The next painting in Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality is one of my favorite’s of Joseph Rael’s works – “Of Many Many Windows in the Dream Time of Mother Earth.” A detail view of this artwork was also published in our essay in Kosmos Journal for Global Transformation entitled “Becoming Medicine: When There is no Treatment, You are the Medicine.” Take a look at the article through the link, here is the first paragraph:

We are living in disruptive times, yet there have been other times as equally disruptive. People lived through pandemics, plagues, pestilence, famines, natural disasters, slavery, genocide, oppression, and wars upon wars. How did they do it? I believe there is a secret well of resilience and wisdom within the human being—located in the heart—where we find our medicine.

This painting reminds me of a passage I write about in the book where a deer bedded down for the night right outside my tent when I was backpacking on the way to Black Elk Peak in South Dakota. Here is what Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) says about the Deer:

Deer means peh ney. Peh means straight forward. Ney means a space in front of, before creation was made. What this is saying is that if we as a people are going to have peace, we have to go to that space beyond, before creation where Peace was. I did the Deer Dance when I was younger and I think that added to my medicine. That is an important point. The last time we were working a book, my father came in a vision and gave me permission to go forward. Now with this work with the deer medicine, the earlier dances are supporting us to go forward. True Peace is that space before there was anything that could create un-peace. (Joseph Rael, p. 298)

The next artwork in the book is also by Joseph, another great one, “Puma Giver of th Visionary Life to the People of Mother Earth.” These paintings are in chapter 11, “Initiation,” and we speak of the relationship between animals and humans and animals as guides.

“I felt like something was pulling me toward the stream and I went down there and I just washed myself, blessed myself with the water, but I knew that this place belonged to me and I was turning around and I saw at least five or six puma tracks, lion tracks and some had crossed the river, right where I was drinking water and maybe that was the vibration that was I picking up of the lions and I didn’t know that I was going to have a relationship with them.”

“Picuris Pueblo seemed so far away then, because now I was in Colorado and so I noticed that right there at the river, you remember where we did the visionquest that night with the tree spirits? Right there. There were tracks coming from the other side but they were going the other direction and so there were like two separate little pathways. It was an east-west crossing of the river and I had just drank from the energy of the tracks that were the lion’s. So somehow that seemed like a different vibration, but I saw the cat tracks. I wanted to know where are these lions from, so later I went to the top of the hill and I saw that if you go far enough in that direction, you will get to the mountains where the lions were that I had left a deer for. So here I got the sense that I was dealing with a family of lions, not lions in general, but the Puma; there was a family.” (Joseph Rael, p. 292-294)