The back-and-forth of the rocking chair kept pace with the hoarse and measured speech of Starry Song, the shaman gifted with sowing the ancestral philosophy of his people through stories and songs. On the porch of his house, we were chatting about various subjects at the end of the afternoon when a splendid full moon appeared in the sky, one of those that become immortalized in photographs and in the affective archives of memory. It was impossible not to be enchanted. I commented that, although the calendar assured us of a full moon that night, the spectacle of magic and beauty always surprised us. Photos are like theories; although one cannot deny their value, none of them, no matter how well-crafted, can replace the teachings obtained through the experiences offered by life. Images and words often get lost, and even confuse us, in the complex universe of ideas that populate the mind; it is the events we live that sculpt transformations in the soul. Not even a thousand photos of Paris, or the most well-written book about that beautiful city, will substitute for the experience of strolling through its streets, a writer once said. No theory will be more useful than a journey of discoveries and encounters undertaken by the individual to the core that identifies him, an ancient philosopher taught us. Starry Song smiled in agreement with the reasoning; his gaze wandered as if a memory led him down roads distanced by time. Then, with the calmness that was peculiar to him, he began to fill with tobacco the red stone stummel of his infallible pipe, and said: “The voice of the mind is not the same as that of the soul. The mind is a village inhabited by a vast diversity of voices from both shadows and light. The voice of the soul carries the ancestral wisdom from the origin of the world; that is why it is pure. Everyone possesses it. However, very few know how to tell one from the other. When they manage to hear it, the truth becomes crystalline; otherwise, they will continue with a blurred and often distorted vision. Without the necessary clarity to distinguish good from evil, they will make wrong choices under the conviction that they are doing the right thing”.
Then, He surprised me: “The moon is the protagonist in one of the oldest legends of humanity, predating the myth of fire.” I interrupted to say that astrology has always used the moon to read emotions and feelings. The shaman confirmed: “Not without reason; like the moon, we reflect the intensity of light we have managed to radiate. The most varied events, common to everyone’s days, generate emotions and root feelings in the exact measure of the light we reverberate; the same situation, depending on who experiences it, will cause irritation and sadness if the intrinsic sun is covered; or serenity and joy if there is enough clarity to understand the good side of all things”.
“Subtle feelings free ideas to expand far beyond the boxes of conditioning, suffering, and fears. On the other hand, bitter emotions dull reason; the truth diminishes, the virtues weaken. The passion crushes love.” I asked what the difference between love and passion would be. Starry Song lit the pipe, puffed a few times, and explained: “Love brings the joy of availability; passion stirs the addiction to satiety. Love is fulfilled in every gesture; passion remains incomplete after every act. While love expands the individual and life, passion sucks them dry.” He seemed distracted for a moment by the dance of the smoke before his eyes and returned to the conversation: “When driven by good feelings, ideas propel the individual to fly on their own wings; when nourished by dense emotions, reason boxes them into the limits of a truth that shrinks. Then, delusions are confused with dreams, madness believes itself to be geniality. The moon does the same when it shows off grandly, forgetting, however, that its glow is borrowed.”
I agreed with what seemed obvious. Yes, the moon’s light is borrowed from the sun which, when it moves away, or rather, when the Earth stands as an obstacle, leaves the satellite in absolute darkness. Starry Song looked to the sky and clarified: “That understanding is one of the factors that reveals how much illusion and reality we live in at every moment. This tells us a lot about passion and love. Passions, as I like to call the emotions deprived of virtues—the thousand faces of love-wisdom—when the object or person desired becomes absent, distant, uninterested, or refuses them, collapse into abandonment. Individuals driven by passions feel the need to seek light outside themselves in a desperate attempt to escape the internal darkness that torments them; the feeling of discontent and unease is permanent. They still cannot talk to the soul, the internal sun that, by having its own light, frees them from any emotional dependence. No darkness can frighten it; nothing and no one can keep it from shining. Being a legitimate source of joy for itself, it illuminates everything around without sending bills, demanding rewards, making noise or advertising. Nor does it care if the moon shows off in vanity. In the theatre of days, the audience cheers wildly, forgetting that the show would never happen without its true protagonist: someone who never appears on the night’s stage. In the moon’s show, literally, the sun is the hidden star. Without ever feeling sad or offended by this, because it knows its own worth, it asks for no recognition; the sun is the sign of love” .He looked at me, as if to raise a few tones of seriousness, and said: “Sometimes, like the full moon, we present ourselves in splendour without realizing that we are only reflecting a light that is not ours. When the sun moves away, we fall into darkness. Dazed, many take a long time to understand the simple reason for their own downfall. They know nothing of love and passion”.
