Tag Archives: Christianity

Podcast Episode: Shared Constellations With Bear

Posted on by under Consciousness, Spirituality, Uncategorized
Brown bear standing in a green forest clearing with mist
A brown bear stands alert in a lush, mist-filled forest clearing.

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the bear is a philosopher, the moon is a market analyst, and somehow it all holds together.

Mara: Today we’re looking at a piece from Ari Joshua Bouse that moves through Bear Medicine, seasonal cycles, inner stillness, and what it means to come back down to earth — in every sense of that phrase.

Pip: Let’s start with the bear.

Shared Constellations With Bear

Mara: This segment lives at the intersection of the natural world and the inner one — Bear as a lens for examining where we are in the cycle of expansion, contraction, and return.

Pip: The post sets up Bear Medicine as a guide for introspection, and then lands this: “Standing in the space of knowing is a marketing free zone. When we enter the center of a circle, there is nobody to convince or sway.”

Mara: So the upshot is that stillness isn’t passive — it’s a place beyond persuasion, beyond the noise of markets and elections and outcomes. That’s the ground the whole piece is standing on.

Pip: And then it gets economic. The post asks whether we remember when the wealthiest Americans paid around a 90% tax rate — right after the stock exchange crashed. Bear market as literal bear market.

Mara: The Taoist framing ties it together. “Investing in loss” means letting the bullish, expansive emphasis go into hibernation — not as defeat, but as a natural rhythm. Winter Solstice isn’t failure; it’s the season for it.

Pip: There’s a real tension the post holds without resolving: do you withdraw, or come out of the cave? It asks both, directly.

Mara: And it distinguishes prayer from meditation along those same lines — prayer as yang, outward, intention-setting; meditation as yin, receptive, listening. “Walking with one foot in spirit and one foot in ground,” as it puts it.

Pip: The political moment is there too — post-election, beyond cheers and jeers — asking whether you can see the good inside all situations. Revolutionary zeal, the post says, but without the hate.

Mara: It closes on bears themselves: our treatment of them mirrors how seriously we take the environment. The animal and the archetype stay linked throughout.

Pip: Patience, plasticity, planted seeds. The cubs want to come out and play — but not yet.

Mara: The thread running through all of it is that contraction is productive — hibernation isn’t absence, it’s preparation.

Pip: Go quiet enough and something starts growing. We’ll see what comes out of the cave next time.

Shared Constellations With Bear

Podcast Episode: Peering Into Our Spirituality With Owl Revisited

Posted on by under Consciousness
Neon-style glowing owl perched on a branch surrounded by stars
A luminous owl perched on a branch glowing with neon-like lines against a starry background.

Pip: Classroom Mothership Earth — where the owl is always watching, the solstice is always coming, and the political metaphors are never quite finished with you.

Mara: Ari Joshua Bouse brings us into that territory today — spirituality, seasonal transition, and the harder questions about power, information, and what we choose to see in the dark. Let’s start with the owl.

Peering Into Our Spirituality With Owl

Pip: The frame here is the approaching Winter Solstice — the darkest day on the calendar — and the question of what that darkness asks of us spiritually, personally, and politically.

Mara: The post opens with exactly that lens: “Owl peers into dark nights with the light of empathic vision” — and from there it tracks what that vision might illuminate as the year contracts toward its lowest light.

Pip: So the owl isn’t decoration. It’s a way of asking what we can see precisely because we’re willing to look into uncomfortable places — grief, loss, the parts of ourselves that are waning along with the season.

Mara: That personal register runs through the whole piece. There’s a line about saying goodbye to old selves, to loved ones who have passed, to the ghosts of yesteryear — and then a pivot: “Remember a rainbow’s arrival reflects color back onto your soul.”

Pip: The grief gets company. That’s the move.

Mara: And then the post widens the lens considerably — out to the political, to questions about JFK declassification, to what gets suppressed in the name of national security, and whether the spirit of “We the People” is structurally in tension with protecting what the post calls “the minority of the opulent.”

Pip: The owl, it turns out, has opinions about the Military-Industrial Complex. Fair enough — so did a lot of owls in 1963.

Mara: The post holds those threads together by treating them as the same problem: a seductive mindset that believes people are inherently bad and need to be controlled. The prescription is “openness, trust and an authentically heartfelt solution-focused perspective” — and the warning is that apocalyptic thinking, once it’s target-marketed, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pip: Which is a genuinely sharp observation. The machinery that profits from fear needs the fear to stay legible and renewable.

Mara: The post asks directly whether exposing establishment suppression is principle or narcissism — and leaves that question open, which feels honest.

