When I was trying to figure out what I really was and what was expected, I spent of lot of time studying. Conventional books weren't helpful. And in the mid 1980s, the shaman craze hit.

Shaman became a generic term. It had the cachet of the pop religion, but that wasn't what a shaman was. I read Michael Harner's stuff and a lot of things from his imitators, but that wasn't exactly what I did. Some of the techniques were similar and the results were often so, but I wasn't a shaman in the strictest since. My cultural references were wrong. My totems (for lack of a better term) were different. Occasionally things got downright weird. Especially when I worked with others.

So I was very careful to make the distinction. I wasn't a real shaman, I was a sort of. I finally came up with the term semi-shaman, and I used that for a long time.

It didn't help that what I was doing wasn't necessarily under my conscious control. The knowledge and the techniques often didn't pop up until the exact moment I needed them. And I wasn't the one who decided when I needed.

Let me explain the some of the weirdness. Technically my path is heavily influenced by Celtic design and lore. I also draw from some of the folk traditions of my family. When I met Bear, well, she brought me back to live. Not back to life, but back to live. Bear never really seemed to have any cultural links as such.

Now Coyote, he was different. He did seem to have some links with the American Southwest, but what he delighted in was breaking out of the rulesets. Except when there were no visible rules, that's when he would help make them. All I knew for sure was that when Coyote laughed, things were going to change.

For about three or four years, I worked occasionally with a hand trembler. Fascinating path, and we got to be dear friends, even if we didn't see each other as often as we might have. In the end when he grew very sick and died, part of his death gift to me was a friendship with Raven.

So here I am. Bear, that fits sort of with Celtic roots. Coyote, well, I thought that was probably because of my physical location and maybe because of where I was born. I saw Raven for a long time before it spoke to me (I still don't know if Raven is a he or she or something else). I expected Raven to be tied to the Diné.

Raven started reciting epic poetry. Epic Norse poetry, although never any recorded in human books that I could find.

I don't think it's an accident that two of my allies are known for their trickster qualities. Certainly the Trickster archetype has grown to play a bigger and bigger part in my own life and personality.

I don't converse with my "totems" like I used to. I think it's because I was using them too much to avoid this world and they decided to fix it. That's made me stronger too. I still feel them sometimes, lurking in my mind. I really don't know if they are aspects of myself or manifestations of something other. I choose to believe the later, although sometimes I have my doubts.

There are still parts of the relationship that scare me because I don't understand it fully and it doesn't happen on my terms. But it's mostly good.

Sort of.