animals – Under The Table

Twins photo by Todd

We were visited this morning by the twin fawns who share these woods with us, and today our coming to the window to look at them did not scare them away, but precipitated a pleasant staring game that went on long enough for me to get my camera and take a picture. The deer hereabouts are quite hungry now in early August and are eating things they don’t bother to eat when their preferred foods are more abundant. When we see deer going up on their hind legs to eat camellia leaves, we know pickings are slim for the local ungulates.

We just saw the excellent and upsetting movie Incendies by Denis Villeneuve based on the play of the same name by Wajdi Mouawad. If you are squeamish about violence as I am, this is not a movie for you. Had I known what the movie was about beyond what I saw in the trailer, I would not have watched the film. Yet I think Incendies is an important work of art and a brilliant illumination of the religious and cultural madness gripping the Middle East and much of the world today. The movie involves twins, a man and a woman, attempting to unravel the secrets of their deceased mother’s past.

Some years ago, I read several articles about twins. One of the articles suggested that many more twins are conceived than ever come to full term; and most left-handed people are the surviving twin of identical twins, one of whom did not survive the first weeks in utero. For some reason, that tidbit, which may or may not be true, has stayed with me.

One of my favorite stories regarding twins is about an equatorial African society visited by Portuguese explorers in the 1400s. The explorers left behind a missionary who introduced the Africans to myths about Jesus. Many generations then came and went before Europeans made contact with that particular African society again. When Europeans did visit again, they discovered these people were extremely fond of the story of Jesus being born in a manger. In their places of worship the people had constructed elaborate manger scenes. But instead of just one white baby Jesus in the manger, there were twin black babies, for in the original creation myths of these people, the two most important gods were twins—one male, one female.

This afternoon we took a walk along the headlands and came upon two ravens standing close together and facing each other with the tips of their beaks touching. When we stopped to look at them, they turned away from each other to look at us for a moment, and then they resumed their beak touching. They stood completely still as they connected with each other in this way. Waves crashed in the near distance, and I imagined this touching of beaks was not so much a courtship ritual as a reunion.

I love it when animals and birds and lizards look at me. Yesterday, just as I was about to water some succulents growing in a rock garden on the west side of our house, an alligator lizard came out from a crevasse between two large rocks and looked up at me. I squatted down and looked at the lizard. We were about seven-feet apart. She was ten inches long, including her tail, and I wondered what she was seeing as she looked in my direction. Were my form and features clear and distinct to her, or was I a big blurry blob?

I said to her, “Well, I’m going to water the rock garden now. I will endeavor not to flood your crevasse.”

The lizard cocked her head, perhaps to get a different view of me, and then disappeared into the crevasse.

I once had a cat with whom I had conversations. I would say something, pause, and my cat would meow a time or two. I would say something more, pause again, and she would meow somewhat differently than the previous time. Our most animated conversations took place in the minutes right before her suppertime. Her replies to my musings grew more and more emphatic as the official serving time was upon us.

Feed a cat every day at exactly five o’clock for a few weeks, and thereafter you can set your clock by that cat letting you know it’s five o’clock.

I sent a picture of the two fawns to my friend Max in New Hampshire. He wrote back, “I wonder what they see when they see you. Do they have thoughts like, “His hair is perfect”?

Possibly. My hair has been looking particularly good lately, good in the sense of asymmetrically unruly—a frozen filigreed fountain of grays and whites and a few vestigial browns going every which way. But seriously, I do wonder why the fawns were so unafraid of me today. Perhaps their uncharacteristic boldness has something to do with our neighbor who feeds the deer, combined with the apparent shortage of deer food available hereabouts. Perhaps the twins thought we might be more of those two-legged animals that give them food sometimes.

For my sixth birthday, I was given a puppy from a litter of mutts. That pup became my best non-human friend for the next twelve years. I named her Cozy. She was a wonderful not-very-obedient dog, extremely affectionate, and we would frequently gaze at each other for minutes on end. I believed she could hear my thoughts, and she confirmed my belief with her habit of seeking me out when I was feeling sad and commiserating with me by sitting right beside me and looking at my face until I looked at her.

