I like the creatures no one chooses as a spirit animal. Skinks. Ice worms. The little dog whose back legs are supported by wheels and who is walked faithfully around the block by a small old woman. If approached from the opposite direction, there comes a moment when she looks up, surprised, with a wide mouth and kind eyes.
The bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, may live over one hundred years in the cool depths near Greenland. Or the shark of the same region arriving at reproductive age no sooner than the end of the first century alive.
Also swamp sparrows.
Cephalopods.
Bagged goldfish.
The as-yet-unnamed ones, still undiscovered.
The swan of Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Duckling, who does her best to fit in with the duck family she meets upon hatching, having no way to know that the egg she came from had only rolled away from its proper nest. Whose attempts at doing duck things fail the more she becomes her swan self.
At a formative age, I decided to be done with the person I seemed to be, and so I set about making a new self. I went about this the way a young, old-feeling person might: by cobbling together suggestions from available sources. Having decided I was missing something vital to the project of becoming, I occasionally took seasonal employment in places I had yet to visit. In the Sierra Mountains, I found unexpected teachers and learned to sing while walking so the black bears would know I was coming.
I also tried smoking while writing, like Joan Didion or Tom Waits. The experiment failed almost immediately. And yet. If I vomit, will that be the old self leaving? I persisted.
On New Year’s Eve, outside a restaurant, the old self remained.
Later that week, I left the just-opened pack of cloves on a wall at the edge of a Vons parking lot, hoping that whoever found it would take it as the kind of serendipitous surprise that announces fortune taking a turn toward some unexpected wonder. That they might pause to enjoy their find and feel themselves understanding that this place, routinely referred to as the Vons parking lot on Tamarack, is so much more.
That they might see it suddenly: an ancient geography of unknown forces.
And be moved to some greeting, however hushed.
Hello, powerful stranger.
That this discovery might nudge into being the possibility of an astonishing response from this sudden sanctuary. Which, while wordless, would sound the body like an urgent whisper.
Come here.
