What possessed me to spread out the blanket/rug I crocheted some ten years ago and now use for shamanic sessions with people and then just leave it there? Usually Malcolm chews on it, poking holes in it with his whiskery, fangy love. What then prompted me to go to the bookcase, collect the rocks sitting on the shelves, and begin placing them around the blanket's circumference? Who knows? But it began a process lasting about four hours where I went area to area, room by room, and collected all of the stones, every last stone in the house,and I discovered there were a lot.
Next came the pieces from the plant world. Pieces of wood, bark, seed pods, dried flowers, fungi large and small. Then came the animals. Feathers, shedded skins, claws, whiskers, bodies of butterfly & bee, squirrel and rabbit tails, discarded nests, the ashes of Jacinta, Hoon and Cass.
Then the human objects. Bells and candles, figurines and painted stones and art created and given to me by friends and barters from clients, boxes containing secret shamanic whatnot, my medicine bag and journeying scarf, a picture of my great grandmother Gigi along with her copy of a 1919 edition of Ibsen's A Doll's House.
When it was done, my home looked pretty sparse and the blanket looked like this:
And for the past several days, I've been hanging out there, right in the center of it. Taking and making phone calls, going on shamanic journeys, drifting, sleeping, breathing.
I had deep insights into what possessions are, why we give meaning to certain things, and the difference between things we love, things we need, and things that are both. It's about connecting the dots inside of us, then making them manifest in the world outside our skin, so that the visual and energetic charge will reflect back inside of us, to remind us (if we choose our stuff wisely) of Who We Are (and as we grow and let go: of who we are not).
Letting go of thinking outside the box, and allowing what's outside the box to engulf me leads to the oddest outcomes, fascinating, healing, surprising flows of living.
Follow your intuition. It will take you on adventures.
PS - for the first half hour I was doing all this collecting of stuff, I had no clue what was happening, felt a little dumb and weird. Yet intuition said onward. And who am I to argue with onward?
PPS - I just realized that I created a fort in my bedroom, like I used to do when I was a kid. Hilarious!