“Rumbling like thunder o’er the prairie,
Great herds of abundance, sharing with man,
I need your knowledge to meet life’s challenges,
To survive and move on with my plans.”
=author unknown
Buffalo are powerful medicine symbolizing Abundance! All animals are sacred, of course, and each symbolize a value in life. All helps us know what we need for healing or to work on. Buffalo carry much medicine: courage, creativity, generosity, knowledge, manifestation, protection, strength, sacrifice, and thought. As we harvest in preparation for cold freeze months, we need to show gratitude for these values that we already carry within us. All food is a gift. Each thing, that once lived, sacrificed or was sacrificed in order for us to use them however we do.
We are rich in so many ways. Being grateful sends out ripples of harmony as we use and can and freeze the bounties that we have.
Whatever our health is, let us be grateful we have what we do. Be willing to receive what is given. We need to stop focusing on the negatives, as we seem to do, sometimes. Our life, however it is, is a miracle – a gift. Buffalo have great heads and this is part of the medicine for us – to think, but to think good thoughts, to magnify our thoughts, to make our thoughts reality in a good way. The ether needs much good right now. The buffalo has large shoulders…so do we. Our shoulders should be used for others to lean on…not until we are sickened and weakened ourselves, but to do what others might need us to do, when we can.
The buffalo has a great hump on its back, symbolizing stored energy, memories... things we might need to sustain us (and why it is important to not hang on to thoughts and memories and negative energies for that will weaken us further when a time comes, when we might need that energy. The horns curve towards Creator. Like an antenna, it sends and receives. Notice how buffalo draw together in times of travail. We are reminded to draw on our own and others’ feminine energy.
When provoked, and we all do come to that space, eventually, Buffalo becomes enraged. Buffalo reminds us not to let things build up until we lose it.
Buffalo has much to teach us and I have been thinking on these things as I preserve my own bounty and watch Mother Earth shed the old. It is a time for me to be super busy and I love the harvesting of things I planned in Spring.
As I began this painting, I had no idea that she would become Buffalo Woman. I was nearly done, thinking it was about the wheat sheaves that represent fall to me. Suddenly, I spied a sheet of cardstock that I had used as a brush cleaner and background to keep my paintings from coating beyond the painting. It struck me. I could do horns of the buffalo. I changed her hair to look like the curly cape of buffalo hair. Then I added the horns. In fact, when I first put the horns on, I wished I had centered her more, but I had no choice but to cut the left one off. This has become my honor to abundance I enjoy.
©Carol Desjarlais 9.6.20
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