Hundreds of times over the course of our twelve years together, Cozy pulled me out of my gloom with her devotion and kindness, and by being so darn happy to be alive.

Hawk pen and ink by Todd

Long ago when I lived in Sacramento, someone gave me Medicine Cards, a book and accompanying deck of cards written by Jamie Sams and David Carson, and illustrated by Angela C. Werneke. Each card features a picture of an animal or bird or insect or reptile or amphibian. For purposes of divination, the user randomly chooses cards from the deck and reads the text in the book corresponding to those cards.

Each animal represents some aspect of power in the natural world. For instance, ant medicine involves patience and trust and hard work, badger medicine is the wise use of aggression, and beaver medicine helps us pursue our goals through cooperation and planning and persistence. The text of Medicine Cards reflects the teachings of various indigenous peoples of North America regarding the physical, energetic, and spiritual attributes of forty-four non-human beings.

When I moved from Berkeley to Mendocino twelve years ago, I found myself in a world populated by most of the beings represented in the Medicine Cards, so I no longer needed to draw cards from the deck to ignite my wondering about what Nature wanted to tell me. And last week, in the course of a single day, I had three extraordinary meetings with non-human beings that gave me much food for thought.

In the morning of that remarkable day, I walked from our house to the commercial district of Mendocino—about a mile—and upon completion of my errands decided on a circuitous route home that took me through the graveyard at the south end of town. And there amidst the gravestones I came upon a magnificent Great Blue Heron, stalking gophers—the living seeking sustenance among the dead.

The Great Blue Heron is not one of the birds in the old Medicine Card deck I have, but herons represent to me the power of stillness and stealth and careful observation, three important skills that herons use to catch fish and frogs and rodents to sustain their lives and empower them to fly.

Home again, my mind filled with visions of the Great Blue Heron among the graveyard monuments, I shed my pack, drank a glass of water, and went to see how my carrots and lettuce and chard and zucchini plants were faring in the heat of day. And whilst perusing my garden, I decided to nitrogenize the soil, otherwise known as taking a piss.

Now on several occasions in my life I have been wielding a garden hose when a hummingbird arrived to drink from the cool flow of water—a most delightful happenstance. But this piss I speak of was the first I’ve taken that attracted a hummingbird thirsty enough and brave enough to take a sip of my warm salty flow.

According to Jamie Sams and David Carson, hummingbirds are bringers of joy, and I must say that this piss-drinking little beauty certainly made me smile in wonder at both her appetite and her audacity.

In the afternoon, I needed to make another trip to town and took our trusty old pickup. I turned onto Little Lake Road and was going about fifteen-miles-per-hour when a huge Red-tailed Hawk flew across my path no more than ten feet in front of the truck and only a few feet off the ground. I hit my brakes, missed the big bird by inches, and she flew away to the south. Phew! What a relief not to have killed her.

And I wondered if almost hitting a hawk meant something more than almost killing a hawk. Is life a random meaningless crapshoot? Was the universe communicating with me by sending the hawk across the road at that moment? Was the hawk telling me that death is always near, so enjoy life while we may? Was she a harbinger of a publisher calling to say she wanted to present my books to the greater world? Or was the hawk asking me to consider the question: “What’s the big hurry?”

Sams and Carson write, “Hawk may be bringing you the message that you should circle over your life and examine it from a higher perspective. From this vantage point you may be able to discern the hazards which bar you from freedom of flight.”

At dusk on that day of visitations, mammals took over the harbinger business, and a young doe with a nest in a copse of redwoods on our property brought her two fawns to the clearing outside our office windows, and we delighted in the adorable baby deer until they wandered away.

Sams and Carson write, “Deer teaches us to use the power of gentleness to touch the hearts and minds of wounded beings who are trying to keep us from Sacred Mountain.”

And let us never forget: there’s no telling what a hummingbird might do.