Through A Shaman's Eyes
Frozen
by Jeffrey Pierce

It's winter here in the Pacific Northwest. We don't tend to get a lot of snow where I live, but we do get a lot of rain. While most people readily associate rain with my native Oregon, what isn't thought about is that is that rain tends to freeze whenever the temperatures drop. Waking up to a sheet of ice covering the car's windows and finding its doors frozen shut is a pretty normal event here in the middle of winter even if there isn't any snow on the ground.

When I went out to warm up the car a couple of days ago, after managing to get the door open, this is what the front windshield looked like as seen from the driver's seat.

Ice frozen on my car's windshield (December 30, 2010)

So often we get "stuck" on our paths and in our growth, much like the water frozen to the windshield of my car. In those moments, we typically become frustrated or get down on ourselves for not being more "liquid" and being able to flow through our lessons. Being locked in place when we want to move is generally not a happy place to be for any of us - much like finding your car encased in ice.

Sometimes, knowing that everything is "alive" isn't a process of finding it's spirit, but simply a process of honoring its existence.

The ice wasn't what I hoped to find in my morning. Countless times I've simply pried open the car and turned it on to warm up while I scraped the windows. Energetically, we regularly do the same thing on our paths. When confronted with a challenge, our first response isn't to honor it but to overcome that obstacle. It makes me wonder how many times we miss the beauty of our flow being "frozen." We are beautiful. We don't have to be constantly moving forward or always achieving this or that to have value.

Our value is not found in what we do or accomplish, but in who we are as unique expressions of Spirit. Crow, one of my core totem animals, looks at the situation with one eye (seeing the physical world) then cocks his head and looks at it with the other eye (seeing the spirit realm) and finds the balance between the two. We could learn a lot from Crow's example rather than taking our standard approach of sizing up the situation with one eye and plowing straight ahead.

The secret held in all of this? It doesn't matter whether I turned on the car's defrost or scraped the windows, the ice would melt on its own. If you'll notice in the photo, starting in the lower left corner and moving toward the upper right, the illumination moves from darkness to light. The sun had risen and would soon melt the ice on its own. Too often we approach a situation as if its outcome is completely up to us. We forget that if everything is alive, as shaman's believe, then we never face any challenge alone.

Often the challenge is ours to overcome. After all, it is our own unique path that we walk. However, sometimes it's a matter of stopping and simply honoring the situation that we're frozen in. As strange as it may sound, there's a part of me that wishes I would have gone back in the house and come out with a mug of something warm, that I would have sat in the car and watched the ice slowly melt and transform before my eyes. It would have been a beautiful experience - much like facing a challenge without answers and allowing Spirit to work without our touch until a door appears for us to walk through.

Thoughts? Comments? You can contact us at connect@oldways.com or interact with Jeffrey, Briana, and the Old Ways community on our Facebook page.

Originally published in Old Ways on January 1, 2011