The surprises of the night were far from over. Koda, a young adult about thirty years old and a resident of Sedona, from the same ancestral lineage as Starry Song, appeared at the gate. The shaman motioned for him to come closer; he had watched him grow up. He had become a kind and polite man; although he hadn’t lived in Sedona for years, he had many friends in the city. That day, his gaze was sad. Disoriented would be the most precise definition. He sat down; said he needed to talk. He didn’t understand why things had gone wrong when he had done everything right. He felt incapable of grasping the sequence of recent events; he looked back at them without understanding the moment, or the point, when everything began to fall apart.
Since he was a teenager, Koda had dreamed of being a car mechanic. It wasn’t about fixing cars, but about making them unique. He wanted to own one of those shops that use old cars as a base, making various modifications, from installing cutting-edge echnology, from electronics to the engine, to customizing the paint. On the outside, old; on the inside, modern. The result is an incredible, one-of-a-kind car. It was a growing and promising market niche. He read every publication on the subject; had taken a course in Las Vegas, where the most prestigious shops in that field operated; he was passionate about the idea. He didn’t just want to have his own small workshop, he wanted to make it the most famous of all. As financial conditions didn’t allow it, he worked as a mechanic in a regular shop in Phoenix, about two hours from Sedona.
One day, after managing to fix a car whose issue no one else had been able to identify, Koda was approached by Bill, the owner of the vehicle. Very satisfied, Bill invited him to watch a popular basketball game in Phoenix that was part of the championship finals. Bill’s son, who was supposed to accompany him to the stadium, had to travel for work. Koda accepted. The two hit it off immediately. They talked a lot that night; the mechanic shared his dream. In the end, Koda invited Bill to be his partner; he wanted Bill not only to be the investing partner, but also to use his administrative experience to manage the business, while the young man would take care of the operational side of the art car factory, as he liked to call the cars he would transform. Bill, nearly twice Koda’s age, had a successful career as a director of a tech company in Silicon Valley; he explained that he couldn’t and didn’t want to leave his job. Koda said he knew how to assemble and disassemble cars, but had no idea how to manage a business. It didn’t matter that the executive lived far away and couldn’t be present at the shop. They would hold weekly video meetings, during which guidelines would be given and monitored. He insisted that Bill’s experience would be essential to the business’s sustainability and growth. Koda would take care of the daily operations of the factory. Bill had some savings; he liked the young man; he had always worked in solid, well-structured corporations; the challenge of building a business from scratch was exciting.
At Bill’s request, Koda created a cost plan, listing all the items needed to set up the shop. It took six months for the small factory to be ready. In the end, twice the expected budget was spent. Kindly, as was his nature, Bill pointed this out to the young man so it wouldn’t happen again. Since they planned for continuous growth, new investments would be needed later. Mistakes like that can be decisive for the future of a business. However, the executive wasn’t angry; he attributed the mistake to the young man’s inexperience and believed it would serve as a lesson. In the beginning, business looked promising, with a higher volume of contracts than expected for the first few months. It was necessary to structure the growth. In the weekly videoconference meetings, each step of the strategy was provided. The mechanic followed all of Bill’s managerial instructions to the letter. The small business had no debts; the shop was thriving. The young man felt confident, but discontent.
