Crow: Keeper of the Sacred Law Crows are the keepers of the Sacred Law and to have a Crow totem is very powerful. Personal Integrity is your watchword and your guide in Life. If you have a Crow totem, your prime path is to be mindful of your opinions and actions. You must be willing to walk your talk, to speak your truth and to know your life’s mission.
Crow is an omen of Change. Things that you have been working toward will come to fruition when Crow appears. Crow lives in the void and has no sense of time; therefore, it sees past, present and future simultaneously. Crow merges both light and dark, both inner and outer. It is the totem of the Great Spirit and must be respected as such.
American Crow – Corvus brachyrhynchos (image source)
Tiger: Passion, Power, Devotion Tiger’s gift is focus, patience, and the ability to heal quickly, both physically and emotionally. Healers often have a Tiger totem. It is very important for Tiger people to have time alone in their own special place. Tiger is the symbol of darkness and the new Moon. When a Tiger totem enters your life, expect new adventures. It will awaken new passion and power. Tiger people do their best work at night. They are very sensual, passionate people and devoted parents. Your best work will be done at night. Tigers are associated with water and have all the properties of the element of Water – healing, power through gentle flow, feminine energies.
A listing of some traits these astounding creatures offer in terms of wit and wisdom:
Loyalty
Courage
Teamwork
Confidence
Determination
Preservation
Fellowship
Cooperation
Vigilance
G o o s e
Family And Protection:
Geese take their families seriously, and the adults and young ones are often spotted sticking together. During breeding seasons, geese become extremely aggressive and protective. They defend their young ones with their life. Be it humans or other animals and birds; geese are often noticed chasing away those who try to harm their offspring.
Geese travel in flocks and are excellent navigators. Even if they travel miles away from their habitat, they’re known to have the ability to get back to their home.
Smart in terms of navigating and adaptability, when the colder season arrives, geese travel to warmer regions. They are known to strive for survival and search for appropriate habitats quickly.
While cacophonous noises geese make might sound joyful to some, or annoying to others, it is undeniable that geese are great communicators. The loud noises they make represent their medicine: opening up their hearts and expressing their emotions.
People with goose totem are born leaders and communicators. They do need to be mindful to avoid getting too fixated on achieving their dreams, to the point they ignore every other aspect of life, including their precious familial relationships and friendships.
Call on goose totem within to remember the keen navigation and communication skillset you have been gifted with. Listen within to allow the heart to guide you towards succeeding in your quests. Teamwork, cooperation through communication, makes the dream work!
Goose encounters, in nature or in dreams, encourage you to listen to your heart. Have you been living life on your terms or by someone else’s rules and regulations? Do your day-to-day activities make you happy? Geese remind you to let go of things that you’re trying too hard to control and to live at your own pace.
Flock of geese spotted, congregating today in Central NY
An interesting development has been brought to light. The LAUSD finally and reluctantly rescinds their v a c c i n e mandate, pressured by judges’ repeatedly expressed concerns about rationale since the shots don’t work to prevent infection or transmission.
As reported by Teachers for Choice, Leslie Manookian of Health Freedom Defense Fund was a guest with Michael Kane hosting CHD TVs “Good morning CHD“. She noted that likely LAUSD attorney Connie Michaels advised her clients to rescind the mandate and then argue the case is moot, to avoid losing the case. Same as we are seeing in New York in state and federal cases in support of medical and religious freedom.
None of these cases are moot, as teachers, healthcare workers and NYC workers are still facing discrimination, and a multitude of obstacles from getting their jobs, seniority and employment benefits back, not to mention lost income.
Leslie laid out the importance of the LAUSD case as follows:
The SCOTUS Jacobson v. Massachusetts case 197 U.S. 11 (1905) has been wildly misconstrued to justify authoritarian overreach.
In Jacobson, SCOTUS held that in extreme circumstances, such as a smallpox outbreak with a death rate of 30- 40%, a jurisdiction might mandate a safe and effective v a c c i n e or allow a fine to be paid by those who declined the v a c c i n e.
Jacobson never imposed you could plunge a needle in the arm of anyone who was opposed to being v a c c i nated, or use such a mandate as a condition of employment.
Case law that says you have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment: Washington v. Harper 494 U.S. 210 (1990) case on behalf of prisoners who didn’t want to take psychiatric drugs. SCOTUS: “You have a liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment”. There is a growing body of case law supporting the right to refuse medical treatment that might extend or save your life, that you have a zone of privacy around you in which the state cannot intrude. More recent case law says you have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to decide what you put in your body, and to decide whether or not to accept life saving or life extending medical treatment. This stuff cannot be forced upon you, nor can the state intrude into your privacy.
“It seems to us that [attorney] Connie Michaels and LAUSD got it backwards. HFDF asserts the right to bodily autonomy for any and all medical treatments. Surely, then, the state must prove that a vaccine works if it seeks to justify mandating its use. Otherwise, where is the limit on state power?”
