What th' Hell IS a Coyote Anyway?
October 1999
Forget all the formal definitions about this concept. This is not about Aesops rendition, Indigenous American ideas or Warner Bros. either. This is what I know from the inside about this coyote energy that we ALL have to a greater or lesser extent.
First; here's a little prose poem I wrote years ago about how it manifests in me, how it fits my own character:
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Shape-changer, star fixer, trickster-falls-into-his-own-traps.
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Teacher failing his own courses,
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survivor consistently placing himself in jeopardy.
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Seer who seldom sees in time the faux pas of his own making. Supreme Teacher/Perfect Fool. Pretentious pretender, full of pious impropriety. Imperfect perfectionist, forever searching for the simplest way to make things more difficult.
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Planner, schemer, grand architect of failed structures. Builder, destroyer...........rememberer.
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Remembering all that is possible in the magical realm of hope and belief; then forgetting it all in an instant of fear, running off to the hills with tail tucked.
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Filled with the wisdom of the universe,
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and all the foibles it is possible to imagine.
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Sad one/Ecstatic one; carried away on the magic carpet of hope in one moment,
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crashed and burning in the dump of lost dreams the next.
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Eagle/Vulture........................Panthermouse.
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Unbound leader and fear-full hider, out catching rain drops in a sieve
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and sunbeams in a bottle.
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Seeking always one more curiosity, one more fearsome shadow to skip into and flee from,
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all the while complaining about the audacity of cause and effect.
So what does all that mean in the grand scheme of a life lived? There is one underlying theme of the tales of Coyote no matter which culture tells them. Trickster.
This trickster can be malevolent or benign. Clever or stupid. Most often, when all this energy is focused on creating some clever ploy, it backfires and Coyote is caught in his own maze of misplaced schemes. Sound familiar to you?
I read that poem to a friend who said he wanted to know me better. When I finished he said; "Maybe that's more than I wanted to know."
Kind of surprised me. But then his statement was really about HIM. And at the same time, it demolished the pedestal he had built for me. Pedestal builders hate that kind of thing.
That's another Coyote trick.
All the deceiving I did when having affair after affair in my first marriage. It all came around to bite me hard years later. Not just in the loss of the marriage, but in the destruction of trust between me and my kids that lasts, to some extent, to this day.
A typical Coyote trap.
They're not always funny.
Coyotes dream BIG. And the oft expected collapse of these dreams is usually spectacular. One has to develop a wry and ironic sense of humor if this kind of energy is to be survived. See the story of the Dodge diesel fiasco on our web site for an example of this one. Or just ask me about three failed marriages and numberless inappropriate relationships. Or about marrying my second wife twice. Hey, Coyotes will revisit disaster just to try it out once more. Short term memory deficit you know.
We DO learn from our mistakes. But we learn best from repeating them just to make sure they were mistakes and not just little wrinkles in the Universes' plan for us.
In the Tarot cards and in Greek mythology, the Coyote is The Fool. Not the court jester, but as in the beginning of any adventure, life for example, a naive child who walks through the jungle not knowing or expecting danger.
After encountering the betrayals of Life, after the surprises our choices gift us with and experiencing both the serendipitous and the disastrous results of the roads we take, we come to a fork in the road. We can choose to become "safe" by making more and more bargains-with-necessity, pulling in the reins of our galloping hopes and dreams and building fences around our horizons. The choices here range from not entering the jungle at all to walking through it armed to the teeth with suspicion of all around us. (See; "Paranoids" and "Conspiracy Theorists" or Game Players of all types.)
Or we can become Wise Fools. Walking through the jungle, knowing the danger; and walking through the jungle.
Fact is; being a Coyote is typically a blessing and a curse. As I get older, I have not chosen to take fewer risks, rather I try to choose with more wisdom the kinds of risks I will undertake.
I would still like to do white water stuff on the Colorado. Or take a plane up one of these days and do some low and fast cattle strafing. Those aren't the big risks anymore. The really big ones are the interpersonal ones like loving my kids; openly that is. Or expressing my feelings, popular or not.
Or continuing to write, and the internal critic-be-damned. Now there's a Coyote leap!
Dick Prosapio ©1999
Coyote On Coyote - More about Coyote by Dick Prosapio
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