After some time, Bill noticed changes in Koda’s behaviour. Several machines they had bought were no longer being used. Instead of doing the work with them, Koda outsourced the services to other shops. Besides the waste of investment, profit margins were significantly reduced. Worse, the cars were delivered without the quality he had promised to make the company one of the most respected in the market. When questioned, he said he needed more time for his personal affairs. Annoyed, the mechanic said all the hard work had been left to him, while the executive had the comfortable job of giving orders. Bill replied that it wasn’t like that, they had agreed from the start that one would invest the money and the other would provide the work. Moreover, Bill’s experience would be used as a managerial tool at the mechanic’s own request. Handling the administrative side had been Bill’s only condition to invest in building the factory. So, there was nothing wrong with that, this was the fundamental agreement.
Bill decided to visit the factory. He was very upset; none of the strategies they had established were being followed by Koda, who had started making decisions without consulting his partner. As if that weren’t enough, he bought a very expensive machine that the shop would only be able to use much later, when production was significantly higher. The upcoming payments could jeopardize the economic stability the business had maintained until then. Although the young man’s decisions were clearly misguided, he didn’t care about his mistakes, as if he were provoking a confrontation with his partner. He said he was the one who understood cars and the shop, so all decisions, including administrative ones, should be his, contrary to what they had agreed upon when forming the company. A previously unknown side of the mechanic’s personality began to emerge. They argued. Instead of adjusting course to stay on track, Koda said he no longer wanted a partner. He didn’t want anyone interfering with his dreams. He said he would buy out Bill’s share of the business. The shares were transferred immediately; disappointed with the young man’s actions, Bill just wanted to disentangle himself from the web of mistakes as quickly as possible. He didn’t ask for any collateral to secure the debt; the mechanic’s dignity would be the determining factor in ensuring the payment. Koda committed to repaying the money Bill had invested within one year at the most. Not that, after everything, the executive still trusted him, but he knew not every battle is worth fighting.
Advised by friends, the young man created a financial projection. He calculated that he would repay the debt before the deadline. He was ecstatic; as the sole owner of the factory, free from Bill’s interference, he would be able to soar higher and higher. He boasted about the tremendous power of his wings. He believed he stood before the turning point of his life. There was no way it could go wrong.
But the mathematics of life has unusual equations. Since many contracts were still in force, money continued to come in at first; he could pay the bills and cover a few instalments of the debt with his former partner. However, a series of poor management decisions soon led to financial difficulties. The first decision was to stop making the monthly payments to Bill. As a way of reducing expenses, he stopped outsourcing some services. Although he knew a lot about the process of vehicle transformation, he lacked the hands-on experience; he had the theory, but not the practice. This became evident with every car he delivered. The decline in quality was both cause and effect. Contracts began to dwindle. The friends who had encouraged him with words and forecasts to let go of the partner didn’t step in to help with his growing debts. He had to turn to bank loans to keep the company open. Though they didn’t own a single share of the business, in practice, the banks became Koda’s majority partners, since the interest rates were higher than his monthly withdrawal for personal expenses. When the deadline came, he hadn’t paid off the debt to Bill as promised; owing the banks was even more dangerous.
At last, he admitted he didn’t understand why life had been so unfair. Starry Song rested his pipe on a small side table next to the rocking chair and asked, “From what I understand, while Bill was your partner, the company grew in a stable and secure way, am I right?” Koda closed his eyes, not just to recall a recent period, but also because of the unspoken discomfort that memory held. He nodded yes. The shaman continued, “You always stood out as a good mechanic. Have you ever had experience managing a company?” The young man whispered no. The essential questions continued: “What made you believe you could run the business better than someone who had been doing it correctly and successfully?” The mechanic murmured that he was the one who understood the day-to-day of the shop; therefore, the decisions should be his. Starry Song reflected, “Building an engine is a job of great importance; building a company holds the same value. Knowledge from different areas should not compete; they complement each other. An engineer builds a CT scanner; the doctor makes the diagnosis and prescribes the right treatment thanks to the machine; both are essential to healing the patient.”
