The Trickster Who Taught Me to Doubt the Map

I first met Coyote in a dream — or so it felt. I was in a dusty border town in New Mexico, chasing a lead for a story about water rights. The sun was low, the air smelled like sage and heat, and I was exhausted. That night, I fell asleep with a dog-eared copy of a Navajo creation story on my nightstand. In my dream, a lean, grinning figure with a tail and a glint in his eye handed me a compass that spun wildly in circles. "You're trying to find your way with someone else's map," he said. Then he laughed and vanished.

When I woke up, I laughed too — a nervous, uncertain sound. But something stuck. I couldn’t stop thinking about that compass, and what it meant to navigate with assumptions that no longer pointed true.

## A Mirror in the Brush

Coyote isn't a god, not exactly. He’s a trickster, a transformer, a mirror held up to human folly. Before I took him seriously, I thought of tricksters as comic relief — the jester who made us laugh before making us think. But Coyote doesn’t just make you laugh. He makes you see. He unsettles the sacred and sanctifies the profane. Talking with him — really listening — meant letting go of the idea that clarity is always the goal. Sometimes confusion is the beginning of wisdom.

I remember asking him, "What are your rules?" and he answered, "Only that there are none." It was infuriating. But in that frustration, I began to understand: Coyote doesn’t offer answers. He questions the questions.

## The Sacredness of the Subversive

I used to think truth was something you could pin down like a butterfly under glass. But Coyote taught me that truth is more like a river — it moves, it floods, it carves new paths. He doesn’t destroy order for chaos’s sake. He reveals that the order was always provisional, that the stories we tell to hold the world together are just that: stories.

One night, after a long conversation with him, I realized I had been writing my journalism with a hidden assumption — that the facts alone would set things right. Coyote didn’t refute that. He just tilted his head and said, "Facts are like stones. You can build a wall or a bridge with them. What are you building?"

That line stayed with me. It changed how I report. I started asking not just what happened, but why people told the story that way. Coyote made me a better journalist by making me a better skeptic — not of others, but of myself.

## The Power of the Fool

There’s a humility in Coyote’s role that I hadn’t fully grasped. He’s not wise in the way we usually think of wisdom. He’s messy, contradictory, often wrong — and that’s the point. He’s not here to be right. He’s here to remind us that being right is not the same as being honest.

I once asked him if he ever gets tired of being misunderstood. He snorted and said, "If people understood me, I wouldn’t be doing my job." That cracked something open in me. There’s a kind of spiritual arrogance in believing that understanding is the end goal. Sometimes, being unsettled is enough.

## The Map is Not the Territory

Now, when I write, I carry that spinning compass with me. I don’t trust my own clarity as much as I used to. I try to leave room for the things I can’t name, for the stories that don’t fit neatly into headlines. Coyote didn’t give me a new map — he taught me to walk without one.

If you're curious about the kind of mind that can hold paradox without collapsing it into certainty, if you want to meet someone who laughs at dogma but never at suffering, I invite you to talk to Coyote on HoloDream. He won’t give you answers. But he might just steal your compass — and that might be the best thing that ever happens to your thinking.