition and make something beautiful with it.
Wild & Salty Healing Company
In 2018 I moved back to my birthplace of Watrous and spent a year there while hubby and I created a home in the village on Little Manitou Lake’s hills three miles to the north. I walked the shores and the pastures, the valleys and the wild orchards; I swam in the lake, tended my gardens, took in some of the culture, attempted to help the community, made a few friends and some enemies and also some art.
I saw a few clients from earlier connections around healing who came here for a Little Manitou experience. I set up a massage table in a dining tent in my large yard and we’d commune with the elements here. I would use my drum, rattle and other nature tools – all ways of connecting and repairing the human apparatus that I have picked up during this wyrd wild nature university training period I’ve been cobbling together on instinct.
The results were always extraordinary. People were having supernatural healing experiences, leaving our time together feeling as though they had received light for something within and were palpably re-energized.
One day I realized how little I had to do with anything that was going on in the healing studio. What a relief! That surrendering to nature was healing and vice versa, I could see and feel plainly. The elements and powers of Little Manitou and her environs would meet up with the person who came to see me, and I would serve as company that helped light a bridge on the path from disconnection to reconnection.
I shifted my moniker to Wild & Salty Healing Company. Wild to surrender to nature’s powers and intellect, salty to acknowledge the sting that comes with truth and healing and to put my life and contribution to the world we make in a state surrendered to our nature, to this salty water here and the land. Company is companionship, not a business.
At this time my story all of the feelings and messages in all of the monikers I’ve traveled with as guides unite with my love and my sense of life and place in the words wild and salty healing company.
Happy Endings
A funny part in this present state is that some of the locals see Wild & Salty Healing Company as a sexual term, like I operate happy endings massage parlour. At first I felt disturbed by this, but as I let it sit and reflected in the feelings I soon enough made my way to amusement.
The impact of wild and salty healing company is definitely an activation of the sexual energy that is our original lifeforce powering us. It is also a reconciliation of the masculine and feminine frequencies to return to a generating partnership of passion imbued with natural beauty, honour, energy and the desire to continue.
Sounds like a happy ending to me.
Wild & Salty Healing Company 