Pip: Darkness, vision, what we’re willing to name — that’s the whole season, really.

Mara: Empathic vision as a practice — that’s what ties the personal grief and the political questions together here.

Pip: The owl keeps watch. We’ll see what it spots next time.

Peering Into Our Spirituality With Owl

Cardinal Whistles Wind Chimes of Virtuosity

Posted on by under Consciousness, Native American, Shamanism, Uncategorized

Cardinal appears in our world today
As Father Sun just revealed a peak light experience
on a waning Summer Solstice

A Full Buck Moon runs through the sky trails ahead

Do you need a strong moral compass or a
yoke tattooed around your neck to be true to yourself?

Yang heats up his fires during the summer months
It is a time for outer growth and an action-oriented lifestyle

And yet, we are heading downhill now until light and dark
are equal again on Fall Equinox in September . . .

Can you sense seismic shifts of
Climate Change across the fruited plain?

As the world turns, may we remember the softness of
yin’s hands calm the nerves of anxiety ridden war mongering

May meditation on Cardinal’s whistles blow in the winds of change
that resonate with crystalline clarity in Mother Earth’s heart beat

See you up the trails,

Ari

Soaring Yangward in the Spirit of an Eagle in Flight

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I remember when an old co-worker friend gave me a handful of bumper stickers that collectively found a home on my old guitar case.  If pressed, my favorite one sports the lyrics, Who Would Jesus Bomb?  However, Sorry I haven’t been to church lately, but I’ve been busy practicing Witchcraft and becoming a Lesbian, arrives in a distant second.  And then I thought of the powerful You Tube video that responds to the Trayvon Martin tragedy in a way that left a roomful of Sweathogs speechless in class the other day.  In fact, one of The Sweathogs poignantly commented that before I showed the video, my student thought the story about Trayvon was something straight out of the 1900s.  I’m so proud of Horshack for connecting the dots of American History X, as revealed on an episode of PBS’s Liberty’s Kids that we featured during one of our Social Studies classes.  And then I think of Starbuck’s taking a stand against bigotry against folks whom are sexually oriented differently than I–though many so-called followers of Christianity and “Disciples of Christ” seem threatened by Starbuck’s desire to pour coffee equally to everyone, regardless of their sexuality.  I don’t know why, but perhaps having choices like drinking Our coffee black, with cream and/or sugar leaves a bad taste in their mouth? 

“Eagle . . . Fly high, touch Great Spirit.  Share your medicine, touch me, honor me, so that I may know you too.”  Feathering Our ripple with Eagle’s spirited guidance teaches Us how to balance Our co-creative connection to Heaven and Earth so that We may know balance by walking with “one foot in spirit, one foot in ground”, as Abenaki storyteller, poet and novelist Joseph Bruchac muses in his classic Native American book Dawn Land.  Similarly, Bruce Springsteen recently reminded Us in his keynote speech at South by Southwest, that Our tensions of opposites relax as We become more effective in holding two seemingly contradictory views in Our psyches at the same time.  Perhaps my own Nervous Woodland Creature energy might have been driven less nuts back in elementary school while singing the apparently contradictory folk lyrics, “it rained all night, the day I left, the weather it was dry . . . the sun’s so hot, I froze to death, Susanna don’t you cry.”  In the spirit of that, one of the reasons I stick to my daily meditation puree is because it allows me to gently watch two seemingly polar opposite ideas pass through my field of awareness with compassion, while releasing judgments that May Spring up.  In saying “peace out” to budding judgments, We say “what up, G” to giving inner peace a chance by transmuting internal conflict into Love and Light.  And it can’t hurt to remember Brother Buffett’s Infinite wisdom that jests “if we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane.”  Isn’t the definition of insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results in the process?  I don’t know about You, but I’d rather take a step into the realm of Infinity than stay stuck in quicksand of insanity!

During this forthcoming week, please consider allowing Eagle to fly into Your life in a way that teaches you how to view Your current situation from a perspective that includes all directions.  Given its strong talons, Eagle has the potential to help You stay grounded and remember that with great power, comes great responsibility.  From a karmic perspective, Eagle helps Us understand that Our actions have consequences that will arrive more instantly if We choose to invoke Eagle’s power.  Please be mindful of what you think, do and/or say and what you do not think, do and/or say.  Also, meditation on the figure 8 sign of Infinity, the water element and paying attention to Life’s opportunities will help get your creative juices flowing like an eternal spring, within the depths of You soul.  And gaze onto Your fears with chimes free of repression, suppression and/or going Straight Outta Woodland, Ma’ Chucka.

Stay True,

Ari