Shamanic Bat Journey (by Cas)

image from ucsantacruz.ucnrs.org

                One of the big attractions to living in the southwest is definitely the spirit of the place. That spirit energy draws all kinds of beings to Tucson. The mixing, melding, merging and mingling of many viewpoints, cultures and lifestyles is the bounty of the Naked Pueblo. I love being able to go to the opera one night and an All-Souls puppet making workshop the next. Being able to attend a Noam Chomsky lecture at the U and being able participate in a Despacho Ceremony for the winds of the four directions of Tucson. Tucson is a rich combination that appeals to the high intellect and to the profoundly spiritual. What better way to experience both than a shamanic journey with 45,000 Mexican Free-Tailed Bats? 

                On the one hand you have one of the biggest colonies of Tadarida brasiliensis, who, according to Wikipedia, “are about 9 cm (3.5 in) in length, and they weigh about 12.3 g (0.43 oz). Their tails make up almost half their lengths. Their ears are wide and set apart to help them find prey with echolocation.” What kind of prey? On a nightly basis they eat pounds of moths, beetles, mosquitoes, flies, wasps, and ants. Pounds of them!! Not to mention spreading pollen. Tons of desert cacti and succulents depend on them. If you enjoy rum or tequila, thank the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat for pollinating the sugar cane and the agave!!  Now, let’s add to that the fact that Shamanically Bats represent rebirth, intuition, dreaming and vision. Bat spirits are capable of imparting to you great gifts including; the ability to see through illusion, create true community, transformation and prophecy!! All this AND they are MAMMALS THAT FLY!!! Bring on the Bat Journey!!

                We gathered together about an hour before sunset at the walking bridge on the Rillito River near River and Campbell to meet up with Alyson Greene, who envisioned, created, offered and guided this journey. (Here’s a link to her account of our evening…http://shamanacircle.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/sacred-nature-adventures-beauty-bats-and-blue-lotus-tea/ ) A group of a dozen of us then walked down into the wash north of the bridge and settled ourselves comfortably on the sand. We formed a circle, shared sage and essential oils to open ourselves to the spirit of the bats. We took a short consciousness journey together to connect with our guides and receive some clarity about our adventure. After we checked in with each other we then made ourselves extremely comfortable, most of us lying down on our backs on blankets spread over the sand to begin journeying with our eyes open, Alyson’s drumming and wave after wave of thousands of bats waking up and heading out to hunt and pollinate for the night.

                Whenever I have journeyed, the beginning of the experience is always a battle with my cognizant self that starts questioning, “How do you know this is real?” If I engage that thought with possible replies like;  “How do we know if anything is real?”, “What is “real”?”, “Maybe I did too many drugs twenty years ago and this is all residually enhanced.” or  “How do you prove experiential knowledge?”… (you get the idea)…then I inevitably miss relevant portions of the journey. I have learned, gratefully, to simply reply to my own negative thoughts with, “This is my reality…here…now” and quiet that distraction as quickly as possible. This mental exchange occurred as the bats activity began to intensify and spirit gifted me with another musing, “If animals could speak to us, would we understand anything they had to say?” and so I listened.  Watched and listened.

                Prior to the journey experience itself, I brushed up on my scientific bat knowledge a little. I was mostly interested in learning about echolocation and how different bats ears are from ours.  The one piece of information that really stuck with me was that our ears are actually pretty similar; some humans can even use a form of echolocation, but that the sound that bats emit as their echolocation beacon is not detectable to human ears. Wait what? Not detectable? Nearly the first thing I think of in regards to bats is that distinctly bat sound, you know the sort of clicking almost electrically kinetic chirp clicking noise that is BATS. Turns out that their actual echolocation noise is at such a high frequency that humans and even most dogs can not hear it.  But we hear bats, right? So what are we hearing? I listened, I watched and I listened. They are talking! Like any other communal mammal they were communicating with each other.  The more intensely I focused, the more visual the connections between the bats became. Mostly they were webbed together by intricate lacings of pale green glowing lines which were easiest to see directly above us and harder to maintain visually if I followed the bats movement into the sunset.  Every once in a while one of these lines would grow thinner and thinner almost as if it was being stretched and then it would quickly glow a bright pink and the two bats at either end of the pink line would move closer together, remedying something between their connection.

