I found it interesting how many people responded to my tossing off, ironically, at the end, the classic pick-up line, “What’s your sign?”    Apparently my jokes are as obscure as my text.  Perhaps if I used more smiley faces….  But seriously, if anyone were to send me his birth chart, I’d know more about his personality than his therapist knows, unless the therapist is an astrologer, too.  Sun sign astrology is too general to be anything but crap.

The following is my longest blog yet, and I’ve already had comments about my verbosity.  Please be aware that although I use the term, “fortuneteller”, and many people apply that term to me and the work I do, I don’t consider myself a fortuneteller.  Fortunetellers are generally considered entertainers and their readings usually concern the future.  I consider myself a counselor, and my readings are grounded in present realities.  The future is what one makes of it.

Metaphysics and me

There have been questions and comments about my psychic abilities, experiences and beliefs. “Psychic” wasn’t part of the lexicon as I was growing up. I don’t recall hearing the word before I’d started school. My mother was highly intuitive and I am, too. She usually knew who was calling before she answered the phone. I remember her expression of disgust once when she was interrupted by the ringing, and knew the call was a wrong number. But she answered it anyway. I do that, too. Go figure.

Fortune-telling, astrology, and the paranormal were viewed by my friends and teachers as dangerous superstition. My parents seemed to have open minds on such things, neither promoting nor criticizing. Early on, I went along with my teachers and friends.

Astrology was the first fringe science to chip away at my indoctrinated beliefs. My friend Carol brought me a paperback to amuse and occupy me while I was convalescing from a severe case of flu. It was Write Your Own Horoscope, with planetary tables and brief interpretive guides. I did mine, and had to admit it fit me, but wasn’t really impressed until I’d done my husband, parents, and a few friends and saw how clearly it nailed their traits.

As I studied astrology, I found a lot of familiar concepts such as the classical four elements and many names from myths. I also found fascinating, challenging geometrical and mathematical concepts. The more I learned, the more utility and validity I found in it. One aspect of it that intrigued me was the predictive angle. I really wanted to know what the future would be.

Other people I knew were reading and doing divination with the I Ching, and I started doing that about the same time I was reading C.G. Jung–they’re connected by synchronicity and synchronicity became a big part of my life. Synchronicitously, this was a time (1969) when there was some intense outer planet stuff going on, as well as a big dip in the Timewave. We were all groovy and in sync with the Cosmos.

I had a number of intense psychic experiences including precognition, projective telepathy and a sort of traveling consciousness thing where a friend left my house and walked across town and my awareness went with him. I also became aware of some spirit presences who were interested in what I was doing. Their interaction with me, their “guidance”, consisted mostly of connecting me with various people.

Then came my three-month amphetamine run–my summer of speed, the autumn in jail, and after my guilty plea, release on my own recognizance for the duration of the pre-sentence investigation. Out of jail, no job, no home, in shaky health, I’d keep warm in daytime at the public library. Evenings I spent at a coffee house, where I could always find someone willing to let me crash on their floor.

In the morning, I’d clean up and go to the library to look at the classifieds. Then I’d check in at the state employment office, and stop in at a few cafes and stores looking for a job. Weeks went by with no success. I’d always end up back at the library until closing time.

I read metaphysical works by Ouspensky, Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, Alice A. Bailey and Anton Szandor LaVey. They had lots of other books, too… I read Asimov’s series of science popularizations, read everything they had on semantics and semiotic (three books), and I read a lot of holy books of various religions. They had seven different translations of the Christian Bible. At one point, I had four of them spread out on a table at once, comparing texts.

One evening at the coffee house a bunch of us were sitting around a big spool table discussing my predicament. No answers were forthcoming. One of the women asked if I had ever had a Tarot reading. I hadn’t, and I expressed my skepticism. She said that the guy who worked in the head shop down the block did readings for free, and, “What do you have to lose?”

It was blowing snow as I headed down there and shyly asked Rhys Court what it took to do a reading. He had me cut the cards. He told me I was in the middle of the biggest crisis of my life and it would take all my wits and help from my family to get through it. There was probably more, but that was the gist of it.

