Part 2-Grouse medicine

grouse medicine

You may be asking yourself what is grouse medicine?  Is that made of part and bits of dead grouse?? Do I have to eat grouse feet?  But it is none of those things.  Bear with me, and don’t grouse, it’s a bit a winding road to get the point here.

Most everyone has psychic experiences and those experiences can vary person to person, teaching lessons as they come and go. To the Native Americans, brushes with those spirits that help us, is thought of as medicine for the soul. Personally, I do not see a difference between everyday experiences rather than professional readings. Being psychic is much like having any other talent. It takes no more or less dedication and awareness to play a concerto than to give some kind of psychic or intuitive reading. It is a talent that grows with time, practice, and opportunity. I am not one type of psychic or another. I simply try to employ as many of my senses as I can at any given time. I have seen, heard, felt, smelt, and had intuitive leaps of knowledge of things I should not have. These are pretty standard things as far as everyday life is concerned. Few people do not have stories of knowing who a caller was before the phone began to ring, warning dreams of death or accidents of loved ones, or some type of experience with ghosts, angels, or simply something unknown.  But really, what could one learn from Grouse medicine?

 

It is a cop out to say I was born like this. We are all born like this. Not many of us have the chance to realize it. I didn’t truly realize this about myself until I was twenty-one. After reading all that I have to write about this, you might say that I was clueless or hard-headed. But this collection is rather pointed, and all the pieces of a story don’t necessarily flow in order or with regard to our ability to understand the patterns in and around our lives.

 

My realization started with a deck of animal totem cards. I had gotten them on a whim. They felt good to my hands and at that time I was very interested in Shamanism. Every few days I would chose a new card and place it in my student id case. This way I could carry my medicine lesson with me and get to know the cards more intimately. I had my favorites, of course. Eagle was strong and sharp eyed. Cougar was crafty and fierce. Owl and crow were messengers. About halfway through the school year I got stuck with Grouse. I didn’t really like Grouse. I didn’t understand why I needed to hold on to Grouse’s medicine for such a long period of time. I thought I was already following the life lessons of “Find your rhythm, honor the synchronicity, spiral into your potential.” I was in collage after all, studying what I always wanted to study, and taking life as it was coming. It is almost a needless pun to point out, that I was grousing about Grouse’s medicine. I even drew cards a few times, most always to be stuck with Grouse. This continued until I really got stuck with Grouse. One day, the whole deck, but Grouse, vanished from my night stand.

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Months passed and a few times I had become so irked at Grouse that I tore through my room looking for the deck. Each time, the deck remained as lost as it was before, and the memory of it would stick in my mind, like a word on the tip of your tongue, waiting just beyond reach to be remembered. While I huffed and groused that my deck was lost, there was little I could do about replacing it on my collage budget. Grouse stayed tucked into my id case.

 

When the end of the school year came, I cleaned from my room from top to bottom. I found my deck of animal totem cards on the bottom of my night stand. This was a place I had cleaned more than several times since I had lost the deck. But the deck sat there, as if mocking me, between a few books at the bottom of my nightstand. In the last two months of that semester I had been through those books and even taken them off of the shelf. I groused even more internally through out the day as I finished cleaning and packing for the year.

 

I treated myself that evening by going down to my Jocelyn’s apartment for some tea and some down time. It was a bit of a ritual. You may take that as literally as you like, because for me, life is lived by intention and not necessarily bells and whistles. We lit the candles, had a light dinner, and waited for the brew. She and I crashed on the futon couch while we waited and eventually took in our tea. It was an odd night and Jocelyn had other visitors, of which only she could see. After several trips out West and to a reservation in New Mexico, Jocelyn had managed to acquire the friendship of some Native Elders. The Elders had their stereotypical sense of humor and rarely were things actually calm when they felt they had something to share. Rustling Willow was usually particularly antagonistic in his joshing.

 

I was at the point in life where I had been ready to accept that I could sense the difference between days and times when there were visitors and when they were keeping to themselves. That night there was a message for me. I never took their messages with grace, they brought out the chip on my shoulder with their advice sometimes. Jocelyn was laughing, and not able to understand the message in full, but she repeated what she could make out. The message was something about grouse.

 

I completely deflated. Not only had the deck been in it’s own way mocking me and my efforts to understand, now the invisible Indians were mocking my grousing. I sat slumped on the couch, annoyed, and explained to Jocelyn about the grouse card I have been carrying around with me for months. Jocelyn laughed. She laughed not simply at me, but also at the commentary, that at this point only she could hear. After they all had their laugh at me, it was time to leave. I still had to make the trip home the next day.

 

I stood by Jocelyn’s door, collecting my backpack and coat, when I heard something. Today I can’t tell you what it was, it was an inconsequential snarfy comment. But I heard it, and Jocelyn once again cracked up laughing. The world seemed to stop in that moment, and stood up and looked at her. I asked her pointedly if they had said what I thought they had said. She agreed that was more or less what she heard. But I had heard it. I had heard their words in way that was not foreign to me. I had a similar internal voice most of my life.

 

It brought my world to threshold I had never considered before. I now had to consider the fact that that voice that reared it’s head every so often was not simply me making stuff up when I got bored. I had to consider that those times when I thought I was zoning out, talking internally with, what I thought was a completely made up character, was not quite as made up as I had thought. This was something so internal to me, I never thought to tell anyone about. I had thought that this was not an uncommon thing, that it was like day dreaming. This process was so insidious to me, that I never questioned how or why it was there.