                As I mused on the nature of what these various connections might mean, I was graced with visits of spirits very dear to me. Some of whom, I have only ever known as spirits and others of whom I have known in various states of existence.  In a communal way, they had very clear messages for me. Some simply by their presence reminding me of all of the astounding transformations of which we are truly capable.  Others spoke directly to me about very specific fears I am currently facing and very specific paths to overcoming those fears.  Some named individuals who are willing and ready to work with me and some illustrated resources that I already have in abundance and have been neglecting to recognize on my own. Seems a lot like creating community, breaking down illusions and aiding in transformation…did the bats do this? AND THEN A BAT LANDED ON MY BELLY!!! The bat seemed to weigh nothing, adjusted its wings, twitched its little head and was gone again. Yeah, that happened. I glanced at how really close to us a lot of the bats were coming, several more came extremely close to me, but the one who had landed on my belly really defined the entire experience for me. I was entranced and deeply charmed and saturated with gratitude.

                The experience continued, Alyson drummed on, others were still journeying, but I was content. I watched with complete admiration and joy, relaxed and at peace. I appreciated how mammalian these bats remained in flight, flying a bit kinetically like I imagine I would when I dream of flying. I turned my head more often and watched how the thick black cloud of bats faded and diminished and were ultimately absorbed in the glowing red light of the sunset. Individual bats moving together becoming one mass and then becoming part of the horizon of it all. Every once in a while we are given a little glimpse of the big picture and this time I had bats to thank for it, as if I wasn’t already infinitely indebted to them for their assistance in tequila creation!!

Adventures in Culinary Alternatives...

I had talked a few months ago to a friend who uses a common, regulated medicinal herb for chemo pain relief about its possible use as an alternative to the narcotics that my husband, Marc, takes for chronic pain. My friend offered some of his supply for a trial, although he had nothing to suggest about how to use it other than by inhalation. That is not an option for Marc because his illnesses already affect his respiratory system. My friend nonetheless kindly gifted me with about half an ounce of loose, tiny leaves, all wrapped up in a white paper towel and then again in a beat-up plastic baggie. I put the baggie in my purse and drove straight home, feeling at once culpable, vulnerable and empowered.

When I got home that afternoon, I told Marc about my proposed experiment and laid the baggie on the bar in the kitchen. Marc said nothing at first, and I saw expressions of incredulity, censure, wry gratitude, and finally, curiosity cross his face. Neither one of us was terribly well informed, although years ago I had held a similar baggie briefly in my hand after picking it up from the lavatory shelf in the U of A women’s room. Before I could determine what it was, a coed had burst into the room, grabbed the baggie and darted back through the door as it swung.  

After staring at the small packet on the kitchen counter for a while, we engaged in a lengthy, wide-ranging debate, one that is obvious and no doubt universal among those seeking alternative medicines. At last we decided to leave all options open for a while (including just throwing it out) and I stowed the baggie deep in the tea cupboard, with half a grin for that small joke.

Weeks passed, and although several chances arose where we could have run the trial, the herb was still not in a usable form. Each time, Marc took the usual narcotic, and I felt bad each time about my failure to follow through. True, I’d come home with the product; done some initial research (finding out that in addition to steeping tea, one could also could brew a beer, but baked goods were best because fat was the most efficient processor of the therapeutic ingredient), and I’d think about it periodically before getting distracted by something. I have a habit of beginning but never finishing a project, but in this instance, I’d faltered partly because I’d read that the effect is slow to manifest and the potency difficult to measure. On a recent, particularly bad pain-day, I finally took action, deciding that I would prepare something called “bud butter” to have on hand. Spreading that on cinnamon toast might be the best option: it was lower calorie than brownies, and easy for Marc to prepare if I was not at home.

While Marc was sleeping, I put a pound of butter in a pot on the back burner of the stove to melt, and rummaged through the cupboard looking for the plastic baggie. In my kitchen, everything once opened gets transferred into one size of zip-lock bag or another before I toss it in the pantry. Now I pulled out a small (unlabelled, but then nothing ever is) baggie of loose leaves wrapped in white paper and poured it into the blender to grind up and add to the butter as the Internet recipe directed.  The recipe said to simmer for twenty minutes, until the butter turned green. This particular pot of butter was a red-gold brown and I wondered if I'd let it go stale. Perhaps it was a different variety. In any case, it smelled heavenly—slightly spicy and not at all cloying, as had been the hazy atmosphere of the rock concerts we’d attended years ago or of the annual open-air blues festivals at Reid Park. Marc, awakened from his nap, came into the kitchen. After one or two hearty sniffs he asked why was I making apricot decaf on the stove rather than steeping it in the electric teakettle.

Somehow that misstep soured me on the whole endeavor, and this project joined the myriad others left undone. I do have fruit-flavored butter for coffee cake that I might make soon, but the other ingredient has been returned to my friend. I’m sure I returned the proper baggie. There are no others, labeled or not, in that cupboard now. None at all.