Early morning: Coyote, Raven

5:00 A.M, jerked awake. Overwhelming urge to get up, right now!, and walk north two miles to the Warm Springs from Kelly Wyoming where I'm staying in a yurt. Surprised. Not only do I not feel any trace of the sore throat and lethargy that threatened to undo me yesterday, I am bursting with energy.

Quickly dress, start walking, an eye out for bison which have proliferated this year like rabbits. First light, yes. As in years past while on this eary walk, I will get to see dawn's rosy hue brush the top of the Grand Teton and move on down to the valley floor way before the Sun itself rises over the eastern hills.

Winding my way on a horse-path through three-feet high sagebrush, picking sage leaves and rubbing them in my fingers, bringing up to my nose, inhaling, swooning with intoxication, just like when it rains. When will it rain? the dry underbrush crackles, crunches underfoot. Reminded of how, as a kid growing up on the Idaho sagebrush desert, each rare hard rain's release of sage aroma would throw me into this same swoon.

Somehow, that brief brush with infection yesterday, countered with a well-timed acupuncture appointment in Jackson with Carol (I had been prescient enough to schedule it in advance, knowing I would probably need a tune-up, given the switch into high, dry climate) grounded me here, landed me back into the magic of this place.

Kelly Warm Springs: site of countless inner journeys over the years, sitting on its banks watching both white mist hover over winter-cooled water and the soft clumps of summer's algae green. That day, for example, in 1991, when I sat there perplexed after two years of doing the magazine Crone Chronicles, wondering whether to continue. I asked Raven sitting on a post nearby for a sign; then crestfallen when he immediately flew off in the other direction. The very next day, on another walk, Raven swooshed over my head with inches to spare from behind, then turned, and flew back, again low, directly over my head, giving me the precise signal I needed to go on. (The magazine had begun in response to a dream in which Raven was clawing into my shoulders from behind, cawing, "WAKE UP! WAKE UP! IT'S TIME! IT'S TIME!", and I KNEW that this symbol, for me, was that of the Crone.)

This morning I climb the little hill directly north of the springs and just as I arrive on top, Coyote streaks out from under a bush and runs down the hill, not thirty feet from me. In all my 18 years in Jackson, I never encountered Coyote at such close range, and so of course, take it as a sign.

On way back, there sits Raven, on a downed post. He lets me walk up to within ten feet of him, and we stand together and watch the sun gleam then burst across the top of the eastern hills.

Last night's event had a bit of Trickster Coyote energy, interesting, and moving at times, however with a distinct disjointed feeling. From the beginning I've known that in order to do this trip I need to release all expectations and move into the present moment. As these book events unfold, three so far, I find myself comparing the relative lightness of the second two to the terrific intensity of the first. "Comparing" has to do with expectations. Reminds of me of "compare and contrast" essay questions in tests throughout my school years, including comprehensive exams for the Ph.D. I've been so long conditioned that expectations- based-upon-analysis feels natural. But does Coyote or Raven compare and contrast, judge, see right and wrong, good, better, best?