I had not let my mother, who lived halfway across the country, know about being a speed freak or getting busted. She had enough worries of her own. I called her, collect. She was relieved to hear that I’d gotten away from the Hells Angels, but she started crying when I told her about going to jail. She sent me $12.00, all she could spare. It came to the Western Union office next day, and I used it to rent a sleeping room for a week.

Then I went back to a taco joint where the owner had said he needed help, but (sorry), he couldn’t afford any. I offered to work a split shift and cover his mealtime rushes, for meals. He went for it. I went back to tell Rhys that I’d worked things out, and to thank him and ask for more. More, more, I wanted more of that! He told me to learn to do it myself.

He used the Rider-Waite Deck, and I picked up one of them and a book by Eden Gray on how to read it. From the book, I got the basics, and more of those already familiar archetypal concepts. I didn’t connect with the deck, though, and soon replaced it with The Book of T: New Tarot for the Aquarian Age. I’ve worn out five of them in my career, abraded and obscured the pictures through use. The deck is long out of print, the author and artist: John Cooke and Rosalinde Sharp; and publisher Western Star Press, have dropped out of sight.

In the coffee house, at first, I shyly asked a friend, then another friend, to let me do a reading. I shuffled back and forth in the book, looking up meanings. But after I got the new deck, with symbols that spoke to me, I didn’t need a book, and soon people were coming to me asking for readings. They started calling me psychic. Around that time, I was in close communication with my guides, and I was getting a lot of the prescient experiences I’d been asking for. It became burdensome (be careful what you ask for), and I negotiated a little deal with my spirit helpers: I’d quit trying to map out the entire future and they would let me know if anything big was around the next bend in the road for me. That’s the same deal we still have.

Eventually, I found a live-in housekeeping job, had my drug-possession case adjudicated and met my probation officer. My boyfriend the dealer got out of jail and we zipped over the state line and got married. We had met a couple in jail who knew some people who had gotten around the probation prohibition on associating with each other by marrying. That didn’t work for us. Crossing the state line was just one more violation, plus the PO had video of me on the U of O campus at an anti-war protest rally, right behind the (illegal) barricade. I was off to prison.

That institution, affectionately known as OWCC, had just gone through what they called a “witchcraft scare”. All books on metaphysics and the paranormal were forbidden. That was okay. I started requesting religious books through Inter-Library Loan. Kabbalah was one of the books I read, also Autobiography of a Yogi, Popol Vuh, and The Golden Bough. For the library, I ordered Castañeda’s anthropological classic, Teachings of Don Juan, and several works on pop psychology that were helpful not only to me, but to a few other motivated lunatics in there.

Prison is an excellent place for meditation. I’d done a little bit of OOB “astral” travel from my little room at the live-in job, and I continued to practice that. My husband was out on the streets at that time, and I visited him out of body. One night I watched the Johnny Carson show with him. From where I sat, Johnny appeared to be projected on the toilet in my cell. Later, after my husband had been locked up in the big prison whose wall loomed over the high chainlink fence around our little feminine joint, I visited his cell block, and caused a little stir (a stir in stir, so to speak while I was looking for him. This took a lot of effort and energy, and didn’t afford as much pleasure as just flying around, enjoying the scenery. Not long ago, I learned that Robert Monroe also preferred just winging it on OOBEs, over trying to follow a map or complete a specific quest.

When I got out of prison, my old tarot cards and books were gone, along with everything else. Somewhere, I’d read the tradition that Tarot cards were not to be bought, but either stolen, found or received as a gift. I’d stolen the first ones. My first full day out of the slammer I was walking to my sister-in-law’s house when I saw a small paper bag on the ground. It contained a deck of my favorite cards. Then, I ran into an old friend who had grabbed my I Ching from our house after we’d all gone to jail, and he gave it back, a little richer in marginal notes than it had been.

Already elated by freedom, I was awed by these little gifts from the Universe.

In prison I had met two women who had lived in Alaska. One was an inmate, the other a volunteer who came twice a week to teach a typing class. Together they convinced me that I would like it here. It took about a year and a half after my release before I got here. Without money, the trip went off perfectly. Long, involved story, adventures at every turn, and finally, with a lot of help on this plane and others, arrival in Anchorage with a duffle bag and about three bucks and change.

