leader of the pack

~ protect her ~
episode 9

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lone Wolf, independent in nature, forever stepping forward on new adventure. Running new routes, tracked along the way, but like The Littlest Hobo, won't settle or stay. Known by many names, like Gulliver you travel, been to hell and back, bondage ties you unravel. Mission led, forever driven by instinct, by exploring new opportunities, might never go extinct. But looking back, on your path others now follow, studying your footsteps, your skills they try to borrow. Stopping to self-celebrate how far they've now come, forgetting to honour all that you've done.

In solitary moments you feel tired and depleted, no real recognition for all you've completed. You've led the way for the continuation of your pack, but it's these moments alone you discover whose got your back.

Before you were others who also trod this sacred trail, ancestral line, to prosper or fail. Chosen from the otherside, for this life you were born, a path of service sworn in to perform.

But protecting and preserving this bodily vessel, home of spirit so soulfully special. Transforming Earth to meet with Spirit, cleaning inside, your sweet fragrance now fills it. Lovingly bound in cloth like a Mummy, circling around to preserve the tummy.

The head or leader assigned to this, Anubis was responsible for this practice. In canine form, Jackal some said, but perhaps with this they were wrongly led. Ancient wolf, so less of the trickster, loyal companion and protector mixture. Your Hazel eyes, capable of seeing many shades of grey, dividing up duality in this game of life we play. The boy who cried wolf and his false alarming, but celebrating true expression through the art of embalming.

Sent into the darkness, retrieving what's been taken away, actively bringing back, enough of the sit and stay. Black tar, dark liquid form, energy clearing, clean slate reborn.

Charged with sexuality, eroticism and desire, mind running wild and over-feeding the Fire. The big bad wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, sneakily hiding under the covers and up to no good.

You can be heard in the moonlight howling, but See everything when dark night prowling. Animality, savagely showing teeth, covered with fur, but still human underneath. Half wolf half man, bitten by werewolf, what have they done. Now just a mere shadow of your former masculine self, but your original blueprint still sits on the cosmic bookshelf. A silver bullet, for purity of heart, returning true nature for a new life start.

Pure genetic line, no hybrid crossbreeding, pedigree of spirit, true physicality feeding. Grounded in being, certainly no lapdog, the truest of leaders, unable to leapfrog. The power of the pack, a gathering of strength, soul family united on one wavelength. Mother and father, both pup sitting, but alloparenting, duties splitting. Yes, it takes a pack to raise a pup, nurturing and protecting, full team backup.

Alpha male was quite the tale, studying wolves in captivity, bound to fail. If you manipulate the environment, you disturb the social order, disrespecting boundaries, careful crossing the border. Watch them in the wild and you might learn a thing or two, no stay at home mother with only mothering to do. Trapped inside, desperate for a break, modern-age parenting make no mistake.

Trapped wind and anxious mind, aerophagia, no time to unwind. Dog eat dog, stressfully eating food fast, but shifting posture, ready to receive at last. For those on the path, spirit always provides, but only at the point that it decides. Anxious thought, worrying about what might be, maybe tomorrow, but tomorrow you'll soon see.

Prepared for every moment, such a magical story, pain is temporary, long live glory. Guided by gut instinct, gastronomy, but wisdom beyond Earth, astronomy. Orion and his hunting hounds, Earth's precession, galactic rounds. Brightest star in the Earth's night sky, dog days of summer, so Sirius say hi. Heliacal rising, inner cleansing and rebirth, universal love pours in, like the Nile flooding the Earth. The fertile harvest, which naturally now follows, fully feeds mission, such sweet mouthful swallows.

So to the spirit of Wolf stand along side, into the darkness protect and guide. Your bright dog star more luminous than Sun, so some deep shadow work can now been done.

These are my own insights, but a great beauty of life is that of perspective, so how might others respond to the spirit of Wolf, unbeknownst to this being the spirit they are receiving. How might they perceive it through their six senses. And guardians and protectors of Earth and far beyond, now wrapping and weaving to gather and respond.

* some participant names might have been changed for pen names.
* no participants were informed that it was the spirit of Wolf we were working with until after they had all shared their experience of the Session.

