8) Shape Shifting Shamanic Journey: (or cigarette smoking crow, blue barrel, truck, mountains and telephone wire?)

The next morning was hot and silent. I strolled around the ethereal motel grounds, and spotted this cigarette smoking crow. The blue rain barrel, the crow, the red desert, the silence and dry heat, plus my lack of a proper breakfast_all combined to form an hallucinogenic experience, or did it?

On her journey, the shaman undergoes a transformation that involves the experience of her own death. She may visit totem animals who either help her to heal herself or somebody else, or benefit her community in some way. She may even merge with one of these power animals. The experience is one of actually becoming the power animal and is sometimes referred to as shape shifting. Carlos Castaneda describes the sensation of becoming a crow after ingesting a powerful mixture containing mushrooms in his book Teachings of Don Juan.

“I had the perception of growing bird’s legs, which were weak and wobbly at first. I felt a tail coming out of the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones. The wings were folded deeply. I felt them coming out by degrees. The process was hard but not painful. Then I winked my head down to the size of a crow. But the most astonishing effect was accomplished with my eyes. My bird’s sight!.…Don Juan…’tossed me into the air’… I ‘extended my wings and flew.”

The power of shape shifting along with the experience of one’s own death and resurrection are two key aspects of the classic shamanic experience.

I so much wanted to stop and eat at this restaurant. Someone took the time to lovingly paint an American Flag bench in the middle of the desert. Mitch felt we should get a good 4 hours of driving in before the mid-day heat set in, so we didn’t stop. I was disappointed. Only one chance in a lifetime to experience eating here, and it was gone.