Dead spots in the living world and the life cycle. Everything in the world creates an energy, casts a light out into the world. These life lights intermingle to create life events.

Now everything in the natural world exists as predator, prey, parasite or symbiot, and really the list is this short. But we don’t look very closely at the web pattern these relationships form or consider that this web might have a shadow counterpart.

Let’s take a lion. It’s a predator, often very busy, very loud, scary, and very much alive. People admire them as being living examples of strength and general vigour or vitality. Identify with them for their seemingly direct elemental way of engaging life. Predators create direct dead spots. They interrupt a life, and sometimes very quickly.

The next relationship is not actually prey, as prey is not a single type of creature or category of creatures. It doesn’t occupy a single point on the web. The next we consider is the parasite. It takes from another life, sometimes dramatically, but kills it very slowly and perhaps not at all. These creatures cast a longer and more subtle dead spot. A sort of diffuse mist of death. In the flip side of the world, you have the mirror image of the predator and parasite.

The prey part is interesting. Everything is food for something else. Yes. Do tigers eat humans just because we are around or because they like how we taste? They eat humans because they catch you in a dead spot. Right place and right time and they are either hungry or afraid. Animals are afraid of dead spots also. Cats have very dramatic reactions to them, but dogs react also. Ironic because cats cause death spots. This is part of why cats are so nomadic as the dark signature fades with time and it becomes harder to feed in a fresh dead spot. Especially if you are not a cooperative animal. Most cats don’t help other cats hunt. Tigers for example.

The last class of creature in the web is again not prey, but the symbiotic. It takes its life from another living thing but performs a function that feeds or furthers and preserves its host organism.

The dweller on the threshold, the messengers of death and the dark world, are the eaters of the dead. They are neither predator, nor parasite, nor symbiont, and the eaters of the dead, the carrion creatures, have no mirror image. They are the same in both worlds.

They keep our world tidy. They do serve the balance and preservation of both. The Egyptians were not the only culture to revere these creatures. The Norse did with Odins crows. The Native Americans did as well where they also esteemed vultures as great guiding spirits.

You relate to this spectrum also, and your place on this web is based on your attitude about dead spots. Are you predator, parasite or symbiotic? Look at the dead spots in your life and they will tell you. Each has its own distinct pattern.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~