 

While I am pointing out here how one instant began a realization process for me, the full course of learning what was real and what was my imagination took time. It took some experimentation. To my mind the largest shock was, not really that I had been doing this listening all my life, but the fact that I had never really been alone. I had grown up being adopted, an only child, in between the ages of my cousins, few friends. I had grown up alone and grown up to like my alone times. The shock of the idea that perhaps I was never really ever alone, so to speak, changed my perspective in ways that are very hard to describe. One of the first things I felt I had to figure out was where I ended and other ways of being began. What was my authentic voice? What was fed to me without me realizing?

 

I don’t know what took me so long to see things as they are. I don’t know what really got me all blocked up from catching the hint that I was more powerful than I knew. Today, while sometimes I forget, sometimes I get caught in the melodrama of daily life, there comes a point where I get a slap to the back of the head and askance of why I didn’t ask for help sooner. The world comes back into focus, and the patterns and cycles of things give the sight and knowledge I need to tread the deep waters of life and the strength to live my life on my own terms. My path is mine alone, given to me long ago. Laid forth by ancestors and friends. My path, my wheel of life and medicine, is the only thing that can break me, the only thing that can heal me. It is the only thing that is real. This is the medicine lesson of the honorable brother, sometimes trickster, Grouse. Find your rhythm, honor the synchronicity, spiral into your potential.

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Months passed and a few times I had become so irked at Grouse that I tore through my room looking for the deck. Each time, the deck remained as lost as it was before, and the memory of it would stick in my mind, like a word on the tip of your tongue, waiting just beyond reach to be remembered. While I huffed and groused that my deck was lost, there was little I could do about replacing it on my collage budget. Grouse stayed tucked into my id case.

 

When the end of the school year came, I cleaned from my room from top to bottom. I found my deck of animal totem cards on the bottom of my night stand. This was a place I had cleaned more than several times since I had lost the deck. But the deck sat there, as if mocking me, between a few books at the bottom of my nightstand. In the last two months of that semester I had been through those books and even taken them off of the shelf. I groused even more internally through out the day as I finished cleaning and packing for the year.

 

I treated myself that evening by going down to my Jocelyn’s apartment for some tea and some down time. It was a bit of a ritual. You may take that as literally as you like, because for me, life is lived by intention and not necessarily bells and whistles. We lit the candles, had a light dinner, and waited for the brew. She and I crashed on the futon couch while we waited and eventually took in our tea. It was an odd night and Jocelyn had other visitors, of which only she could see. After several trips out West and to a reservation in New Mexico, Jocelyn had managed to acquire the friendship of some Native Elders. The Elders had their stereotypical sense of humor and rarely were things actually calm when they felt they had something to share. Rustling Willow was usually particularly antagonistic in his joshing.

 

I was at the point in life where I had been ready to accept that I could sense the difference between days and times when there were visitors and when they were keeping to themselves. That night there was a message for me. I never took their messages with grace, they brought out the chip on my shoulder with their advice sometimes. Jocelyn was laughing, and not able to understand the message in full, but she repeated what she could make out. The message was something about grouse.

 

I completely deflated. Not only had the deck been in it’s own way mocking me and my efforts to understand, now the invisible Indians were mocking my grousing. I sat slumped on the couch, annoyed, and explained to Jocelyn about the grouse card I have been carrying around with me for months. Jocelyn laughed. She laughed not simply at me, but also at the commentary, that at this point only she could hear. After they all had their laugh at me, it was time to leave. I still had to make the trip home the next day.

 

I stood by Jocelyn’s door, collecting my backpack and coat, when I heard something. Today I can’t tell you what it was, it was an inconsequential snarfy comment. But I heard it, and Jocelyn once again cracked up laughing. The world seemed to stop in that moment, and stood up and looked at her. I asked her pointedly if they had said what I thought they had said. She agreed that was more or less what she heard. But I had heard it. I had heard their words in way that was not foreign to me. I had a similar internal voice most of my life.

 

It brought my world to threshold I had never considered before. I now had to consider the fact that that voice that reared it’s head every so often was not simply me making stuff up when I got bored. I had to consider that those times when I thought I was zoning out, talking internally with, what I thought was a completely made up character, was not quite as made up as I had thought. This was something so internal to me, I never thought to tell anyone about. I had thought that this was not an uncommon thing, that it was like day dreaming. This process was so insidious to me, that I never questioned how or why it was there.

 

While I am pointing out here how one instant began a realization process for me, the full course of learning what was real and what was my imagination took time. It took some experimentation. To my mind the largest shock was, not really that I had been doing this listening all my life, but the fact that I had never really been alone. I had grown up being adopted, an only child, in between the ages of my cousins, few friends. I had grown up alone and grown up to like my alone times. The shock of the idea that perhaps I was never really ever alone, so to speak, changed my perspective in ways that are very hard to describe. One of the first things I felt I had to figure out was where I ended and other ways of being began. What was my authentic voice? What was fed to me without me realizing?

 

I don’t know what took me so long to see things as they are. I don’t know what really got me all blocked up from catching the hint that I was more powerful than I knew. Today, while sometimes I forget, sometimes I get caught in the melodrama of daily life, there comes a point where I get a slap to the back of the head and askance of why I didn’t ask for help sooner. The world comes back into focus, and the patterns and cycles of things give the sight and knowledge I need to tread the deep waters of life and the strength to live my life on my own terms. My path is mine alone, given to me long ago. Laid forth by ancestors and friends. My path, my wheel of life and medicine, is the only thing that can break me, the only thing that can heal me. It is the only thing that is real. This is the medicine lesson of the honorable brother, sometimes trickster, Grouse. Find your rhythm, honor the synchronicity, spiral into your potential.

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