This was my first big object lesson in the rewards for following spiritual guidance.  Before long I had two full-time jobs and found a community where I felt I belonged. Another year after that, I was sick, out of work, but on an incredible spiritual journey with the Urantia Book. Just routine, story of my life.

Seven years after I’d done my first readings in the coffee house, I was still in Alaska and the economy was in the big bust that followed the Pipeline boom. I responded to a request for “musicians, jugglers, entertainers, fortune tellers…” for the first annual Girdwood Forest Fair and made that my first professional gig. It became my regular summer occupation, and I traveled to as many as half a dozen festivals each year.

Then, trading readings with another psychic one time, I asked her what I could do for a winter income. She asked, “Can you do an absent reading?” Without pausing to think I said, “yes,” though I’d never tried, really. I had done one for two girls who were concerned about a mutual friend in a coma… I suppose that counts.

I placed a few inexpensive print ads and supported myself and my kid that way for five years or so. During that time, I started doing past-life regressions, had a lot of past-life memories come through in dreams, then finally, had them coming through consciously just as those of earlier years in this lifetime.

This guy I call the old fart wrote to me for a reading, and sometime near that time our fey and jaded MisFit Sarah also wrote to me for readings. We recognized each other as soulmates. Greyfox had been losing interest in his government career and found himself drawn to shamanism. Our long-distance courtship and meeting are the basis of one of my most exciting chapters.

Then I married the shaman and we worked together a few years. By then, that stuff wasn’t so trendy any more, and we couldn’t compete with the ad budgets of the 900-line psychic networks. Three of them solicited us to work for them, but I wouldn’t work under their “for entertainment only” stupid CYA disclaimer.

I don’t advertize any longer, but I still get occasional new clients from ads in old magazines or referrals from old clients. I still get letters and email from past clients and a few have become friends, but in my business I don’t think it’s ethical to hang onto a client and keep him dependent. I prefer to give them the keys to go out and get their own answers. That’s what the smart ones do. Some others just go and find another psychic more willing to take  their money and the responsibility for their lives.

Doing readings is fun for me, and when I feel the desire for a metaphysical fix, I go to the chatrooms on a psychic website from the UK and do readings pro bono, or I frequent the boards at Morgana’s Observatory.

I haven’t said anything about my beliefs except that they had been shaken by my metaphysical discoveries. While Greyfox and I were publishing a newsletter on shamanism, book publishers sent us review copies of their new releases. One of them was titled How to Believe in Nothing and Set Yourself Free. Its concepts meshed with my experiences, with the Avatar teachings of Harry Palmer, and with the shift from the Piscean Age of Belief to the Aquarian Age of Knowledge. Since then, I’ve been transcending belief.

Any questions?

Now, before going on to the first of several things I pecked out on the laptop yesterday, I have some questions to answer and some comments on your comments.

Nanny, as I see it, we are all ONE and each of us is special and different, no conflict between those two ideas.  I sense some defensiveness in your comment and want to assure you that although I would  not choose to be other than as I am, I do not think others should be like me.  Different…and special:  I like it that way.

Portia:  No, I’ve not always lived in Alaska.  I came here to protest the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline almost thirty years ago, half my lifetime.  I never again wanted to live anywhere else.  I don’t think cold has any effect on intelligence or verbal ability.  I have observed, however, that a lot of brilliant people are drawn here.  It’s a great place, but forget I said that.  It’s starting to get crowded and californicated.

My stuff may read like fiction, but everything I’ve written here is either straight out of my memoirs or right from the heart.  No bullshit.

Regarding our favorite MisFit, you wrote:  “I guess when Sarah went to Alaska, is when she met you, and you have taught her your beliefs.”  Nope, she was my daughter in one of the past lives we shared, but in this life we connected when she found my ad for psychic readings in a magazine.  We first met face to face when I visited her about 9 years ago.    Later, she came to Alaska because I was here.  I have not knowingly taught her anything, but when she seemed to be getting addicted to my readings, I did suggest that she learn how to find her own answers. 

Beliefs are another matter entirely.  I’m trying to transcend all of mine and trade them in for some real knowledge or just let them go and admit that I don’t know everything.

