the phagos blog

I’ve been working on my Riverbanks project for three and a half months now, and one of the common threads during my visits have been the presence of geese on the river. I know now that geese are year round residents here, but I wanted to examine their metaphysical symbolism for a few minutes.

According to Ted Andrews’ book Animal Speak, geese represent spiritual journeys. For a while I thought I was on a spiritual journey in undertaking this Riverbanks project, and I was fairly convinced of that two weekends back when I saw a couple flocks of geese flying overhead on their way north. A great omen, I thought for a while, until I really thought hard about it.

Our entire lives are a spiritual journey.  They’re a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual journey.  Everything we do has these four components in it.  Obviously some things are oriented specifically towards one or more of these aspects, but all four of them are included regardless of the activity.  Everything is physical, because time as we understand it is a physical phenomenon.  If you age, time is physical.  Everything is mental, because our minds construct and filter our reality, and some activities are concerned with the cessation or alteration of our perceptions.  Everything is emotional, because humans are emotional - we have feelings, the result of our thoughts about the world and events around us.  And everything is spiritual, because we are beings of spirit, not just matter.

When we identify activities as being a subset of those four, we are doing ourselves a disservice.  We may be focusing on a subset, but really we’re just emphasizing that subset while experiencing the others at a lower level.  By categorizing them, we are making unnecessary distinctions that hinder our growth and inhibit our potential, rather than aid it, as any activity has the potential to aid us in all four areas if we are open to the experience.

Honestly, I never thought I’d learn so much from the presence of a bird.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 8:05 pm and is filed under life, pagan subjects, nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.