Osprey & Lyre Bird
Osprey = Sea Eagle.
Yes the Eagle, charismatic predator. Have I ever confessed this before, but that I am incredibly superstitious?
Seems crazy I know for somebody most sympathetic to deterministic, rational, materialist, anarchist view of the u.n.i.v.e.r.e, but yes, it's true! like most explosive athletes, I am highly superstitious.
And I've been feeling predatory for the last I dunno 6-8 months? Like I've had my teeth back the fuck in, and I remember an interview with Earthworm Jim designer guy talking about how he had one level where Jim is out of his suit and a really helpless worm character having to just avoid obstacles. Then you get your suit and machine gun back, and how in testing players go ballistic with the machine gun.
Like that.
You know, just like the good old days for me, in Ballafornia where I played 'who defers to who' on the footpath. I only had to defer to one Senor Ash Coates whom due to superior genetics and attending a school with more liberal rules regarding facial hair, had a full beard. But man when two adolescent kids pass each other on the footpath of Ballifornia's 'street' it was an exhilarating game of chicken every fucking time.
But anyway, I've had a bunch of important revelations, sort of thematically clustered, and that generally is good enough for my mind I don't need a coherent concise theory of everything.
The first came via Enneagraph, a personality test a friend posted to facebook, where I discovered I was 'Type 8' - Aggressive. It also described me as 'healthy' and this kind of fucking reaffirmed Gabor Mate's 'When the body says no' type message.
And then you know, I read a lot of One Piece, and Monkey D Luffy is you know just the latest most popular reincarnation of a very enduring archetype. And shit like One Piece is kind of a relic, in terms of being the same story as when I was a kid, and going back to the fairytales and shit of brothers grim.
What I mean by that, is that I realised Luffy actually helps people, saves the day, by fighting.
Here's the distilled thought all this lead me to: "I can't save you, you need to save yourself, but I can help you. I can blow everything up, so you have to save yourself."
Much in the same way, that it took me so long to overcome my existential crisis by realising that I'd known what to do with my life when I was but a child, I had realised that the conflict I introduced had had an intuitive sense to it, an intuitive altruism all along.
Aggression without anger, Phil Jackson called it. Just as predators can play a vital role in keeping eco systems healthy, so too does conflict play a role in keeping our society healthy.
Take a short walk from there to this video:
Being assertive, and aggressive is all well and good, but life is not binary, there's a food chain of aggression, and while it may feel pretty good to be a wolf among sheep, or a fox among hens, life needs it's Golden Eagles hunting the wolves and foxes of the Mongolian steppes. And just so, while the Golden Eagle may be king predator their, it's jumping off the wrist of a Hunter, the king predator of all. Yes, it is the hunter that takes the lions share of the presumably delicious wolf meat.
The comic vagabond, might refer to this food chain, as the spiral of death and killing. But the point largely is, that by being aggressive one doesn't necessarily prey upon the weak, but can with training and practice prey upon the predators.
And I guess also, to identify with the poor poor wolves, if I or anybody get too preoccupied with being a predator, and beating up on the weak, chances are we can forget our places, or more importantly our potential to be in the middle of a predator-prey continuum.
It was the remembering of this video, and it's many portents, auspices and ill omens that had me pause for thought about the predator I was spreading my glorious wings.
Then I went on holiday. I badly wanted to see a sea eagle, to observe it's majesty, sea eagles hunt the much more realistic prey of fish and eels. One year there was this massive old eel on it's deathbed stranded in the sandy shallows of the river of my soul and this Sea Eagle was hanging around watching and waiting for it's chance to grab a huge meal.
And the sea eagle this time round was sighted, it in fact dropped one of it's catches onto the bonnet of the ranger's car, to retrieve it's now dead kill. But it was not sighted by me. It alluded me.
But on the last day, around dusk, I was walking my meditative trail, and I came across a lyre bird. Here, here was my spirit animal. That bird the indigenous rated as 'the most beautiful bird in creation' a mimic, a chameleon of sound.
And I realised, in this place of snakes and lace monitors and eagles and insects and all manner of predators, this lyre bird survives. And is beautiful. And that more than their courage and aggression, these freedom fighters, these Luffy's and Musashi Miyamoto's and Phil Jackson, and Golden Eagles... they are beautiful. They are beautiful at heart and that is a common thread.
