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Mushroom Clouds: The Shaman's Story

The sky brings us dreams. It is the sleeping God who drifts in and out of the possibilities of choice that are dreamt for us. I would often ask my grandmother where these possibilities are first born and she would always respond, ?Mushroom clouds.? Over the years, little by little, I began to weave a story of what she meant and what mushroom clouds had to do with the realities I could chose from.

As a child I believed that I was a magical creature, the dreamer of my own dreams. I had the ability to pray dream gifts into a loved one's dreams too. The sense of power I would feel when a dream became manifest for me or someone close was unmistakable. This news of a sleeping God acting as creative director over my dream world was upsetting. Deep inside there was the sense that my head was being seeded with an arrangement of images programmed by another magical creature whom I had never met. It felt as if the dreams I was able to see to manifestation and the resulting sensations of power that exploded like fireworks inside of my child's body were nothing more than illusion from the world of Maya.

I revolted, expressing my complete and total refusal to be a puppet for a sleeping God who played with the strings of human consciousness connecting us as a species. My grandmother would sit in her chair knitting and laughing as I played by her feet plotting to seed a dream of my own into the godhead, a viral code disabling him from the grip he had over my dreams. She would often remind me that this wasn?t about loss, but about potential. I didn?t understand what she meant; to me I was plagued by a God who resided in my head only by projection from wherever he lay sleeping.

Shortly before my grandmother died she took me to a hillside where we sat beneath a tree encircled by white mushrooms that grew all around us. In a soft voice she told me to lie down and close my eyes. She began to tell a story about the mushrooms that grow from the earth to meet the light of sky and that they are all connected to one another like the root system of the tree we were sitting under. She said the mushroom is our greatest teacher and as it grows it shifts and moves like the clouds that are blown by the winds above.

My grandmother told me to open my eyes and look up at the sky. There, I saw many mushroom clouds above us. All the clouds became the shapes of the words she sounded. She became silent and averted her eyes from the sky toward me. I asked my grandmother what the sleeping God looked like. She told me to sound the form of my words into the clouds. I squinted my eyes, summoning for him to reveal himself to me. Suddenly the clouds began to shift, revealing a surprising image.

I looked toward my grandmother confused and shocked asking her, "Why does the sleeping God look like me, Grandmother?"

She replied, "The shaman's power is to shapeshift into anything it wants for purposes of creating, destroying, or maintaining. Although the shaman can choose from possibilities, the possibilities belong to the Realm of Jealous Gods residing above the skies, which leaves the power of choice to humans. Look to the mushroom for the teachings of shapeshifting and to the clouds as a canvas from which form is birthed. This is the language of the dream and you must learn to translate between the languages of earth and sky to create story. A dreamer does this by weaving the possibilities of the Gods into a story that can manifest and survive here in this very place. Without the Gods we would not be, but without us there would be no story."

The Tequihua Foundation www.tequihuafoundation.org

 Chuparrosa is a Dreaming Woman who inherited the sacred art of the ensueño (Dreaming) from the Yaqui Queen of Dreams, Heather Valencia. She has also been training and closely working with Koyote, a Toltec Man of Knowledge, integrating the art of invocation with her academic training in psychology. Chuparrosa works her dream weaving by unifying worlds and mystical visions, using her body and words to sensually integrate, rearrange, and transform.