A few years ago two of our really good friends (S&K) got hubby and I involved in a Lakota Spirit Lodge. Hubby bailed pretty quickly, but I stuck around for over a year. Some of the Lakota beliefs just resonated with me, and I’ve always enjoyed learning about different religions. Seeing underneath to all the commonalities and yet at the same time, how each culture shaped the message differently.
Lodge was a little different than a religion class though. Don’t want you to get that idea. It was more group therapy combined with a spirituality kick in the pants.
I’ll probably talk about all of that more later, but for this post, I’m concentrating on one thing. The Lakota tribe (and I think all the tribes, probably) believe that Creator speaks to you through animals, rocks, plants, everything. Animals are big messengers or totems, and can show up in physically or in dreams. The dream version is more like spirit guides trying to get messages through, but again, that’s another post.
With the physical guys, it’s more than just seeing one on the side of the road or circling above. It’s more that your attention is called to them. Maybe it’s the crow that won’t go away: is always out on the fence post when you leave the house, follows you around the block, and eventually recruits two more to do the same until you acknowledge them and try to figure out why the $%!! they’re there. True story, maybe later.
Anyway, we were doing a big clean around the house on Saturday. You know the kind – instead of just picking up I was scrubbing every surface in the bathroom. Somewhere along the way of cleaning the master bathroom, I disturbed a medium sized spider. I’m pretty sure he moved with us from Parker, because it looked like the same one that used to live under our dresser out there.
I did my best to not kill him as he wandered around in a panic because I’d picked up all of the things he could hide under. I lost track of him in my frenzy of cleaning, but he was in the bathtub last night, so he’s okay (for all you spider lovers out there).
Later, I changed shirts to go get food for the horde of hungry gamers (okay, five isn’t a horde, but it sounds better) that were about to descend on the house. When I was making the grocery list, I looked down and noticed that I had another spider crawling across my chest. This was one of those really little guys.
Instead of just freaking because I’m not that big a fan of spiders, I just got him moved over to the pad of paper and then down onto the footstool. But I did yell at hubby to ask what spider messengers/totems represented, because they just aren’t leaving me alone today. And that was a bit of a surprise to me, because I quit Lodge over 5 years ago, and had let most of it just fade into the background.
Today, I finally got around to looking up what Ted Andrews has to say about spiders. Check out his book, it’s pretty interesting, even if you think it’s all hogwash.
It’s never as easy as “spiders mean you need to go on a diet”. There’s a ton of information and usually a dozen things that the totem might be telling you. In the past, one of the concepts or ideas usually just jumped out at me as being important to some problem or issue in my life that needed attention. In this case, two seemed appropriate:
“Are you not weaving your dreams and imaginings into reality” and “Do you need to write? Are you inspired to write or draw and not following through?”
I need to think about the first one.
The second one seemed obvious. I started this blog last week, and I’d let a couple of days slide by without writing anything. Not such a big deal, but I know me. I’m always starting something and then wandering away. So I’m going to try to not do that with this place. Might work, might not, but I’ll give it a shot.
