Coyote Medicine

“Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.” ~John Updike

Coyote medicine is about the balance of wisdom and folly. It’s about shaking up entrenched routine. It’s a vehicle for transporting transformation, a vessel for the dissemination of mercurial change.

Coyote laughs out loud at the cosmic joke. He’s a Psychosocial troubleshooter of the highest order. Adept at overcoming the ordinary world to discover the extraordinary, he shakes up the orthodoxy to unleash the unorthodox.

Coyote is a jester that satirizes the seriousness of the Sacred. He is the wise fool, the trickster spirit, the wiggling worm in the apple of the heart of the human condition. He pulls no punches. He howls until both heaven and hell fall into sacred alignment. And He could give two flying blue shits if we like it or not.

As Margaret Atwood said, “The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.” Coyote is free in all the ways culture is not. Foremost, he teaches freedom in the face of fetters.

Coyote refuses to walk on eggshells. Filled with insouciance and aplomb, coyote is hellbent on bending hell into a path toward heaven, and vice versa. Coyote is the king of vice versa. The prince of pain-turned-providence. The lord of laughter in the face of self-righteousness.

As Joseph Campbell said, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

In a world filled with thin-skinned status quo junkies, sappy simpletons, snowflakes with hair triggers, and cry-me-a-river Karens drowning in sentimentality and mawkishness, Coyote could give a rat’s ass about being offensive.

Let them all weep. Let them cry out in woe-is-me self-pity. Let them fall all over themselves in a cartoon crisis. Coyote is here to remind us all that life is fundamentally offensive. Life is pain. Life is absurdity multiplied by infinity. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

As Ovid said, “Someday this pain will be useful to you.” The same can be said for absurdity.

Coyote uses pain and absurdity to create purpose and curiosity. Pain catapults him into greatness. Absurdity launches him into higher meaning. Both are whetstones, soul sharpeners, existential boons that blast him past nihilism.

Coyote medicine is the power of self-deprecation. Coyote has the courage to shoot himself in the foot in order to gain better footing. Adaptation, improvisation, and reorientation are paramount. Coyote reminds us to stay sharp. Stay flexible. Stay ahead of the curve.

Shooting himself in the foot, Coyote keeps “leveling-up,” he kicks himself out of his own comfort zone. Again, and again. He gains the heightened awareness that we are God playing peek a boo with itself. We are world weavers and world makers. We are the world at play.

It’s when we stop “playing” that we run into problems. When playfulness becomes seriousness, when spirited thought becomes rigid belief, when open vulnerability becomes closed invulnerability, that’s when we lose sight of the underlying essence.

Because most people are so inured, so conditioned by outdated conditioning, they cannot see their unhealthy condition. They cannot see how their comfort zone has closed in on them. They are crippled by cognitive dissonance, hamstrung by mortal dread, and paralyzed by existential angst.

Coyote explodes the construct. He detonates fixed conditions and rigid states. He alchemizes outdated alchemy. He one-ups one-upmanship. He transcends through sacred tomfoolery and holy monkeyshines.

Coyote energy is as electric as it is eclectic. It lights up the dark with minefields planted in sanctified mind fields. It blots out the blinding light of cultural conditioning by tossing intellectual hand grenades into parochial klieg lights.

The will to humor is the only thing more powerful than the will to power. Coyote realizes this and uses it to get power over power. He uses it to transcend, as a tool for nonattachment. He uses it to catapult himself into the Overview Effect, where he can see the big picture despite all the small picture perspectives mucking it all up.

As Lao Tzu said, “As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.”

Coyote uses the power of a good sense of humor to keep ahead of the curve and fall like a thunderbolt.

Behold the lightning! Witness the cunning coyote. The herald of huzza. He comes as a mighty howl from the core of the human condition. He strikes like a cobra, sinking his fangs into the ripened fruit of the primal truth that has for too long been forsaken.

Coyote medicine is thunderous, empowering, cataclysmic. It rocks all boats. It tests all waters. It flips all scripts. It turns all tables. It pushes all envelopes. It thinks outside of all established boxes. It topples all ivory towers. It stares into the void and laughs at man’s ineptitude and then swallows it whole, chewing it into the pulp that ferments magic elixir.

Coyote takes that magic elixir and then seeks the shadow. He allies with the Shadow with pluck and aplomb, with tenacity and candor, with fierceness and grace. They drink to the dregs in trickster delight. Boundaries are transformed into horizons. Worlds end and begin. Culture is reconditioned. Imagination is reimagined. God is reinvented.

The tug-o-war rope between life and death, finitude and infinity, darkness and light, pain and passion, mortality and immortality are held taut between madness and genius. And Coyote holds the rope.

Coyote finds a way to playfully distract our fixed notions and opinions. He makes us curious about the darkness, the unknown, the ineffable. Coyote lights up our curiosity and humility so that curiosity outshines certainty and humility outshines hubris.

Only Coyote can trick us out of delusion. Only Coyote has the power to break the spell of culture, to loosen our grip on clingy one-dimensionality, and to unfix our fixed thinking.

Only Coyote can slip beyond Conviction’s shadow and enter the inner tomb where the hero is pretending to be asleep.

Image source:

Untitled by Ryan Hewett

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Coyote Medicine) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.