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www.shamansociety.org 29 On one particularly long escape into the woods with the moon rising over the trees I had a waking dream. I had to sit down on the moss as a flow of energy an encounter took me through the familiar images of the marketplace the book- stores the old books and then finally I find the one I have been looking for all these years. This time I open the book and the pages are blank But I wait I drift and then I hear three words. Bard. Shaman. Harp. When they are spoken they appear written on the pages. And the waking dream is done. The three words were new and strange to me. There was only the vaguest sense of shaman having something to do with other cultures. I had only heard the word bard in relation to Shakespeare. And why the harp Over the years I had experimented with background music during medita- tion. It held little appeal until a friend gave me a cassette of Celtic music. I had never heard anything like it. Skirling pipes soaring strings and underneath it all there was something. Was it a guitar A mandolin Some kind of synthesizer I checked the liner notes. A harp. I had been caught by the ear enchanted. It became a staple in my meditations. I once heard a harp live in concert when I was 25. I remember sitting in the audience moved to tears. I knew I loved that sound A Flood of Change The Harp After the experience in the moun- tains there came a flood of change. I transferred to a new school a new home assisted someone else in taking over the meditation center and decided to buy a harp. I phoned every music store in Calgary but none sold harps. I discov- ered that it was possible to purchase a harp at a distance via the internet. And so I ordered one. It felt like an insane thing to do. In the six months it took for the harp to be built I read everything I could on shamanic traditions. I marveled that there was such a thing as Celtic shamanism. Though I maintained my meditation practice I began journeying like a fiend. When I received news that the harp had finally arrived at the Calgary airport I was at school. My principal knew how much this meant to me and offered to cover my class so I could go to the airport and pick it up. I recall how ferociously the wind blew a proper spring gale for western Canada as baggage handlers wheeled an enormous box out to my jeep in the parking lot. I wrestled for a good twenty minutes in vain to fit the box into the jeep. Hands numb I resorted to tearing open the packing with my car keys. The burly fellows in shipping and receiving watched with amusement through the windows as the wind literally tore the packaging off the instrument cartwheel- ing the huge cardboard box across the parking lot. So my first look at the instrument I had long felt drawn to was in a spring blizzard just after sunset out at the Cal- gary industrial airport. It was love at first sight and I have never looked back. Becoming a Harper I began with no musical skills. I had never before known such a feeling of ac- complishment as that which came from learning how to release the music that lives in the stilled strings. I understood this to be a shamanic adventure but at the time I had no interest in becoming a performer of any sort. It soon became clear that the spirits had other ideas. Two months after the harp arrived I could barely play a note. Even though my artistic skills were slight unexpected invi- tations to play began to appear a book launch for a friend a restaurant owned by an acquaintance soon a local book- store. At each my spirit allies nudged me past my doubts and off I went with the harp. I hauled the harp into the classroom every day and experimented with telling part of a story to the music of the harp. From there I began to be invited to tell stories at conferences and professional gatherings. I worked with great disci- pline and practiced my heart out but it wasnt the slow development of skill that kept me going. It was the inexplicable moments of simply sitting at the harp with the spirits letting my fingers move on the strings letting discoveries unfold. Letting the veil grow thin. Letting the enchantment grow strong. Within two years I had taken all of the basic workshops in shamanic healing had gone on a vision quest and had no more doubts about this being the way forward in my life. Life became a process of the most unlikely new doorways. I was now liv- ing an hour outside Calgary in a fairly isolated spot in the forested foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was out in the woods that the power of song came through in full force. I recall being moved when I read au- thor Bruce Chatwin put forth his experi- ences and interpretations of Aborginal Songlines. His notion after spending time in conversation and travel with Indigenous Australians was that the to- temic ancestors left more than footprints behind them. Through song and spoken word they created trails of Dreaming across the world as they traveled. There is beauty in the notion that even though we may be physically separated from one another there are trails of Song and wisdom across the land connecting us. There is beauty in settling into the idea that the land itself sings and that together we sing each other into being. This was my experience of walking daily in the deep woods in the song of the river and the winds.