The shaman asked if he had heard about the Myth of Icarus, a beautiful story from the precious Greek Mythology. The young man said he had studied it in his high school philosophy classes. In short, it tells the adventure of a man who, in order to escape the labyrinth in which he was imprisoned, builds wings out of bird feathers and beeswax. Upon escaping, enchanted by flight, he launches himself too close to the sun; the wax melts, the wings fall apart, and Icarus plummets down. Starry Song looked at me and asked what I had learned about the meanings of myths and legends. I replied that I knew very little. Like all good stories, they have several layers of interpretation. What drew my attention most was the theory that speaks of a knowledge common to all of humanity, but which, while not decoded through lived experiences, remains unavailable. We have been present, sometimes as actors, sometimes as spectators, in various situations over countless lifetimes. We have lived and witnessed stories not fully assimilated, because they were still incapable of being used as tools for growth. That is what allows myths and legends to survive through the centuries; there is something familiar in them that we cannot fully identify or understand. To be used, they must be awakened or, in other words, brought up from the unconscious, where ancestral memories are stored, into the surface of reason, the conscious mind. Only well-elaborated experiences guide us from darkness to light. Only then can they serve as instruments for a good life.
Starry Song closed his eyes for a few moments, as if searching for the right words. When he spoke, his voice had a sweet tone, but with unshakable firmness: “When you met Bill, you were dissatisfied with your own routine. You nurtured a dream you couldn’t bring to life.” He paused briefly to emphasize: “To realize means to turn an idea into reality.” Then he continued: “It may seem like a simple definition, and it is. But not at all easy. The simplicity lies in removing the deceptions and fantasies that cover and mask the truth. Otherwise, reality turns into fiction; the wings melt, and the most beautiful dreams fall into the category of delusions.”
He furrowed his brow, as a way of asking for attention, and said: “You approached Bill kindly and invited him to build a business together. Without his participation, it wouldn’t have been possible, at least at that moment, to realize your dream. Not only because of the financial investment, but also in guiding the initial steps necessary for the fundamental structure of balanced and safe business growth. It was the beginning of a beautiful and long flight. Right solutions seem easy to distracted and immature eyes, because they don’t realize how many experiences were processed to extract the knowledge necessary for an essential set of sensible decisions. The business took off; a flight so smooth it seemed simple. And it was. But simplicity is not simplistic or shallow; there is more wisdom and depth in it than the crowds believe.”
He picked up his pipe, checked if the tobacco was still lit, and said: “It was such a calm and promising flight that you felt like you were flying it with your own wings alone. You began to believe that Bill’s participation was unnecessary and inadequate. Alone, you would fly better.” He puffed the pipe and continued: “What happened is that you confused his wings with yours. I do not deny the importance of your participation in the company, but it was he who kept the flight stable. The nearness to the sun melted Icarus’s wings. Not all eyes are ready for intense light; under the risk of blindness, no one approaches the light without love. Passion blinded you.”
Still not fully understanding, Koda asked what had blinded him, after all, there is nothing wrong with light. Starry Song shook his head and explained: “Yes, there is nothing wrong with light. However, light requires truth and virtues, and love is the essential element both to see the former and to practice the latter. Passion originates from distorted truth; it brings the illusion of flights on wings still unready. The fall becomes inevitable. This happens every time that, from flying so often with someone else’s wings, whether from haste or immaturity, we believe they are our own.” He paused so the young man could connect the philosophical arc and continued: “Love requires humility. For a simple reason; without understanding the importance of people, they become objects. Just like in passion, they serve for use, never for consecration.” He made a gesture with his hand to emphasize the obvious and said: “To consecrate is to become sacred with someone. Sacred is everything that makes us intrinsically better; to consecrate is to walk alongside another person under a shared purpose of transformation and growth. To know whether there is love, understand whether there was consecration. Everything else is lesser.”
