Our physical and energetic environment includes our friends the plants and animals, the elements, the personality and character of the landscape, the make up of our very planet itself, the mineral kingdom, and the heavenly bodies. We know what science teaches us about them but the average person knows little…

Shamans throughout the ages in all parts of the planet have known a great deal more about the nature of animals and plants than modern day plant biologists and those who study animal species. Although scientists may know a great deal about the flora and fauna of the Earth, they know nothing about why they are here on the planet and what they can do for us on a larger scale than anyone might imagine. This is the expertise of shamans who in addition understand their local behaviors and their purely physical medicinal values. Because scientists are severely restricted as to what they are allowed to study and what they are allowed to consider as valid information, they are extremely handicapped when it comes to actually knowing anything about plants, animals, and the cosmos. This is both quite amusing and tragic in its consequences for how we treat the flora and fauna on the planet. Let us take a little journey around the terrain of power plants and power animals to understand just a little of what shamans have learned and in this way you may begin to understand how plants and animals support humanity in so many different ways.

By now all of you must be well aware of the ending of the Mayan long count Calendar on the Solstice, December 21, 2012 and all the hoopla that surrounds it. Shamanically speaking, according to the Mayans it is not the end of the world, just the end of an era, a shift from the fourth sun to the fifth sun, a chance to dream a brand new dream, to dream the dream we have all been dreaming of. So ignore the hype, the end of the world parties, the bandwagon that so many commercial interests are riding for some extra cash, and become quiet and go inward. What do you want for the future of the planet? What do you want for your own personal interests and well being in these coming times? The Mayans say we have a window, a doorway to walk through, an opportunity to shift the paradigm that runs our experience of this world. If we dream together a future world of loving kindness and compassion, this is what we will have. It will take a little time however. Few things happen in the blink of an eye. It is not as if we will wake up in the morning and a new world will already be in place. What will be in place will be a new frequency, a new potential, a new choice, and that is what we can build on to create something fresh, something beautiful, and something worth living for. Let us take a quick review of what the Mayan elders say has lead us to this juncture in order to understand better what this opportunity involves.

Have you ever been speaking to someone and listened incredulously as they told you something that revealed how seriously they were deluding themselves? Perhaps it is a parent whose child is in a lot of trouble abusing drugs or has severe learning disabilities and you hear them talking glowingly about how their child is going to go to Harvard.

Must we get old and decrepit? Is getting old and grey honorable or is it just a drag? Is youth all its cracked up to be? Where are we headed?

Throughout history one of the functions of shamanism has been to look ahead and forecast upcoming changes whether it be weather forecasting or simply seeing events unfolding in the near future in order to be better prepared. In keeping with that tradition, now that we are over half way through…

More than half the world population now lives in urban environments and even though they too live on land, the deep connection that has been so important to peoples throughout history has been for the most part lost. Fortunately this situation has reached its nadir and from now on this…

One day an email came from an old grammar school classmate. He sent me a picture of my grammar school class and asked me if I could help him identify some of the people in the picture. He was organizing a fifty-year class reunion. The truth was, we had never had a reunion before and my curiosity was peaked. I was able to help him with a few names and just the process of going over the pictures sucked me in. These were the kids I had spent eight years with, from first to eighth grades. They were the ones who I had been with in those early formative years and they were the only people in my life that had witnessed and experienced those school years where so much had happened.

As a looked over the class picture I was struck by several things. The size of the class was huge, fifty kids and one teacher, a hard core Catholic nun. These days that would be unacceptable but in the fifties it was status quo. The other thing I noticed was ethnicity: Italians, Irish, Hispanics, Armenians, Poles, and some Asians but only one African-American child. We were diversified in a Catholic school sort of way.