Hilde, do I know you from SFWED, or is it just a coincidence of names?  I’m also known as “almost there”.

Nimue, Todd, Kris, Terry, prophet and all, thank you for the attention.  You know, don’t you, that our focused attention is the most powerful force we possess?  Now here is something else for your attention:

Loosends

I came to Xanga a few weeks ago on the theory that a journal would help me make sense of ambivalence about my addictive behavior. The practice of journaling had been highly recommended by one of those enigmatic old crones who visit my dreams sometimes. My kid suggested LiveJournal, but my Anam Cara was here and I’m partial to names beginning with X, like Xocoma and Xanga.

I wandered around, found my old friend and made a bunch of interesting new contacts. Then you guys started giving me feedback on my dilemmas. It was insightful and useful. Thanks.

Very soon the subject shifted and I thought I’d found my long-lost middle-aged “little boy”, but his dad never responded to my emails. The shock of the discovery popped my consciousness back to the era when I’d last seen my second husband and elder son, and I related some stories from around that time. 

I reminisced here about my dopamine addiction–the bubble baths, remember?  Dopamine is just one of the neurotransmitters involved there, and one of my favorites. Endorphins are nice, as well.

I started a story about a loaf of lettuce and a head of bread… and I told my second-worst prison horror story, but neglected to relate the positive stuff about the slammer. One of the most beneficial things in there was the time… time to study mythology and folklore, uninterrupted time to meditate and travel on other planes.

Now, all of that strolling down memory lane, plus the insights gained as I reflected on it and on your feedback (thanks again) has allowed me to confront the shadowy fact of my essential ambivalence.

The full moon approaches, and then Mercury will go direct and I’ll be ready to get back to work. Now’s a good time to tie up some loose ends. First, I must say that you, my regular readers, are either an incurious bunch, painfully polite, or so psychic that you don’t need to ask questions. Is no one interested in why I went to prison or for how long?

Here’s that story: In ’69, I’d escaped from the Hells Angels with the help of a speed chemist, a wholesale speed dealer, and Page Browning, one of the original Merry Pranksters. I had hepatitis from a dirty needle and could not, would not, quit shooting speed. A couple of young married-just-out-of-high-school newbie speed freaks got busted for dealing and gave up some of their connections in a deal with the DA.

Getting busted saved my life, dried me out, fattened me back up a bit from my low weight of 95# (I’m 5’7″). Friends said they’d hated that yellow-skin-stretched-on-a-skull look I’d had. I’d always hated the way my hair frizzed, how my skin crawled with speed bugs, and the suicidal depressions if (when) I ran out of crank. Quitting meth in the drunk tank of the Lane County Jail was so horrible that I was able afterward to avoid becoming dependent again–effective aversion therapy.

Just getting busted was a lucky break for me. Then we really got lucky. The only drug in the house was about ten grams of cannabis. No speed or anything harder, no pills or paraphernalia, just a bag of weed in an otherwise empty old purse. My old purse. I got probation on a three year sentence by pleading guilty.

I ended up having to do the sentence anyway, because I violated my probation by getting married. I got out on parole after fifteen months.  In prison, I’d learned to program in Fortran II. My parole plan involved going to college in a strange town and avoiding contact with all my old friends. I took a heavy load of classes in math, electronics, and both hard and soft sciences.

Then I met Stony, a heavy-drinking Vietnam vet with PTSD. We shoplifted a chainsaw and I made it out of town ahead of the cops when one of the people who lived with us let me know they had busted Stony.

After the trip to Galveston and back to California on freight trains with Robbie and Rocky, two of the people who had been living with us before the unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, I holed up with Aunt Goldie in Morro Bay until Stony got out of jail by showing the cops where he’d buried the chainsaw.

Then we hitchhiked to Oklahoma with a different Rocky and a guy named Jim like the one who had been traveling with Stony and the other Rocky when I met them (just one of a series of weird synchronicities happening at the time) and this is where the loaf of lettuce and head of bread come in.

