I enjoy having a critical thinker in the house, my house, this house of flesh and bone and spirit. I especially enjoy it when there’s no pressure of anyone listening, or so it seems. I wonder what it would take to be a free thinker, sharing what I really think in a free way, as to say in an unencumbered way, energetically free, no blame, no posing one thing against another.

My computer powered down just when finishing that last sentence. Who or what had gotten into this house? In the pause, I reached over to the book, The Way We Lived, sitting on top of my book pile and opened the interlude pages for “Coyote and Spider” (that way that things just seem to magically happen ~ timing and juxtaposition at their best!) I settled in on these words of Malcolm Margolin about Coyote:

He is at the same time good and evil, crafty and foolish, godlike and scroungy. He is both the prankster and the dupe. He seems to exist in the free and wild area of the mind beyond duality–beyond the trick of intellect that divides things into good or bad, smart or stupid, winner or loser, allowable or forbidden. The trickster is everything at once. He dies, is dismembered, decays, and then is pulled back together again to continue his journey. He exists in an undifferentiated, boundless, intensely creative world.

Ah, I’d received a visitation. And what fertility there within! The realms of Coyote are both  relaxing and affirming to the deeply vexing parts of my being. It’s as if I’ve found a true ally in Coyote with my Design North Node in line 4 of the Gate of Confusion: Before Completion. Gate 64 is “Transition, like birth, requires a determined strength for the passage through.” And line 4, Conviction, is “Symbolized by its phases, the Moon is assured of transition convinced by its very process that it will triumph. The assuredness that confusion is a process that results in realization.” And then there is a classic Coyote in the detriment of the line: “Where force and energy alone cannot overcome doubt. Where the confusion is so energized, assuredness brings no relief.”

Where to begin? Right in the heart of confusion, no doubt. This kind of confusion, both the rich, fertile kind and the one that weakens me into a surrender of no where to go, is a kind of medicine. I found delight in reading that one of the names of the trickster is Sweet-Medicine. Ah… good to meet more fully both of these aspects of conviction today, as I’ve tasted both time and time again. Just as the heart can cry tears of deep grief and joy simultaneously, I find my journey in this blessed vehicle showing me the delicious nature of being myself, a portal to that free and wild area of the mind beyond duality.

Recognizing this aspect of self where doubt, confusion, and conviction play an essential role in my thinking, a natural role in the eco-system of my definition. Confusion, rich in trickster medicine, is a signpost in my story line. Without it, I don’t see what I am here to see. Even now, this writing has elements of confusion for me, yet I return to the page, I return to the thread and the visceral feel of the movement.

What brought me here earlier? The thinker in my house, Sweet-Medicine, the taste for the life that is uniquely my own ~ and that which calls to be shared, what may nourish and support those arriving here, too.