I finally got some pictures back from my first wedding, and I thought I’d share them with you.  SuperCore got married a few weeks ago and he asked me to perform the ceremony.  I hadn’t done anything like that in a while– not much call for a shaman these days.  I really like SuperCore’s taste– I would never have thought of it:  shaman and a bagpiper.  That’s my son, Angus, playing the pipes.

Perhaps the  first thing that got people weirded out was at the beginning of the ceremony, when I called out, “Bring forth the virgins with the Iron Mushroom!”   I got two little girls to carry in this rather heavy iron mushroom-shaped thing.   Shamanism is a lot like that.  It’s a lot like the iron mushroom.  For one thing, and I mentioned this in the ceremony, this thing was left on my doorstep a good 5 years before I decided to call myself a shaman.  It was not from anyone I knew either.  Somebody, some total stranger, just felt I needed this big iron thing and left it at my door.  I used it for a doorstop for years, until I finally realized that the mushroom had acquired a whole mystique all its own.  My friends spoke reverently about it as though it was a sacred object– what the hey!  Shamanism is like that.  You find something that seems to be more important than the normal background radiation of boredom and pain and you go with it and see where it leads.

For those of you who find it makes a difference, the ceremony was pretty much a short-form Methodist ceremony.  I am a good Methodist boy at heart and a good Christian.  I’m sure folks might of thought otherwise, but  as KYHillChick likes to say:  “Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”  That was me.

SuperCore and his bride both had a blast.  The best man got to play bongos at one point– he was cool with it.  The maid of honor?  She showed signs of obvious distress. The one relative whose husband is a minister left the proceedings early on and did not return.

Someone came up to me and asked if it was all legal.  I replied that it all depended on what we did with the virgins after the ceremony.

Why the hunter orange?  Well,  this was deer season, and in Kentucky you need to wear hunter orange, at least a vest and hat during hunting season.  I just wanted to make sure I was doing everything legal.

Another onlooker came up in obvious deep thought.  She’d gotten “all of it, except the part with the feathers.”  That’s funny.  I’ve been doing this sort of thing for 30 years or more, and I still haven’t gotten it.  What she was referring to was the part of the ceremony where I first apologized for the next bit and then proceeded to walk around the couple four times, once with a lit candle, once with a canteen of water sprinkling a little here and there. I went ’round with my rattle and then a turkey wing, fanning the couple as I went.    This person had gotten it all, except the last time around with the turkey wing.

“Oh, that’s easy.” I replied.  “It gets hot up there.  I was cooling them off.”

I will leave you with one of the readings I gave.  It is from the Hua Hu Ching, one of the lesser Toaist texts.  Taken as a koan, it is the perfect advice for a married couple:

It is like a monkey catapulting through the jungle
Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses,
it swings from one desire to the next,
one conflict to the next,
one self-centered idea to the next.

If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life

Let this monkey go.
Let the senses go.
Let desires go.
Let ideas go.
Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the center, watching.

And then forget that you are there.

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