Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams & David Carson
(St. Martin's Press, New York; 1988, 1999)
"[W]e have used certain aspects of each animal's medicine to relay life lessons that apply to the human search for unity with all our relations. It is through nature that these teachings come, and it is to nature that we will all return. Each part of creation has a distinctive and valid place in the Medicine Wheel of all that is."
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(from the Introduction of Medicine Cards, p11)
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Animal GuidesA good friend of mine that is familiar with medicine cards and animal guides gave me the Medicine Cards book with a set of cards after she read the first few chapters of To Kill A Coyote in mid-2013. This was my first introduction to animal medicine. I found that not only was coyote part of a trickster archetype that spanned many cultures, but also was a single aspect of a much greater network of teachers that nature provides.
This new information provided insight and helped me to develop my story and to understand my connection to the coyote even better. I find it interesting that the symbols and words that speak to me strongly, align with my inner truth even before I have made the connection or am able to articulate this truth. I used hawk pictures to introduce the medicine card section to draw from their power as messengers. "Hawk is akin to Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Hawk medicine teaches you to be observant, to look at your surroundings." (Medicine Cards, p45) Or as Dave Matthews might say, "Everybody Wake Up." To Kill A Coyote is about waking up, seeing what is obvious and yet hidden due to our habits and faulty perceptions. Medicine cards and the animal medicine they describe can help us understand the world as we wake up from old habits and faulty ways of perceiving. |
Above: The hawks that visited me a few times over a 3-week period in July 2014 and helped me to realize that I am "only as powerful as [my] capacity to perceive, receive, and use [my] abilities." (Medicine Cards, p45)
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Top of the page: Alligator living on a plantation in South Carolina. I was more than a little nervous getting out of my car to get a better look and take a picture (March 2014)