With the spiritual upliftment from the peak experience in the San Antonio freight yard, I glowed. I had the look and psychic feel of one who has been touched by an angel. I could hold my head up, shoulders back and pull off a good impression of a normal decent citizen. I had enough confidence to walk into any big supermarket or K-Mart and boost the bare necessities of life for myself and my traveling companions, without drawing to myself any unwanted attention.

As we hitchhiked across country, Jim and Rocky stayed out of the stores. They looked too suspicious. Stony and I would panhandle if there were enough people around for that, or just walk around picking up coins off the ground, then go into a store and buy a head of lettuce and a loaf of bread. I would conceal on and about my person various meats, cheeses, fruit, vegies, beverages and such, and we would feed four and often more for the price of a loaf of lettuce and a head of bread (somewhere between twenty and fifty cents at the time). Often, I was able to trade foodstuffs for a place to crash. It was nice having a roof over my head once in a while.

Then, after Jim II and Rocky II had gone their own ways, and Stony and I were heading for Boulder, Colorado, I got picked up on the parole violation warrant. I spent about a month in the Boulder City-County Jail, awaiting extradition. By this time, I was con-wise enough not to sign away my rights… let them come after me if they wanted me that bad.

And it turned out they didn’t want me that bad. Although simple possession of marijuana had been a felony when I was busted in Oregon, the law changed while I was incarcerated and it became something nearer the level of a traffic ticket. The amount of weed I’d had was never considered a big deal in Colorado.

The staffs of the two governors got together. A letter went from Gov. Love to Gov. Lamb (or other way ’round: Liz Dexia strikes again!) suggesting that keeping me at Colorado’s expense, for violation of parole on an offense that neither state then considered felonious, was not such a good idea. The Oregon governor granted me a full pardon, and I got out of jail free.

I’ve left out many of the most interesting details, and I’ve probably brought up a few questions in some of your minds. I never, for example, even touched on how I became such an expert shoplifter in the first place, or how I rationalized it.  For that, I’d have to go back about ten more years.  Do feel free to ask any questions, but be aware that I intend to reserve some of the details for publication in my memoirs, and for them you’ll just have to wait until I’m done. Anyone know a good literary agent?

**Aw, geez! One of my neighbors just fired four or five fairly long bursts with some kind of automatic weapon. Not my favorite sound, that’s just about the only serious drawback to living in this neighborhood.

Aargh! There he goes again. The old fart just said the guy at the end of the block told him he planned to take out a few trees and set up a shooting range. Then he added, “…and he’s the only one I know of around here with an AK-47.” One thing I can say for the old fox, he has a good ear.

One of you [you know who you are] asked in an email: “What is love?” I may have asked for that by saying how much I love dogs and all doggy things, or you may have had reasons of your own. It’s a good question anyway, and the 2 paragraphs I gave to my answer as the kid hovered, anxious to get back to ROL, didn’t begin to cover the subject. No one will be trying now to take this old laptop from me, so I’ll give the question the time and seriousness it deserves.

Right from the start in this life, I encountered conflicts over love. My mother “loved” me, and she expressed it by feeding me, washing me, restricting my movements, trying to keep me “safe”. My father loved me, too. He expressed it by teaching me, making a set of tools to fit my small hands and letting me use them in his workshop with him. He encouraged my curiosity by answering questions, and empowered me to learn by sometimes answering, “I don’t know… go find out.” He challenged me to take small risks and he applauded my successes or sent me to Mama for bandages if I failed.

In retrospect, I consider his love more truly loving than my mother’s nurturing maternal worry. I think Neale Donald Walsch makes a valid point when he says that every human action has but two possible “sponsoring thoughts”. We act either from love or from fear. Fear was what my mother’s “love” was all about.

No blame: she was programmed that way, and by her lights she had plenty to be afraid of. I was almost not born alive. She had lost one baby before me and couldn’t have any more after me. I was her only chance at posterity. And then the damned doctors told her I’d probably not live long enough to grow up. The motive uppermost for her was to keep me alive, largely because she believed that a woman’s main job was motherhood, and I was her only chance.