As can be seen here, no one threatened to take away Jacobson’s livelihood. He was fined, and that was it.
(Jacobson at the time was ordered to pay a $5 fine for his refusal to vaccinate his son. With an inflation rate of 31.09 in 2023, that amounts to $155.45).
This is a powerful totem — symbolizing transformation, healing and eternity. The Snake is wisdom expressed through healing. The Snake turns venom into medicine.
Snake teaches sharpening and more accurate intuition. Snake energy is the energy of wholeness, cosmic consciousness, and the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance.
It is the knowledge that all things are equal in creation. It also signals a transition in your life. New opportunities and/or changes. Snake is fire medicine, the medicine of transmutation.
On a material level, it is vitality; on an emotional level, it is ambition and dreams; on a mental level, it is intellect and power; on a spiritual level (the highest level), it is wisdom, understanding and wholeness.
Snake magic is heavy magic. Become the Magician: transmute the energy and accept the power of the fire.
Squashing spotted lanternflies isn’t always easy. Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe you’ve tried it, after encountering kill-on-sight orders. The dotted, mothlike bugs tend to hop, after all, sometimes narrowly escaping the (almost) perfectly timed thud of a sneaker. So when you get one, you celebrate.
“See ’em? SQUISH ’EM!” reads one tweet, complete with a trophy photo of two bug carcasses stuffed inside tiny glass jars. “I KILLED A SPOTTED LANTERNFLY!!!” another exclaims. And another: “I can honestly say that’s the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve had all 2020.”
Haters have organized “squishathons” and spotted-lanternfly-killing pub crawls. “It’s kind of a crusade,” according to Brad Line, who lives in Pennsylvania. He developed an app called Squishr, which ranks users’ spotted-lanternfly kills, complete with gory photos as evidence, on a national leaderboard.
The motive for attacks of such self-congratulatory glee—and such careful viciousness—is supposed to be a dire environmental prognosis, our belief that the spotted lanternfly is a threat to Mother Nature herself. The bug’s wide-ranging appetite for at least 103 different plants worldwide, according to the latest research, has perhaps contributed to its reputation as an indiscriminate life-drainer. “If you see thousands of these very large insects feeding on your tree, then the first thought you’re going to have is That tree is not going to survive this,” Brian Walsh, a Penn State Extension educator, told me. Yet in the eight years since the bugs first made American backyards their home, some of the most shocking damage has come not from spotted lanternflies themselves, but from overzealous (and very human) attempts to stop them.
The bugs were first found in the United States in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 2014, after supposedly hitching a ride as a bundle of eggs from China via a shipment of stone. Spotted-lanternfly infestations have since been documented in 11 states, but are centralized in the stretch of Eastern Seaboard from Virginia to New York. Female spotted lanternflies can pop out 30 to 50 potential offspring packed tightly into an egg mass smaller than a human thumb. A single tree can host more than 12,000 of the grown sap-suckers across one week.
When the lanternflies showed up here, the “really problematic” proclivity for grapes and stone-fruit crops they had already demonstrated in South Korea alarmed researchers, according to Emelie Swackhamer, who educates locals on the invasive bug for Penn State Extension. Even after Korean vineyards were sprayed with pesticides, spotted lanternflies were reported to “rapidly repopulate,” swarming in from adjacent wooded areas. They can devastate grape crops by feeding on sap and excreting a substance called honeydew, which causes black-mold growth, Kelli Hoover, a Penn State entomologist who studies the insect, told me. So worries were, in part, justified: A 2020 study found that among a sampling of Pennsylvanian vineyards, higher densities of spotted lanternflies were linked with a decrease in fruit production and overall vine health. Hoover has heard of entire vineyards succumbing to spotted-lanternfly-induced stress.
“It is the most unusual insect I’ve ever studied,” she said. “It’s probably the hardest to do research on”—in part because of its voracious appetite. Scientists have been able to raise another invasive bug, the Asian long-horned beetle, on maple branches, logs, and even an “artificial diet,” Hoover told me. Spotted lanternflies survive on potted trees—if they’re swapped out every few weeks. And even then, they don’t thrive like they would in nature. Researchers still don’t have a grasp of key facts, such as exactly how far spotted lanternflies can travel in their life span, or key defenses, such as how best to trap them.
So, sure, the spotted lanternfly isn’t really a bug you’d want to cozy up to. But maybe its critics have all been a little hasty to judge so hard.
Take, for example, economic impact. In 2019, a report from Penn State projected that spotted-lanternfly-related damage in total could cost Pennsylvania more than $324 million annually if the bugs continued to spread. But Erin Otto, a national-policy manager in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, cautions that, so far, “damage to vineyards in Pennsylvania has been scattered and inconsistent.” She would need to see more research before putting a dollar amount to the totality of harm.