A thread I need to keep hold of.
Yes the Eagle, charismatic predator. Have I ever confessed this before, but that I am incredibly superstitious?
Seems crazy I know for somebody most sympathetic to deterministic, rational, materialist, anarchist view of the u.n.i.v.e.r.e, but yes, it's true! like most explosive athletes, I am highly superstitious.
And I've been feeling predatory for the last I dunno 6-8 months? Like I've had my teeth back the fuck in, and I remember an interview with Earthworm Jim designer guy talking about how he had one level where Jim is out of his suit and a really helpless worm character having to just avoid obstacles. Then you get your suit and machine gun back, and how in testing players go ballistic with the machine gun.
Like that.
You know, just like the good old days for me, in Ballafornia where I played 'who defers to who' on the footpath. I only had to defer to one Senor Ash Coates whom due to superior genetics and attending a school with more liberal rules regarding facial hair, had a full beard. But man when two adolescent kids pass each other on the footpath of Ballifornia's 'street' it was an exhilarating game of chicken every fucking time.
But anyway, I've had a bunch of important revelations, sort of thematically clustered, and that generally is good enough for my mind I don't need a coherent concise theory of everything.
The first came via Enneagraph, a personality test a friend posted to facebook, where I discovered I was 'Type 8' - Aggressive. It also described me as 'healthy' and this kind of fucking reaffirmed Gabor Mate's 'When the body says no' type message.
And then you know, I read a lot of One Piece, and Monkey D Luffy is you know just the latest most popular reincarnation of a very enduring archetype. And shit like One Piece is kind of a relic, in terms of being the same story as when I was a kid, and going back to the fairytales and shit of brothers grim.
What I mean by that, is that I realised Luffy actually helps people, saves the day, by fighting.
Here's the distilled thought all this lead me to: "I can't save you, you need to save yourself, but I can help you. I can blow everything up, so you have to save yourself."
Much in the same way, that it took me so long to overcome my existential crisis by realising that I'd known what to do with my life when I was but a child, I had realised that the conflict I introduced had had an intuitive sense to it, an intuitive altruism all along.
Aggression without anger, Phil Jackson called it. Just as predators can play a vital role in keeping eco systems healthy, so too does conflict play a role in keeping our society healthy.
Take a short walk from there to this video:
Being assertive, and aggressive is all well and good, but life is not binary, there's a food chain of aggression, and while it may feel pretty good to be a wolf among sheep, or a fox among hens, life needs it's Golden Eagles hunting the wolves and foxes of the Mongolian steppes. And just so, while the Golden Eagle may be king predator their, it's jumping off the wrist of a Hunter, the king predator of all. Yes, it is the hunter that takes the lions share of the presumably delicious wolf meat.
The comic vagabond, might refer to this food chain, as the spiral of death and killing. But the point largely is, that by being aggressive one doesn't necessarily prey upon the weak, but can with training and practice prey upon the predators.
And I guess also, to identify with the poor poor wolves, if I or anybody get too preoccupied with being a predator, and beating up on the weak, chances are we can forget our places, or more importantly our potential to be in the middle of a predator-prey continuum.
It was the remembering of this video, and it's many portents, auspices and ill omens that had me pause for thought about the predator I was spreading my glorious wings.
Then I went on holiday. I badly wanted to see a sea eagle, to observe it's majesty, sea eagles hunt the much more realistic prey of fish and eels. One year there was this massive old eel on it's deathbed stranded in the sandy shallows of the river of my soul and this Sea Eagle was hanging around watching and waiting for it's chance to grab a huge meal.
And the sea eagle this time round was sighted, it in fact dropped one of it's catches onto the bonnet of the ranger's car, to retrieve it's now dead kill. But it was not sighted by me. It alluded me.
But on the last day, around dusk, I was walking my meditative trail, and I came across a lyre bird. Here, here was my spirit animal. That bird the indigenous rated as 'the most beautiful bird in creation' a mimic, a chameleon of sound.
And I realised, in this place of snakes and lace monitors and eagles and insects and all manner of predators, this lyre bird survives. And is beautiful. And that more than their courage and aggression, these freedom fighters, these Luffy's and Musashi Miyamoto's and Phil Jackson, and Golden Eagles... they are beautiful. They are beautiful at heart and that is a common thread.
A thread I need to keep hold of.
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