Perhaps the most important ingredient in cooking the shamanic into my work as a potter is my ability to surrender my personal desire to spirits direction. After completing the first seven Tobacco Spirit pots I knew the eighth would be my last. I did not want to quit. I wanted to continue. But Spirit was quite clear, it was time to prepare for my final pit firing of the season and move on into spring with the rest of nature.
I once put together a small collection of poems titled: Twenty Seven Poems: Shamanic in Nature. I thought this was really funny. It was a kind of playfulness in words. You see there is no other way to be shamanic. To be shamanic is to be ones true self in oneness with the rest of nature. I am an animal, first. I am a daughter of the Tree nation, literally. Grand Mother Moon rules over my life as absolutely as she does my sister the Owl’s. I am not a human being in the regular sense of the word. And so, in harmony with the spirit and nature of who I truly am I finished up my winters work.
Friday evening I began my springtime communion with the Snake Spirit, as requested by the Snake Spirit. Saturday morning I completed my second Snake medicine bowl. Later that day Moon Doggie sounded the alarm! I spent the next hour and a half bearing witness to the springtime mating ritual of two stunningly beautiful young rattlesnakes. They danced their sensuousness under the rare delight of a cloudy, cool, post spring equinox, post full moon ritual of conception: they danced. Twining and retwining, weaving themselves in and out of the mesquite fence, reaching for the sky. Falling four feet to the earth in their ecstatic primal love, they began again, entwining untwining, entwining again and again as they reach for the sky.
Some might suggest that I called them in, in to within eight feet of my house, to bless and be apart of my own ceremony in clay. But perhaps it is closer to the truth to understand that it was they who called me in to their ritual. Spirit and nature demand my participation. I am theirs, not yours. I have given my life into this thing. This love. My love of the clay is my love of Mother Earth given voice in form: a voice that sings in ecstasy. I am putting together a collection of pots, perhaps I shall call it: Twenty Seven Pots: Shamanic in Nature. More and more as I mature I live the knowing in the being.

Shar Shk Buk X
3-31-13

P.S. Are they mating or is this actually two males in competition for the attentions of a lovely female watching from near by?