My father’s motive was to give me as much of life as I could cram into whatever time I had. He was proud of me, enjoyed showing *his girl* off to every one. By the time I was three he had taught me “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” and shoved me onstage at a big union Christmas party to recite it. By then, I had already learned to read, mostly from sitting on his lap with the evening paper after work. My vocabulary as I entered kindergarten included words like integration and indictment. Some of that stuff was stroking his own ego, and some of it was just fun, the pleasure of watching a bright young mind develop, but to him it was love.

Love, to the girl I was then, what I felt as opposed to the various loves people were expressing toward me, was the feeling of comfort and safety I derived from my parents. Then very soon someone gave me a puppy and that awakened the maternal nurturing affection that’s hardwired in most girls. Oooh, I loved that pup, but Mama feared his fleas, intestinal worms… maybe even the competition for my affection, who knows? …anyway, she made me give him back. That was my first broken heart.

Hearts don’t break, but I didn’t know that yet then, so mine got broken over and over as I formed unwise attachments and had them torn apart one way or another. As a sexually precocious adolescent under the influence of fairy tales, whose adored father had died young, I was vulnerable, needy, randy and seductive: asking for trouble, in other words. I found plenty of that kind of trouble, and like everyone else, I called it love.

Attachment is one of many words that are euphemized into “love”. Who really wants to admit that they have an unhealthy attachment to someone or something? Doesn’t it sound ever so much better to say, “I love…” whatever? In that same “unhealthy” vein, there is a blend of deference, self-deprecation, and empowerment of the other, that emotionally wounded people will offer to others in the hope of purchasing “love”. They’re saying, in effect, “you’re so far above me, here, take this part of my soul, I’m yours.” The unwary object of such affections eventually discovers that it wasn’t a gift, but an intended trade for a part of his soul. In my lexicon, those are some things that aren’t love, but are commonly called by that name.

Real love doesn’t demand or expect anything (not even “love”) in return. Real love does not need to have the love object around all the time. If you feel you can’t get by without someone, that feeling isn’t love, but rather a sexual bond or emotional need or attachment.

Just as deference is only a surface show of the “respect” it often passes for, nurturing, ego-stroking, longing for someone’s presence, and sacrificing yourself for another isn’t love. Sacrificing yourself for “love” is like destroying land for the sake of the crop–self-limiting and ultimately counterproductive. Unless you love yourself first, you can’t really love another.

If you want to be loved, do it yourself. Love is a verb. We do it, or we don’t. We don’t win it or fall in it. There are other better words for the things we can win and fall into. Some of those words are lust, gratitude and co-dependency.

If a life of love is what you want, first get on good terms with yourself. Forgive all mistakes and give yourself credit for attainments. Then, from now on, do nothing to damage your self-esteem. That gives you a good base from which to transcend fear. Once that is done, just follow your instincts, throw love all around and don’t forget to claim plenty of it for yourself. You deserve it.

A little while ago, I had occasion to point out to someone that we are all animals, that drawing a distinction between “man” and “animal” is fallacious. I’ve no such quibbles about drawing distinctions between us and vegetables or rocks, but as for myself, I’m an animal. And I can tell from looking at you, that you are an animal too. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just a real thing, an actuality.

And we animals can join the vegetables (and maybe even the rocks) in the big inclusive family of life. Animist shamans of my acquaintance say, “everything that is, is alive.” Rocks do seem to resonate…they “speak” to psychometrists, dowsers and other sensitive individuals. I can’t say with certainty that they are not alive or conscious in some way. Just to be safely all-inclusive, I’ll say that we are all one on this planet… and beyond.

The title up there, “Kinship with All Life” is a book title, a book by J. Allan Boone, about a remarkable dog, Strongheart. Personally, I remember Strongheart only from legends, and from his picture on the labels of dog food cans. Rin Tin Tin and Lassie came after Strongheart in the movies, and I loved them, but I still wish I could have known Strongheart.

Boone got to know Strongheart when they were thrown together by their movie work, and the dog taught the man–no, showed him–the kinship of all life. Their telepathic bond gave the man the dog’s perspective and *how can I say this?*…altered his paradigm. I know how that is. I’ve bonded with some animals that way.

