#it used to be the largest free dictionary of animal 'totems' on the internet

[not-poignant]

There's an essay on lithub by an author who had an octopus talking to her in her head as she wrote a novel about him, and I thought you might enjoy it. Shades of stupidhead. It's called lessons learned from a year listening to the fictional octopus in my head

Hi anon!

I've been sent the link to this a few times already (a lot of people know I love cephalopods, and that I do work with spiritual and non spiritual animal teachers - I literally run and write this website about animal meanings and animal teachers)!

I found it interesting, though I didn't really connect specifically with the article (I had more of a detached 'oh neat this is something I've seen a lot of people do before' reaction).

I think it's really cool that the writer was able to have these processes and this experience, and was able to talk to an aspect of themselves - it's a thing a lot of people (especially people who work with animals on a spiritual level) have experienced and do, whether it's an inner wolf, or snail, or spider etc. It's pretty cool, 100% not a unique phenomenon, but it's just awesome that we got a cool article that markets a book about it. :D

It reminds me a lot of Internal Family Systems parts work, where you can - among other things - sometimes let a part take on a voice, or it does it anyway, and then you have literal conversations with aspects of yourself. Those sorts of internal dialogue systems are awesome, and it's a great phenomenon for self-communication, and doing it through the symbolism of an animal avatar can be really powerful, because you can ascribe characteristics of that animal to your inner voice (or it can self-ascribe), and sometimes make the voice more appealing or at least understandable because of it.

I have an inner wolverine that's been leaving commentary around the place in my life for easily over 15 years. In that sense, it can even be used as a deliberate technique for self-communication, esp if you have a fragmented sense of self. It's why some people are super drawn to spiritual animal work, they just have always connected to animals better than people, and then realised they could communicate to themselves through animals, even in their own heads.

Anyway, tl;dr, very cool article, I'm happy for the author and her self-acceptance as a writer, and that she can share that (and her book/s) with others too. :D

[capillata]

You have a spirituality blog?!

Mmhm, it’s actually mostly a photography/nature blog, but spiritual stuff gets stuck there occasionally. It’s at @fornatureiseverywhere It has the dubious honour of being the quietest blog with the most viral original post I’ve ever put online. And totem stuff goes up at @ravenarisart and then I also run wildspeak.com which used to be the internet’s largest free czuciki (animal teacher / guide / totem) dictionary but probably isn’t anymore. I haven’t updated that in a while. 

That domain name is like...well, when did Geocities start? Wildspeak is a solid 19 years old. It used to have its own forum! But...god I got too lazy to Admin that.

Tbh you can also find a ton of my original pagan (mostly shamanism) postings over here under the spirituality tag.

Once upon a time I also used to write pagan columns and stuff but hoo boy that was an infinity ago. Now I just reblog stuff and occasionally post nature photos and the bulk of my spiritual praxis is the part of the iceberg you don’t see.

[not-poignant]

🌻

So I own and maintain the pretty neglected website Wildspeak, which is a site dedicated to a list or dictionary of animal teachers (or animal guides, depending on the language you want to use. Or totems or spirit guides if you’re still confused, but I don’t use those words to talk about what I do.)

Wildspeak as a website is over 20 years old. It’s moved domains four times, I’ve always coded it myself in very basic HTML, and it’s always been lean on graphics and high on text. It started out even before Geocities, and then moved to Geocities, and then moved to another domain (long before Geocities shut down), and finally to another where it’s stayed ever since.

I do all the artwork myself, and I write all the information myself, and compile all the research. Some of the data is well over 10 years old, and outdated, though the animal meanings and symbolism largely stays the same.

It costs about $390- a year to maintain (if not a bit more), because a surprising number of people use it, and it adds up re: bandwidth.

This is actually part of my spiritual work or duty, so I pay that cost happily, because it’s part of my service to nature and the animal kingdom, and keeps me connected to the world around me. It also allows me to offer something potentially meaningful to other people who want to learn about animals. About 10 times I year I get emails and messages from people asking me what a certain animal ‘means’ if you encounter it in the wild. Sometimes I get messages thanking me. I’ve heard from folks from all walks of life, including - once - Michael Mando (I believe my art is still on his Instagram somewhere).

I’m behind on updating it with new animal teachers largely because I’m still thinking about recoding the database to be more mobile phone / OS friendly. It was built back in the days when people didn’t have laptops, and desktops were the only thing kind of out there. So it’s like a dinosaur, though it’s a dinosaur I love.

Since I want to release some oracle decks, I’ll need to start thinking about rejigging the website soon, but in the meantime it just stays there, quietly doing its job and being found by people despite having no advertising or anything. It’s a weird legacy site, but it does its job. For about 15 years it was the largest free repository of animal guide information on the internet, and to this day it’s still one of the largest repository of unusual animal guide information, since that’s my specialisation. :D