Luci

This is an auto-ethnography in two perspectives called

Telling tales/tails of how the wolf came.

Tale/Tail One:

Despite looking at the podcasts before starting, I didn’t fully appreciate what a Plantally session was.

I know now - it’s a process not an event, and it uses the imagination to connect to something people call spirit.

I am not someone who instinctively knows how to do this kind of thing. I don’t know what ‘spirit’ means - let alone what ‘connecting to spirit’ means - but recent, baffling events have confused and intrigued me, which, in my line of work, implies I have much more to learn – specifically regarding trusting my gut and meaningfully exploring the world known through visions and dreams.

I’ve written on the importance of changing how one relates to the physical world. My work focuses on relationships with water, soil and plants. I’ve been calling for a new approach - one that remembers life is lived with the world and that we should pay attention to what it is telling us. A laudable call, perhaps, in the time of climate change, but not one necessarily grounded in knowing HOW to listen. So, I accepted the suggestion of a session - a bit nervously - not sure what to expect and in the hope that it might teach me how to hear without sound.

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The method requires participants be receptive to the spirit of an unknown entity whose presence one is invited to bring in as quotes ‘medicine’. Once the process starts, everyone in the group is invited to share their feelings, as they could be how the medicine is having an effect. As the group was working at a distance, we wrote our comments into a closed group chat made specially for the purpose.

I’m an anthropologist – and I didn’t intend to ‘study the group’ but my anthropological training took over and I found myself immediately grappling to grasp how the sharers knew what was and wasn’t relevant. After all, days are run through with sensations and random events that appear to be arbitrary and haphazard. I sought out patterns to see if I could spot themes. Partly because I was unsure of how to sift through the random flow of what feels like meaningless nonsense in myself and partly because that’s what I’m used to doing.

As a child I had a recurring dream which took place in a room without an exit. The room was strung through with a series of lines running across it. These lines had moveable geometric shapes like beads threaded on them. A discordant noise would sound, and the shapes would begin to advance along the threads. I knew I had to do something before they reached the other side. I ran around to find a pattern, but always failed causing the ‘game’ to jolt with a loud mechanical crash to a halt, reset itself and start again. It felt urgent and upsetting. I never understood how to play or what I was doing.

The comments in the chat did reveal repeated features and idiosyncrasies as people’s experiences and conclusions coalesced over time. Comments while personal also built on each other as they took shape. What began as a stream of information - unfiltered, raw, sometimes cryptic and obscure, immediate, undeveloped thoughts - lay in the chat as snippets, snapshots of the past, tiny simple poems, without context – but slowly floated together, linking. It reminded me of playing ‘exquisite corpse’, the surrealist game where members of a group take turns to draw a part of a being. Each contribution builds on the last.

I wondered what entity these comments would create.

The first comment came into the chat like a message from a traveller in another world. It said,

‘Lots of heat in body just after cat session when I started to feel this new spirit. Vivid dreams. some of them I dreamt before. A different layer of sensitivity. Very clear guidance. Getting things done. Where maybe before energy felt circular it now feels pointed. In motion. Directed. Daily growing connection with animals. Many lessons. Two sided. Some nights feeling dark energies moving around. Black widow and cannabis very present. Spider webs everywhere. A mouse moved into my house. Keep losing sense of orientation when driving.’ (Maike)

I was sitting in the garden when I read it, and as the wind moved some cascading plants, they created dancing serpentine shadows which took my attention. Not knowing why, I wrote/replied,

‘Small dark snakes watching from the shadows cast by plants. thoughts moving, better focused. Feeling an internal vibration when still…’

I really wasn’t sure what I meant, but I imagined the shadows as little snakes and I was feeling interested in this new game. Moreover, a tiny inner sense of buzzing was obvious when I stopped talking! This was new.

The group was very kind and rewarded my comment with heart emojis. I felt incorporated and accepted. Maybe I could do this? It was nice but I was still unclear what was happening.

Comments followed, disconnected, ranging all over the place. Andrea, compared her experiences to Maike’s, agreeing that this new Spirit was strong and developing the theme of darkness that Maike had established by saying that she felt there was a darker side to this energy.

