The sun broke orange against
the sandstone mesa cliffs that early spring morning. Bird songs joined with the new light that
washed the brown meadow and red rock walls, crescendoing and filling my senses,
which had been stilled by a deep uninterrupted night sleep--then followed by
the centering of sitting meditation that morning.
The gentleness of this early
morning practice, at a time when chaos and change tugged at every edge and tried
to get deeply within my core, brought centering instead. The moon in her cycle, the darkness and
ensuing lightness at dawn, the twittering of tiny birds, then the crowing of the
domesticated fowl and the clucking of their hens, assured me of the natural
rhythm which I could rely upon, daily, for calming and assurance that the
pattern to which I felt intimately connected was one thing upon I could depend,
with absolute certainty.
The sudden clamour and
ruckus that followed this otherwise ease, day-after-day, sent me charging with
speed and riveting focus towards the coop.
Meeting face-to-face with a
badger in my chicken coop was therefore quite a surprise since I had not before
either seen one or met one in person.
She was scampering broadly,
low-legged to the ground, gray, with amazingly smooth steering considering her
girth and shortness of stride. After dismissing her species as a duck billed platypus,
I realized that she was none other than the first badger to grace my life. Known for their mystical bold
self-expression and reliance, the keeper of stories in Indian folklore, I
realized that her symbolic message of the keeper of light and the knowledge of
other animals and the Earth was a gift to contemplate that day.
Through badger we are assured that ”if
stories come to you, care for them. And
learn to give them away where they are needed.
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each
other’s memory. This is how people care
for themselves.”
And so I spent the rest of
the day praying and listening and staying still with the beauty and knowing
that her spirit had graced me and was continuing to unfold its presence.
While I had tried to capture
her, my efforts were in vain, and her viciousness in her snarl and forward-attacking
motion sent me running in retreat of safer distance. Coyote, too, carried that wild snarly snappy
aggression that gave me deep respect for their wildness and safe distance, not
unlike my new adventure with Badger.
Later that day I noticed
that a light poked up from the ground beneath my outhouse seat. This Y2K compliant facility was the bane of
my life now that I lived alone and had to care for its recycling into my
compost pile. I put off the work to take
its contents and dig and bucket it over to the compost bins--yet knew one day
soon, before I left this place, I would have to do the responsible act and
clear it all out.
But before giving it too
much thought I found myself the next morning looking into the opening once
again only to note that the entire contents had been removed the night
before. My badger, having failed to
feast upon the white breasted hen’s flesh, had opted instead to give me not
only a reprieve from my work load, but a gift of light, of story, and more time
to care for myself.
Kat
4 March 2012