I’ve formed deep bonds with cats of both domestic kinds (tame and feral) and a zoo tiger I used to visit daily; with birds (remind me to tell the bird stories sometime), squirrels, chipmunks, fish, turtles, mice, rats, snakes, lizards, sheep, horses, deer, guinea pigs, a couple of chocobos, an opossum, a tarantula, a raccoon, and a huge polled hereford bull named Buddy. With the chocobos, it was a really one-sided relationship, but I loved them nonetheless.

They were all interesting, rewarding, and comfortable, companionable relationships–definite feelings of kinship, of shared affection. But none of them ever reached the depth of devotion, the breadth of understanding and profound kinship I feel with the canids. Wolves, foxes, coyotes and all kinds of dogs have shown uncommon affinity for me and aroused the same feelings in me. If I’m ever privileged to meet a dingo or a hyena, I suppose I’d feel the same way with them.

Wolf cubs, puppies, and especially little baby coyotes are irresistable to me… and not to me alone, I know. Seeing pups playing brings joyous laughter bubbling over. Seeing them hurt is like a wrenching blow in the part of me where my motherhood lives. Seeing one taken by a lynx or an eagle is always a shock. I wince, and then I remember the kinship of all life. Can’t blame a predator for its predation, or begrudge it a meal.

Coyote Oldman, the storyteller, the one who made this world: Coyote of the mythic tales from the American Southwest, has had significance for me for as long as I can recall. Some of my work, the lessons in shamanic techniques and reviews of books on shamanism, etc., I sign, “Coyote Medicine”. Coyote is part of my identity. Nothing else thrills me like the yips and wails of coyotes in the desert night. Moving to Alaska was a big adventure, but I missed the coyotes.

Then the coyotes followed me up here. Within years of my arrival in Alaska, in the mid-seventies, people had started reporting seeing them. By the eighties I had seen some near here myself. As coyote sightings became more common, wolf sightings became more rare. There are wolf-hybrid dogs around here, and I’ve heard rumors of wolf-coyote crosses.

I know we have cross-foxes in the neighborhood: big, sturdy, vigorous crosses between the red and arctic foxes, and others whose build and masked faces suggest a cross with sled dogs. I love every doggy one of them, wild and domestic, and none more than my own best buddy Koji, whose ancestry is almost as mysterious as that of those anomalous wildlings we get the occasional glimpse of.

As readily as the canids interbreed, they are equally as ready to compete for territory and prey. Dog eat dog is the way of the world.

I’m fully aware that it wasn’t my relocation that brought the coyotes into this valley. Habitat destruction in their home ranges down south, global warming, the waning of wolf populations in their old ranges here, all had a part in it.

The other night, I caught part of a PBS show on mass extinctions. It’s a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to. Those epochal events were impressed on my consciousness from early childhood by the evidences left in the fossil record. There at one level was great abundance and diversity of species, then in the layer just above was only a small fraction of that. Then populations increase, boom, and eventually there will be another of those discontinuities where the process starts again with the sparse survivors of some catastrophic event.

Until very recently, the old fart and I had a long-standing disagreement about mass extinction. His contention was that “man”, our species of domesticated primates, was going to kill off itself and all the rest of the life on the planet. He said it was a sure thing, inevitable.

I wasn’t buying it. I just do not see that happening. After years of intermittent discussion, the weight of facts on my side has convinced my old fox, too. Now the whole family agrees that life will probably survive on this planet. Aren’t you relieved? Well, I can assure you that the old fart is not.  He was rooting for the human villains to die off in their own stink.

We have already annihilated no-one-knows-how-many species, and the actions of our generation and others before us have set into motion processes that will kill off some more species even if we were to stop killing right now. But we’ve also begun taking steps to slow the rate of extinction, and precautions to preserve threatened species and sensitive habitats.

Life is tenacious, tough and durable. Geologists can show you how, time after time, even when the vast majority of species couldn’t adapt fast enough to a changed environment to survive, there have always been a few that made it. I prefer to think that domesticated primates can be among the survivors of the next mass extinction. I can’t prove it. I can’t even state it in terms of belief… I just know it is possible.   We might have to drop some of our domestication to do it, but we’re survivors, I think.

With much more certainty, I can say I think life in some form will survive. Even if the last animals left are a breeding pair of coyotes and a swarm of cockroaches, we will make it. We are all One, and we will survive.