But comments didn’t always connect. Ana, for example, said she felt really ‘weird’ – lethargic and distracted - which she said was relieved by being in nature. She also said she felt bloated.

(Note to self: I understand what being lethargic and distracted feels like. And bloated. Can relate. But I don’t understand how someone knows when spirits are strong, let alone how one experiences that strength. Moreover, the darkness and shadows I mentioned were physical rather than energetic or descriptive of a type of spirit. The urge to try and tie these threads together is pressing on me. A friend recently told me I think too much…perhaps I should stop trying to understand.)

The process felt opaque, messy, chaotic, meaningless, free range and, despite the reassurance of heart emojis, I wasn’t sure what was going on. But perhaps that’s the point? Rather than know… was I expected to creep along on my hands and knees feeling my way in a cloudy, darkened landscape. Was that what I was supposed to be doing?

As the days passed and comments rolled in, I can’t say I felt clearer. Personal associations gathered. I added to them. Without any obvious reason I felt sensitised, physical, tearful. Writing in the chat made me well up. I held onto a tree branch in my garden and felt a wash of gratitude that turned into hot heavy sobs. Tears - a liquid mix of complicated non-verbal emotion/thoughts flowing out – including

the kind of sorrow that makes you drop to your knees, shame writhing and thrashing in my gut and a sense of uplift, which could be joy.

None of it made sense, but I could sense it.
Was this what people were calling ‘spirit’?
I want to hear ‘nature’ – but is this what it’s saying?

The fog of words continued. Some were reassuring, others utterly baffling and sometimes intensely worrying. Looking back, I can see how restrained and unsure I was compared to others more familiar with the process. People appeared happy to share thoughts about spiders, hissing cats, aching knuckles, wasps, itching, picking herbs, squirrels and dancing, alongside deeply personal traumas. Rarely responding to each other directly, emojis were used to demonstrate care and solidarity. And people seemed keen to open and unburden; there was always a new comment to think about.

I wondered if people were trying to guess who the spirit was. I certainly was. I felt my mind trying to make sense of the comments, to draw them into a coherence or set of meanings that would reveal the identity. I couldn’t. I gave up realising it was beyond me and let go. Then a theme of being trapped and needing release showed its face. For me this manifested in a series of physical events that were foreshadowed in a dream:

‘Dreamt about black liquid running out of my tap. Moved what seemed like mountains into the toilet after getting out of bed. Found the overflow of my bathroom sink blocked with black slimey goop. Got rid of it with improvised tools. Water could flow again! Feeling lighter… even unblocked! No headache but teeth still want to clench!’

Now, days later, after comical amounts of very loud wind-letting that have shocked my children and at times produced alarmingly explosive, watery toilet trips (that I won’t elaborate on), I find myself writing about the psychological poisons I might have been holding on to, perhaps for years. As I read, my stomach continues to churn and audibly gurgle, and it prompts me to imagine a pathway being clearing of all the piled-up rubbish that has blocked free passage.

For many of the group bloating, farting, burping, dietary preferences, feeling drunk and poisoned recurred, but for others being trapped and released wasn’t felt in the gut but as memories of relationships, of past people, of parenting and letting go of children as they grew. As that linking thread emerged between vastly different perspectives, I saw how these different forms come together and connect on similar lines.

The final section of the process required coming together – in our different regions – at the same time to record how we felt then and there. This is the point when the identity of the spirit is revealed. The grand finale. Apparently, I feel asleep, but I remember lying very still, and I did have some visions of a bleeding wounded snout and looking through cloth covering my head, which are yet to be understood.

The last few months have unfolded a course of coincidences and unexplainable events that demanded I look directly into this maddening sphere. I feel I am still crawling in new landscape where people know that what is imagined is real, where another language is spoken and where people blend their imaginings with sensations into meanings that liberate insights and open new directions or approaches for them.

This feels like uncharted territory for me, and I am unsure where to turn now, but hopefully the fog will clear to show the path, and I will get up off my knees and walk forward with some confidence!

