Kindling the Native Spirit: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life - Denise Linn 2015
How to Call
The Call: Remembering Who You Are
Not only can you answer the call, but also you can “put out a call.” Indigenous people developed the skill of calling animals to them as a necessity for survival. They spoke with the elk, deer, and buffalo spirits, asking for guidance in regard to the hunt. There was reverence involved in any taking of life, as it was believed that the spirit of the animal sacrificed itself to provide sustenance for the tribe and should be honored for its gift. There was also calling to find berries or roots, or calling rain when crops were dry. One could call for bravery during battle, or call for strength during childbirth. The ability to “call” leads to a deepening of your connection with the earth’s cycles. Even those who are certain that they can’t master the technique are able to do so with practice.
Learning to call helps you connect to the unseen realms of natural surroundings. You can call animals, plants, weather, opportunities, and even personal qualities. Here’s a little-known secret: if you want to call something into your life, find its sound and imagine the tone deep within you. Every part of our splendid universe has a sound. Every blade of grass, every stone, and every star has its own tonal vibration. Even qualities like integrity, truth, and love have specific sound vibrations. When you discover the tone of something you desire, you can draw it to you by allowing its sound to expand inside of you. This is how some native tribes did their hunting and gathering. For example, they imagined the sound of a particular plant or animal and allowed that sound to hum inside of them; this would lead them to the healing herb or game.
You also have an individual sound that resides in your core. When you find your personal sound vibration, you can harmonize with the universe. To learn how to find the sound of things takes practice. For example, when you’re calling animals, you can tell when you got the right sound because the animal will appear. Here are the steps to learn to call:
1. Believe: Believe that it is possible.
2. Imagine: Imagine the sound of the animal, plant, or quality that you desire. I’m not necessarily talking about a tone you make through your voice; this is an internal sound that vibrates within you. (Ask yourself, If I knew what the sound was, what might it be?)
3. Dissolve: Dissolve into the sound. By doing this, you become one with whatever you are calling. Each animal and plant has its own inner frequency or vibration, so imagine what the sound is and imagine that you’re making the sound. This is the “call.” Don’t doubt yourself or your ability to do this. (Doubt is the greatest barrier to success with this technique.) You can also practice the call just before sleep. Call for a particular animal to come in your dreams, and then listen carefully to the message given in each dream.
4. Practice: Be patient and practice often. My calling has sometimes backfired. Once, when I noticed a swarm of bees in the neighborhood, I impulsively decided it would be wonderful if the bees could hive in our backyard so that my daughter could watch them through the window. I’d never attempted to call anything in the insect world, but I imagined it wouldn’t be that different from calling a plant or an animal.
First I tried to find the vibration, tone, or resonating quality of the bee kingdom. Once I had a sense of the tone, I repeated it mentally. I sent out the call and waited . . . nothing happened. About an hour later, I heard my daughter screaming. I ran outside and was greeted by a huge swarm of wasps that were settling in to make our backyard their new home. The bees didn’t appear, but wasps did, so I imagine that my tone was off by an octave or so and the wasps came instead.
Please be patient, and remember that learning to call takes practice. Start with calling animals, as this way you can tell if you got the right sound or not. Always give thanks to the animals that appear, and when you’re calling, be sure to add the intention that it’s in the highest good of all. You could start by going into a park and calling a squirrel or a crow and see what happens. Once you find that you are gaining success with animals, you can go on to other things or qualities.
To activate the native spirit within you, the first step is to honor, acknowledge, and realize the depth of your connection to the natural world. As Black Elk said:
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka [Creator], and that this center is really everywhere, it’s within each of us [The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953), as told to Joseph Epes Brown].
Let nature and her cycles become your teacher and your healer. The awareness that you’re not separate from the seasons, the ebbing and flowing of light and dark, or the elements and the directions of nature will begin to awaken within you echoes of ancient memories of who you are and what your true destiny is. It’s an act of power to begin this journey.