Coyote


Adapted from an IM session, but it is just my words and beliefs

My understanding is that Coyote is both the embodiement and signal of change, but is seldom changed himself. He "exists" for lack of a better word, to bring about change in others. Sometimes those changes are needed, and sometimes those changes are just ways to make the existing ways stronger

sort of like tempering steel or a test of faith and worthiness

trying to think of how to explain this

Coyote doesn't actually cross the border until someone else makes the way

granted my understanding of Coyote is shaped a great deal by the Diné stories I have heard (and this is the wrong season for telling them), but he does cross borders. Just not first

he is not entropy, he is balance

give him order and he will be disorder, give him disorder and he will be order

if faced with entropy, he will be life

it is the nature of Tricksters

did you ever read Flatland?

way back when I read it, I coindentally read a commentary on it in Analog I think. Anyway, it talked about the perspective of the central character

even though he was round, he was only going to see things in terms of points and lines, he actually couldn't see round, it would seem to be a line

a spherical being moving through the flat plane would seem to start as a point, expand into a wide line, and then shrink back into a point

from a three d perspective (yes I know technically it is four d), we see both the sphere and the plane, but neither changes substantially from the spheres passage through the plane

however to the flatlander, something totally beyond his experience and understanding has happened and he has no way to explain it that makes any kind of sense from a two d perspective

my personal take on this is that Coyote can be either the counterweight or the pivot point, and maybe both at once and neither

what he is and what I understand are not necessarily the same things

what I know is that when I heard Coyote howl, change good or bad was around the corner

just because I didn't see change in Coyote himself doesn't mean it wasn't there, it just meant that I could only see the part of him that intersected my frame of reality

I thought it might be helpful.

Posted: Mon - September 12, 2005 at 09:03 PM
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