This came into my life when I needed it. It has afforded me a glimpse into another place. I can’t logically explain what this means as the words – my words – are struggling to express the meanings. What follows is a first attempt at trying to bring some of these threads together in a manner that demonstrates the sense-somersaults this ride takes you on. For me it wasn’t calm or beautiful, it was confusing, turbulent but powerful. Like I say, just what I needed.

Tale/Tail Two:
A collective poem made up of my thoughts and participants comments called
Being mauled by a wolf.

Who are you talking to?
Nobody’s listening. Words on a screen.
Who’s talking?

New language creeping in, no sounds; pay attention something is happening. Feel it. What does it feel like? Feel it. De/scribe it. Attention in, attention out.

‘Dizziness, white feathers lifting my spirits’ (Sharon). ‘A sense that I needed to defend myself physically - I was given a shield of hand beaten metal and told to hide behind it’ (Alisa)

Words on a screen. Feel it. Feel it.
I can feel something. Shimmering. Tingling, fingertips.
Feel it.

‘When there is no story in my head, I feel free’ (Birgit)

Feeling tears.
Held, wept, released, viscous liquid forming a thick film through which to see. Seeing shadows and distortions. Sensing a softness like butter, melting smooth in my hot mouth. Forms in the darkness. Circling.

‘When I mentioned her my throat became swollen and I could barely speak’ (Ana)

Words on the screen.
Birds, slugs, love, mould, lizard’s eggs, snakes, farting and itching Words bounce back, penetrate or fall to the floor like dust. Leaves. Headaches. Meaningless. Round and round, hopefully going nowhere. Dark thoughts.

‘Hello, dark realm’ (Cathy)
‘A lot went on in the night’ (Andy)
‘Lots of heat. Wild vivid dreams. Dead snakes’ (Maike)

And now men.

‘What I hear… is they just wanna love and go all in’ (Vivian)
‘They shouted at me… “why can’t you help me?”’ (Ana)
‘Annoyed with his sexual energy. Which in my head I know I am longing for but felt, in my body, this disgust towards him.’ (Marluz)

Rage boiling, pushing, resistance in my chest
I don’t want instructions in the darkness. I’m not listening to instructions. Do this, do that. No.
Fu*k off. Listen. We must work together. Listen carefully. With care. These are not instructions. Tell me what you need, it will help. No.
Let go.

The tap is running. Leave it, let it run.
Watch the putrid black jelly gloop out.

‘Tar like substance in throat’ (Maike)

Claws rip into what was settled. The heavy dark velvety blanket covering everything. Scratching, scratching, ripped, exposed.

‘A lot of dreams. At some point I had this big brown dog on my whole body from the back it felt safe.’ (Ana)
‘Wanting a long term project I can sink my teeth into’ (Cathy)

Body contorting, struggling, pulled back, pulling back, twisting – let me go, let me go.

‘Tied up in the dark’ (Andy)
‘For me it is about breaking the spell’ (Daisy)
‘I did my best, I am done. Can I come home now? But where?’ (Vivian)

Bright red blood dripping.
Feel it. I don’t want to feel it. Remember it. Just go to sleep.

Nothing knows how to be alone.

I think

Arwawiku

It was a very good experience, when I concentrated, I entered a darkness but at a distance I saw a light, I went there and when it reached the light I entered it, there was no one there, just a glowing light, everything was calm, a magical sensation, I felt like a baby in the hands of a mother and from there in concentration in the middle of the light I fell into a deep dream and woke up at 3:40 pm. I had never slept in a meditation and I didn't even realize that I had fallen asleep.

Fue una experiencia muy bien, cuando me concentré, entre en una oscuridad pero a una distancia ví una luz fuí hacia allá y cuando llegó en la luz entro en ella ahí no había nadien solo una luz resplandeciente todo tranquilo, una sensación mágica, sentí como un bebé entre las manos de una madre y de ahí en concentración en medio de la luz me quedé en un sueños profundo y despierto 3:40 pm. Nunca yo había dormido en una meditación y ni me di cuenta que me había dormido.

