Ancestral Voices

For anyone that is curious, the Sami people are the native reindeer herders of the Laplands. They are a Shamanic culture who, rather than using the repetitive beat of a drum or rattle, since those things were outlawed by the government of the invading culture, they learned to use a repetitive style of singing ("joiking" or "yoiking") as a vehicle for shamanic journeys to the spirit realms. Here's a sample of Sami Joiking.

Also for the curious, here is a sample of Native American Peyote Healing Songs.

All My Relations

For a few months now I've taken part in a program with Rose De Dan, a local Shaman who specializes in working with animals. We have been visiting different zoos in the Seattle area in ceremony and collecting, via prayer sticks, the prayers of the animals there whose role really is that of ambassadors between the animal and human kingdoms. It is amazing how interactive the animals are when you arrive fully present, with intention, and offer a vehicle of communion and energetic recognition of the Divine in each being. These have been the most profound zoo visits I have ever experienced, and I have spent a lot of time in zoos. We really are all related.

Aho All my Relations!
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin!

 

I’m Not a Real Doctor...

So there's this thing I do sometimes along with performing a Soul Retrieval ceremony for a client, and it's called "Faery Doctoring." Sometimes when a person is missing a part of themselves due to trauma, I have to venture to the edges of the Faery Realm with Eo, my Irish Elk 'Faery Co-walker' and inquire of my liaison of that Kingdom, Alandria, whether that missing soul part has been taken by the Fae in their endless effort to balance the energies between our world and their own. For that soul part to return to my client in this world, we have to make an exchange to ensure the maintenance of balance, and this exchange usually takes the form of something creative -- dancing, singing, art work, etc -- for a certain period of time performed by both my client and myself.

 

This is what happened during a recent Soul Retrieval/Faery Doctoring session...

Lately On Time

Pew! Pew! Pew!

Magickally Delicious

Drawing a Bigger Breath

 For Christmas I received a really cool sketchbook from my sister, except, in my eyes, it seemed more like a 'blank book.' What's the difference? Rather than being just a repository for random, unrelated sketches, it felt like an actual book, bound and everything, just waiting for its pages to be filled in. It was similar to previous blank books, which were like journals with unlined pages, that I used to fill with my comics when I first rediscovered my vocation and love of cartooning, only this one was bigger!

There is something about a big blank book, with all its empty pages pregnant with potential, that makes me begin to salivate. It always has. I have a big blank book from when I was a boy that I began filling in with creatures of my imagination. I didn't get too far in that one, but I still remember the absolute thrill and excitement of so many empty pages to fill in. 

It's different from drawing a comic on a plain, individual piece of paper. Though the quality may be better in that case, because there are logistics to drawing in a book, such as the changing height from the table top depending on how deep into the book the current page is, and having to constantly and clunkily shift the entire book around to get at the correct drawing angle, but there's something about watching the natural progression of pages building on each other, feeding each other with a desire or expectation for what is to follow, until you realize something you couldn't have even imagined at the beginning suddenly exists where nothing had before. Talk about a sense of accomplishment!

Anyway, since I began my original Drawing Breath comics in a smaller blank book, I'm calling this one Drawing A Bigger Breath. Here are the first three pages of many more to come.