It starts with a drip, a single solitary drop, one tear gliding effortlessly down a ruddy cheek to plunge from protruding chin, taking that last leap as a diver from a cliff wall, heralding the arrival of so many more tears. It begins with just one, which fragments into the multitude like splinters of reflective glass made from the fall of a single mirror from the vanity face. The Tequihua begins with a single brick and then more are laid to keep this one company and he calls it a temple. In the great wide world beyond this little forest, dear children, it starts with a single entity, the primal mother that laughs herself into hysterics, splitting her guts so that her children spill forth into being. So it is that here, when we call the primordial, many are present, but the effort starts with one, just one, the only one that you have any sway over, the only one that you can look out from, the one that you have come to call yourself.

To invoke something from outside of the dream it takes just one character within it, the one that you perceive as you, to notice itself within a dream. Every nightmare, every pleasant slumber is filled with many a sordid creation. It takes just one of these to come alive and call out: "Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!", then the others will follow.

This one may be of any apparent form. It is this act of noticing the self and remembering the dream that makes one a shaman. In any invocation, it starts with an individual flaming heart that spills over so that it breeds like wild fire among the participants. It starts with one, it begins with you.

In the shaman's bag of tricks you will find nothing at all, great heaping mounds of it. This is the bread that he serves for his holy communion. He keeps nothing and consort endlessly with no one, with the emptiness that envelops him, caressing him like the cool palm of an elusive love. The shaman knows where the invocation begins, in the hollow space within his cage of bone.

He keeps himself in the company of many fragile splinters of nothingness and calls these his family. To them he tells stories about Koyote the Blind, who put out his own eyes by pushing them back into the soft matter of his brain with his own thumbs, because it is always easier to watch another do the necessary work than it is to do it one's self and without eyes he would no longer be tempted to sit back and watch. In his blindness he could see his family for what they were, nothing at all, a hot breathed mass of emptiness which could yet do nothing. He would have to do something for there was no one else to do it. He would have to do the dances and tell the stories, build the fires, mix the paints and cover the emptiness with his mark.

Alone, a solitary star gleaming in an eternally black night, he danced the dances and told the stories and burned brighter and brighter until the fabric of creation caught fire and danced with him. Burning, burning, burning. All the emptiness was filled with fire. Those many forgotten shards of a broken mirror that he called family reflected back the flames that roared before them joining in on the careening dance initiated by one blind man of naual.

The shaman tells this story to the quiet, obedient cast of characters sitting at his feet and does not dwell on the notion that his story has fallen into the ears of emptiness about him. He tells this and other stories with all the passion and finesse that he would employ if he were certain that his one true love, the mistress of the dream, were listening. If she was not alive in one of those shards of nothingness before the telling, she may be there before its end, flickering brightly.

It starts with a drip, a single solitary drop, one tear gliding effortlessly down a ruddy cheek and soon there is a downpour to moisten the black earth and call life up from it's silent depths. This is the great work of the shaman, to make one into many and many into one with a single beating heart.