The zeal, though, can go too far—especially among those at wit’s end. In 2018, while working as a landscaper, Walsh, of Penn State Extension, fielded a request to check out a tree that was, apparently, well on its way to death-by-spotted-lanternfly. At his new client’s home, Walsh found an oak in poor health; branches on the lower fourth of the tree had yellowing leaves. Notably absent—at least in any alarming number—were spotted lanternflies.
After a round of questions (what attempt had the tree’s owner made at combatting the bugs?) and a telling observation (splotches of dead grass beneath the tree’s canopy), Walsh came to a sinking realization: His client had done the damage herself. Instead of using an insecticide, she’d mistakenly sprayed an herbicide called glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as high as she could reach.
“People can get very bent out of shape,” Walsh said, “and declare all-out war” on the lanternflies. He’s heard of Pennsylvanians running propane torches up and down the trunks of their trees; he’s heard of people dousing plant life with kerosene, engine-starting fluid, and oven cleaner to deal with the pesky bugs. Initially, Walsh told me, there was confusion as to whether common pesticides could legally be used to kill spotted lanternflies in the state (because the critters weren’t listed on any labels). Turns out, they can.
“There’s a lot of irresponsible behavior to try and manage these guys,” Anne Johnson said. “I’ve seen people say, ‘Oh, I use a can of hairspray and I light it on fire,’ and I’m like, ‘Um, that’s going to do way more damage than these guys did.’”
It’s easier to garner support for any cause—bug genocide included—with a rallying cry. In the case of the spotted lanternfly, the label “invasive species” has been enough to work people into a frenzy.
In the beginning, there was a glimmer of hope that stomping out spotted lanternflies—literally—might stifle their spread. The past few years, many in the invasive bug’s orbit have resigned themselves to a different vision of the future. “We’re going to have to learn to live with them,” Hoover said.
After spotted lanternflies were first found in Staten Island, New York, in the summer of 2020, a new generation of do-gooder bug-squishers was born. But some back in Pennsylvania are losing steam. “The fatigue sets in after a couple years,” Line said. People start feeling “this kind of hopelessness that Well, there’s nothing we can do.”
Really, no one person can control the world in this way; the spread of non-native species seems, at this point, like a fact of life. And yet the anxiety persists, most recently swirling around the joro spider, the latest Asian bug to make news for its impending sprawl up the East Coast. This time, Americans are being told the “invasive” arachnid is unlikely to cause any harm at all—on the contrary, it might even keep other pests in check. We don’t need to lift a finger or stomp our feet. Can we resist the squish?
Abigail Gruskin is a journalist based in New York City, where she reports on local politics and cultural trends.
“Well me am sitting quietly thinking about stuff, what am i thinking about really? well here it is, who makes up this shit like the lions gate scam, think about it since the calendar we use was made up their has been loads of 8 8 dates during this time, if all the bullshit about it was true we would either be a super race of loving people or ascended to some other place for sure, this crap is just like the 2012 stuff but we get it every year now, just think about it for a moment and be honest with your self, if we had a dna upgrade every year at this time the above would have really manifested for sure, the only way to change the world and our lives is to act, not follow some madcap idea we do not create our own and collective reality and its all in the hands of some other energy other than our own, get real get loving and then changes will take place, dont give your power away: you are your own power, one love baba”
Lastly Robin also showed up for me on my walk today. They’re proliferating in my neighborhood. I am happy to see them, and to hear their song.
Robin: Spread of New Growth
A Robin totem will stimulate new growth in all areas of your life. Believe in yourself as you move forward. Obstacles will fall by the wayside if you do and confrontations will be for show only.
This totem gives you the ability to will new growth into your life. Make a wish, be patient, and watch how it comes true. Meditate on Robin and the correct path will be revealed to you.
But remember, in order to grow, you must clean house beforehand – let go of attachments and emotions that are no longer useful to you. Allow joy and happiness to fill your life and allow Robin to sing its song with you.
Sharing this because it may speak to you, as you read this, as well.
Also on my path today was a deer, galloping through the woods.
Deer: Gentleness and Innocence
Deer teaches us to use the power of gentleness to touch the hearts and minds of wounded beings that are in our lives. Don’t push towards change in others; rather gently nudge them in right direction with the love that comes from a Deer totem.
A Deer totem shows you a new innocence and freshness in life. You will feel the gentle lure of new adventures. There will be an opportunity to express the gentle love that will open new doors for you.
Today I encountered a dozen darting dragonflies on my nature walk. I greeted them with much joy. They are what I consider one of “my” totems, and I instantly felt they signaled transformation is within reach now, in what seems a rather long healing journey with a wound I have been nursing.
Dragonfly is the power of light. The dragonfly inhabits two realms: air and water and the influence of both these elements will be felt by Dragonfly people. Dragonfly is the essence of the winds of change, the messages of wisdom and enlightenment; and the communication from the elemental world.
Dragonfly medicine beckons you to seek out the parts of your habits that need changing. Call on Dragonfly to guide you through the mists of illusion to the pathway of transformation. Dragonfly brings the light and color of transformation into your life.
elxroflife 