The Calling of a Shaman

Like yourself, I never considered myself to be a spiritual person at all prior to a couple of decades ago. Originally, I was pretty dark. From an existence of violence, drugs, alcohol, and other expensive pacifiers within my life. Although I had been born and raised a “normal” kid throughout the east coast, deep south, and ultimately arriving in the deserts of Arizona where I would descend to the depths of an existence of “by the moment”. Born with an empathic ability, I found myself communicating with emotions within the environment I found myself in as a child, being unable to recognize any differences between “their” feelings and my own. Wild journeys of infinitely expansive emotions, many of which I had no idea how to deal with within my own mind, let alone someone else’s. As I grew older, I thought I was able to numb these emotions, and quash the internal voices of these emotions through the alteration of my mind. Experimenting with Peyote around the age of thirteen, which led to consistent usage of hard alcohol by fourteen in a futile attempt to escape how I was feeling, only to find myself falling into regret and self-loathing upon the hangover. This period of my life would last just short of ten years, before I would finally overdose on heroin in a drain culvert in Tucson, Arizona on or about 25 August 1989.

There has been a lot of “hindsight” offered by my spiritual ancestors, and the deities themselves to allow my memories to be restored, as well as offered an understanding as to the many different events within my life. My gods found me there in that culvert, as my consciousness was released from my physical form, for what seemed to be days, however more than likely hours. This would be my first “slap in the face” moment where some part of me recognized that there was more to living than what I was currently doing. My gods directed a complete stranger to find me there. They had given him all the intellect he and his beautiful wife needed to help me escape the grasp of this terrible existence. The next lesson in my destiny came from these two total strangers who would take me to their home in the Arizonian desert and keep me alive throughout a three-month, arduous journey of self-discovery without the drugs, ultimately becoming clean, celebrating a month of sobriety in November that same year.  The next lesson in my journey would be what was revealed behind my eyelids as my biological form endured the release of the long-term effects of the drugs. My physiological form revolting at the idea of processing data that it had quashed for over a decade. I would discover later that many of my memories were discarded during this overdose and recovery. 

Most of the memories that have been restored now have a different perspective, as I realized that I have evolved, and my understandings have changed. Just short of five months after celebrating my sobriety, I would meet, then, two months later marry, my shield-maiden who now celebrates over 35 years of marriage with me. While the path we are on may seem to have been a dead-end, our future trajectory requires that we be observant for new paths. I speak from personal experience when I say I did not see my shield-maiden on my horizon during those dark days, however, now I am incapable of imagining a life without her. We need to be open to what the universe wants us to know, or where it wants us to be at, when the chapter of our life is ready to intersect our path.

More, as we travel the road to our destiny,

Mark