Then he clarified: “By forgetting the importance of humility, you wasted the power of simplicity; the truth was compromised by minor and momentary interests. When that happens, reality gets lost in delusion. You became unable to perceive that the wings keeping you in the air weren’t yours; the flight couldn’t be sustained. By wanting everything for yourself, you traded love for passion; then, light turned into fire. Not content with brightness, you chose to feast within the flames.” He looked at the mechanic and asked a rhetorical question: “Do you understand now why the wings melt?”
Koda argued that he had been influenced by many opinions and advice that led him to that decision. The shaman immediately corrected him: “They were words that found resonance and were welcome inside you. Otherwise, you would have dismissed them. Every imbalance reveals the unknown that dominates me. Everything I do not understand imprisons me and burns me in the bonfire of senselessness.”
Irritated, the young man accused the shaman of belittling him. They were of the same ethnicity. Since childhood he had learned that everyone has wings. Starry Song did not allow Koda to use the victim’s mask to hide from the uncomfortable truth: “That’s not what I said. Yes, we all have wings. The reach and height of our flights depend on the size of those wings. Everyone can reach the stars, as long as they grow to do so. To know the size of your wings, just look at your own heart. They are the same size and power.”
A rebellious tear revealed the young man’s inner turmoil. Without confessing any regret, Koda said that conversation would not help him. Like the shaman, he carried within himself the ancestral philosophy of his people; in it, he would find the solutions he sought. He had a commitment to truth; it would guide him, he said, citing an important lesson and essential existential foundation. Starry Song reminded him: “No one knows the truth without first knowing themselves.” He looked up at the sky and gave a brief summary of a powerful native legend: “The tradition of our people holds the story of a blanket that, when placed over the body, grants the power of invisibility. The man who discovers it could use the blanket to do wonderful things, but it reveals the truth about himself hidden in absurd repressed desires. He succumbs to his own mistakes. All that he could have been, he never became.” Koda knew that story; his grandmother used to tell it, along with others, on winter nights. They served as a mold for the character of her grandchildren. The shaman continued: “No one is what they know, but what they do. But not only that. We are what we think, feel, and especially what we do when we are not being watched. Actions in the eyes of the world say more about the character than about the identity.” The young man said he didn’t understand how the blanket legend fit into his story. Starry Song went straight to the heart of the matter: “You started the workshop thanks to Bill. Then you cast him aside. You didn’t want interference in something you came to believe was only yours. It never was. The commitment you made was forgotten, both in having him as a partner and in paying the amount that, by your own choice, made you indebted to him. Dignity was the only form of collection. The commitment to Bill came before the bank debts, but since it couldn’t be enforced in court, it was left behind. Faced with the banks’ fierce artillery, honour proved to be cowardly. Not doing the right thing simply because the law doesn’t demand it is the same as doing wrong when no one is watching. Fear won. Love does not bargain with fear; love without commitment is love on the surface, like passion. Understand passion, and you’ll understand the falls.”
Dismayed, Koda stood up. He had come seeking help; all he heard were rudeness and insensitive words. He had wasted his time with a rude and outdated man. Without saying goodbye, he opened the gate with his feet and closed it with his back. When I turned to Starry Song, I noticed no trace of hurt, annoyance, or resentment. I mentioned this. He explained: “His irritation is not with me, but speaks of a misunderstood soul. The many voices of the mind deafen him to the voice of the soul. Koda is a good man. He has lost himself and burns in the fire of mistakes for running from the truth. He will remain where he has placed himself until he decides to rise again in a different and better way; there is no more effective path than through humility and simplicity. Without pride or deception, he will make peace with the truth. Only then can he begin a new and beautiful story, in which, finally, he will fly with his own wings.”
That night I learned a little about the sun and the moon. As well as the connections they have with wings and flights.
Translated by Cazmilian Zórdic.
