The Wildness Within

Winter Wildness

January 8, 2010 on 3:28 pm | In General | No Comments

The second big winter storm of the season hit the ranch this week, another example of the Wild Core of Nature. I love the feeling of vulnerability that i get from this reminder of the creators presence.

That feeling was compounded when i ventured out to go to the barn and found myself stopped in my tracks by deep snowdrifts and strong winds. What normally was a sort trip to the barn became like a journey to the South Pole through snow caves and crevasses. I thought of how it was in the early days of the first settlers of these Great Plains when they would be trapped and isolated by all this white stuff.

Well i am off to experience that deep spiritual passion within the natural world. Now where are those snowshoes and my facemask ?

WinterWildness Jimj’10

The Perfect Storm

December 29, 2009 on 1:38 am | In General | No Comments

It arrived and the news media was right

its an old-fashioned blizzard

Wildness with high winds and blowing snow

temps to freeze your eyelids

Magnificent in Beauty and intensity

everything closes, its the perfect storm

everything and everyone stops and remembers whos in charge here

W I L D N E S S

Caspers Ranch December JimJ09

Winter Wildness

December 29, 2009 on 1:13 am | In General | No Comments

The perfect storm is just beginning - with much anticipation - the news media has been sending out warnings for days now,

i love storms - the ultimate in Wildness - the Creator showing his/her stuff. We have been busy all day getting the animals ready for what they say will be a historic storm ! We have to stock all the feeders full of a few days supply of hay and bring all the cows and the sheep into the corrals. if we don’t they will lay down out in the pasture and get covered up by the snow and we wouldn’t find them til spring.

A painting by Charles Hargens a native South Dakotan and great American Illustrator

Solstice Wildness

December 29, 2009 on 1:02 am | In General | No Comments

The Sun Standing Still JimJ09

On December 21 st at 11:47 am (central time) the Winter Solstice occurred,

The High Holiday of the Old World.

I hope everyone made it through the longest night of the year.

And heres a solstice message from one of my Irish brothers Michael Meade:

Solstice means “sun standing still;” the sun stopping amidst the growing darkness and against the rapid pulse of relentless time. The sun stops imperceptibly, the way one’s heart can stop at a crucial moment and begin life in a new way. The sun stands still in the tracks of darkness before beginning to grow the days back to light.

All the history of holidays, the songs of “silent night, holy night,” the pleas for peace on earth as well as the instinct to celebrate in the face of winter refer to the hidden moment when the sun stops just in time, before the darkness becomes too great to recover from. The “holidays” were once the holy days, a time separate from the traps of calendrical time, a time set aside for helping to make things “whole” so that the world could renew and the light return again.

Most ancient cultures imagined that the sun needed conscious help from people in order to avoid being swallowed by the great darkness that nips at the edges of life. So, people fashioned festivals of light in the depths of winter and sang and danced in order to assist the turning of the world. In the ways of instinctive, sympathetic magic everything from a single candle to a huge fire could be offered to assist the return of the light from the far reaches of the dark.

Even now, albeit mostly unwittingly, people wrap houses in displays of light, bring trees inside and decorate them and as if trying to assist Nature to become bright again. Even the repetitious drama of “bowl games” unconsciously reflects a supposed battle between the forces of light and of darkness. The old year can’t die off or the new year offer renewal unless the opposition/correlation between darkness and light be enacted in culture as it replays in nature.

The solstice presents an archetypal condition that reflects an inner capacity to assist in the renewal of life despite and because of the darkness all around us. Even amidst the commercialized exchange of gifts, people enact a secret remembrance of the gift of life which itself is a light burning within each soul. Gift-giving once intended to encourage the inner gifts that each soul brings to the world. For, each soul harbors an “inner sun,” a deep and giving self that is also a “light inside the dark.”

Peace and blessings,
Michael Meade and Mosaic

The Otherness of Wildness

November 14, 2009 on 1:25 am | In General | No Comments

A theme on my path to Wildness is Otherness. By this i mean a conversation with the sacred other, that exotic other appearing as the wind or silence, the sun shining on my face, a frog or a hawk, a blade of grass, an entranced dancer, a mysterious dream image, a poem or a painting. My conversation is not verbal but it is always intimate and a authentic interaction between my conscious self and another being from a world quite distant from our surface lives. The conversation always produces a new perspective. Its like encountering a person from a radically different culture.

Jim J having a conversation with the Sacred Other at a Mandan brothers earth lodge

Photo by MikkiMade

Tamed Wildness

October 24, 2009 on 12:06 am | In General | No Comments

Party Time JimJo9

Its our male standard French poodle Casper’s First Birthday ( the white one ) and our female poodle Sophie came to his party . This is them singing Happy Birthday

Fire Goddess Dance

October 12, 2009 on 1:07 pm | In General | No Comments

BRIGID - Ireland (Celtic): Fire Goddess
Some of Brigid’s titles include ‘Fire of Inspiration’, ‘Fire of the Hearth’ and ‘Fire of the Forge’. Brigid is a complex and contradictory fire goddess, a patroness of a range of practical and inspired wisdom.