Vivian

In the beginning two people naked making love with each other so beautiful and soft, water, air, present then my mind got loud and just something happened and I had no idea what, like a blackout / a dream you will not remember someone/ something worked on your system for good. I just woke up felt really intense energy in my solar plexus kind of I carry a child on my chest. My left hand fell asleep was laying on the heart. Calm peaceful, saw myself riding a horse in the end riding home it‘s over now not alone with someone else.

Birgit

A light full of love surrounded me. My heart started racing, felt funny on top of the tongue and trough.l and down to the stomach. Had the feeling my tongue was turning green, I was like poisoned. Had to check. Was almost in panic. I calmed down, deep acceptance, flying like an eagle over a place like Arizona. Then I started to feel spikes all over my skin, was surrounded by the thorns of a garden of roses. The deep understanding came that the most beautiful things in life (like roses) are also suffering, don’t attach don’t even to the beauty. Then I was alone, in the street, on the floor. A homeless person, I felt cold, darkness. But the teaching was that even in the darkest moments I am free. I still feel my heart chakra opening.

Daisy

Wind in my hair standing top edge mountain. Looking out. Freedom. Joy. Movement within me, fast, light, softness. Crystal pyramids. Hands on my Heart. Sneezing. Slight nausea. Head tingle. Cough. Heavy. Sour smell. Rose bit later. Ovaries activated. Mother line holding on- soft voice - You can let go. Air letting go of a string with 1000’s ballon’s which turn into butterflies. Strong sensation in my sinuses- I can see the depths of labyrinth. Pain. Opening. A journey. Ancient stories being held within the sinus walls. Comfort and safe. Fire in throat and my hands. 3rd eye pulsating- radiating- ripples. Almost sore. Love. Dragon. I make myself into an invisible ball. People around me drunk unsafe losing their minds. Smell sex . Feel numb. Tight veins. Deeply tired. Stretch out. Claim space. Pains. Release. Magnificent rebirth. Courage. Yellow. Protected.

Claudia

I was lying on the beach and felt deep profound heaviness and peace starting at my feet slowly moving up…felt like deep surrenderance (dying as I was one with Mother Earth) and slowly transitioning into full potential

Maike

sharp acupuncture like sensations in body. feelings of animals crawling all over me. a dark energy in my field that really pisses me off, not willing to give it space any longer. my right ankle being sliced open by sharp teeth to extract this what shouldn't be there and is not mine. oleander very present (has also been last days). Eyes burning. Drifting off for a while. A stream of words, pictures, memories. Can't remember details. Coming back, feels like music is running forever. All of a sudden feels really really loud as if my ears gonna explode. Laying on side in embryo pose. In the womb of an animal. Irritating. Left side achy. A clearing in a forest. A gathering of spirits. A huge vortex. Immense light energy.

Marluz

Warm legs and arms straight from the start. Feeling of being in a nest Calmness, tingling hands, hedgehog, Sunset in the ocean, Soar throat again Desert, people working hard in the sun, but I feel alone, undisturbed Skull. Something dark is there, but it’s with its back towards me. I don’t trust it but also don’t fear it. I feel tears rolling out of my right eye. Feel tingling in pressure points and feel like whole meridian present. Some strange feeling inside my mouth upwards. A deer looking at me, with huge antlers. The antlers change into a bird of prey and stays for a little while on the head of the deer and then flies off. Hands are painful the whole time; as if nails are going through. Waterfall. The water turns black there’s a cave behind it. A boat floats away; down the stream or towards the ocean I don’t know. Feather of an owl. Trees with white pinky blossoms, slightly pink, like a forest in a valley. Apple trees I think. I walk barefoot in a beautiful dress towards paradise. Receptive. Grateful. Back home

Cathy

Train, old steam, smoke. someone comes up from behind me, picks me up by the armpits and shakes me like a new baby. Perspective matters. the web of us matters, we don't choose who we come across but hang on anyway. So much bright light like I've been underground for ages it is blinding and welcome. A big dog arrives to claim her bed. Running thru tall tall grasses with the feeling of I must make it home but too much enjoying myself. cool cool water, everything relaxes and is peaceful.