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Do you know the mythic archetype of the trickster? Coyote? Heyoka? Vibrant, contrary and hilarious in most cultures, yet so adept in it mischief that you may be left with a shiver down your spine if you greet it up close and personal.
I have a story for you….should you dare to take the time to read it.
Part One:
Many years ago while living in Clarkdale, AZ, I had a practice of walking with our two dogs, Kuma and Lucy, up the old mining road to the base of the Mingus Mnt where I’d sit and pray and give gratitudes to this wild overlord of the Verde Valley. One bright morning as I tugged on my chaco sandals to head out on our walk I heard a gun shot and looked up to see an old jeep trundling down the old road I walk on, seemingly in a hurry. Despite the ‘no trespassing’ signs, occasionally people drove up there. My instincts smelled trouble so I picked up my pace and started up the hill. Just before I got to the gate that I usually went through to sit, the dogs suddenly veered cautiously away from something they could only sense and I looked up the slope to see what they were avoiding. There lay a beautiful tawny furred coyote, absolutely still. I approached it with a soft voice and tender footsteps not knowing if it was still breathing. The hole in its side was nearly 2 inches wide and as I kneeled next to it, I could see the wine red pool of its life blood within. Murdered in its tracks as it trotted towards the rising sun. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I touched its gorgeous fur and admired its fluffy tail. It did not feel right to leave it laying there next to the barbed wire fence so I gently stretched out my arms and lifted it. I carried it to the top of the hill where the vista moved out across the valley to the Sedona red rocks and beyond. Kuma and Lucy stayed their distance.
I lay this one down, head towards the view and stroked her fur. I brought grasses and yellow flowers to lay upon her and sang to her, praying that she not suffer in her journey.
I found that my curiosity invited me to check on her often over the coming weeks. On mornings when the smell arose strongly, I did not walk up the hill.
A few months later, I walked up and was shocked to find no sign of this coyote body…no blood marks, no crushed grasses where perhaps it had been drug off. I wandered in the area and found only one thing…one leg from elbow to paw. I asked the invisible world if I could take it, immediately imagining the part it could play as a talking staff for my guiding work. I was granted permission.
But for the ceremony of creating the talking piece, that was the end of that story as a tangible thing for more than a year.
The following year I had decided to move and on my very last morning of living in this wondrous home, I did my final walk as a resident up the hill to my rock. I sat down facing the mountain and started my reverie of prayer and love offerings, taking in the beauty. As I took in the surroundings, I looked to the ground around me and suddenly I saw, within just 8 feet of where I sat, a gorgeous, shiny white, coyote skull. I instantly knew it belonged to my friend whose body I had honored. I picked it up and everything in me knew it as a gift. It still sits on my altar to this day with its mouth ceremonially filled with sage.
Part Two:
Last February, I was walking with Ubuntu up one of the trails in the forest that surrounds Thumb Butte, near my home here in Prescott. There had been a light snow that day and about an inch of white dusted the trees and earth on either side of the trail. Just moments up the trail I caught sight of something to my left. I stopped and turned to see the body of a coyote who had seemingly dropped mid-stride in its tracks, covered as well in that light layer of snow. Again I approached with care. Her eyes were closed and I saw no sign of any exterior harm done to him. Again my instincts did not want to leave it laying there so close to the trail. I bent, slid my hands under her cool body and lifted it. I walked a short distance back into the forest and found a sweet little circle of bushes that felt like a safe place to leave him. I lay my hands on its body, touched its whiskers, its big ears, its tail and paws. She was stunningly beautiful and seemed so healthy.
The next day I brought jet black raven feathers and dried grasses and plants from my home to adorn his memorial. This one’s body I watched over the months as well.
For a curious woman who apprentices to death, this is not such an unusual practice…to you it might be.
It was months before it was touched by the larger decomposing forces of the forest. It lay there through the winter and early spring being rained on and snowed on, wind ruffling her fur and its inner world being slowly transformed.
It was one year after she died that I finally decided to take count of his bones and I asked if I could take her skull, now nearly white, as a recognition and remembering.
One week later a friend wrote to me and told me that she’d learned that ovarian cancer was considered the trickster mythologically.
Coyote is one of the most popular trickster characters in Native American Cultures.
My tracking nose immediately went to the air.
I had read that ovarian cancer was tricky indeed, which left me feeling fearful and like a frightened child, victim to something other. But this…suddenly reframing this cancer as a trickster, had me intrigued. It is not an easy one to be with, but definitely had my attention. Coyote is considered reckless, intelligent, adaptable, a survivor, and is often feared, even hated by ranchers.
I thought about how I’d learned that if one wants to eradicate coyote (same is true of rabbits), watch out, this animal mysteriously knows how to increase their gestation cycles and will just make more babies…so forget about getting rid of them! They are wily in more ways that we know.
I thought about the mainstream medicine that wants to annihilate cancer with a flood of chemicals and I wondered if with this cancer like with coyote, perhaps that is not the best approach. It is a trickster! Perhaps that would only invoke its crafty ways of living larger and spreading.
Perhaps my task is to dance with this disease…to honor its cunning ways…to look deeper into the invitation that came with it. Being an underworld guide, this only made me smile.
Coyote stories abound, as do other tricksters in multitudes of cultures. Coyote can be noble in its acts, or malicious….life giving or banishing.
The trickster encourages laughter and hilarity, or dastardly deeds, but most often with a high spiritual aim. The sacred and the profane link arms and we gain perspective in ways we couldn’t imagine.
Coyote is extremely versatile, lives in nearly every landscape, and knows how to survive.
This does not bode well as I put those qualities onto the cancer that took up residence in my body. And yet…what did it come to teach me? What does it want to catalyze in me? Have I been too serious in my life? Does my relationship with Spirit need to be fired up? Do I need to widen my perspective on life? How else am I being asked to dance? How might I invoke its most noble deeds within me?
I knew I needed to find ways to honor coyote.
I made an altar with the skull on my dining table…where I eat…so I could gaze into its empty eye sockets daily. I shrouded its head with mistletoe who, in its homeopathic ways, is somewhat coyote-esque. I inject mistletoe into my body several times a week, now with a smile of shrewd energy!
That was a start.
I’m inspired more now to intend to live in harmony with this cancer.....to have many years before me. We share the same ecosystem. Coyote lives in my town…I hear him howl wildly, and often. I do not feed them but I’m happy to have them come round. They inspire life, trickery, wildness and community in me.
In my guiding tradition the trickster lives in the East of the Four Direction Circle…the place of wisdom and innocence, of physical death and birth, of broad perspective and the sage, and Spirit.
I lean more into that direction now.
May I dance wildly on the knife edge between death and life and trust that will only make me more alive and full of joy and laughter for all I am given! Living with the trickster consciously, I believe, will keep me on my toes, and in my heart, alive to the wonder and beauty that surrounds even as death courts us individually and collectively in these precarious times.
These ARE the times we live in.
Coyote carries a mirror for me and leaves its scat in prominent places.
I am grateful.