Spirit animals

Spirit animals

Head to a coffee shop in Oakland and begin eavesdropping around the tables.  You’ll hear a variety of conversations: problems at work, irritating partners, black lives matter, weekend parties, gentrification.  Head to the Acai bar in Piracanga and you’ll hear a different mélange of themes.  Do you have a guru?  Are you vegan or vegetarian?  You’re a libra, right?  I knew it!  And then there’s spirit animals. 

Piracanga is divided into two camps: those who know their spirit animal, and those who don’t, yet.  The curiosity is real.  I remember one day, while walking from the restaurant back to my house, I overheard three different conversations about spirit animals, not including the one that unfurled at my lunch table.  As a member of the lucky group, I have become a semi-resource here at how to find your creature.  Semi resource, because the real Animal Totem guru is Angelina, the spiritual leader of the community. 

A few times a year, Angelina leads an “Animal Totem” class where participants are guaranteed to discover their spirit animal.  How can this be?  Spend 2 minutes with Angelina and you’ll understand.  Angelina is the founder of the Piracanga community I so love.  She from her native Portugal to Bahia, Brazil to swim with dolphins (her spirit animal).  Then was guided “by the angels” to create a spiritual paradise.  The rest is history. 

Pick up any children’s book with a witch in it.  Angelina looks like the benevolent version of that.  She has greying curly hair, an ample nose, and a delicately hunched back.  Her aura exudes magic, happiness, and kindness.  When she looks at you, it’s obvious she knows more about what’s going in your mind than you do.  Leading the spirit animal class for her is easy because she knows everyone’s spirit animal as soon as they walk in the door.  Her challenge is to help the participants to discover it for themselves. 

Unfortunately the class timing has never coincided with my stays here.  Though lucky for me, I discovered my animal totem this September.  How was I so lucky?  Not lucky, just intentioned.  Let me explain my process so that you can do the same!

Last September I wanted a “getting to know you” lesson that would connect my Spanish 4 students to their indigenous roots.  A few google searches led me to spirit animals, which play an integral role in most Mesoamerican cultures.  But before I could teach my students how to find their spirit animal, I had to find my own.

I discovered two principal methods.  The first was through meditation.  You sit in a quiet room and explain to God that you are looking for your spirit animal.  Then you imagine yourself in nature.  See which animals appear.  When a creature presents itself, ask “Are you my spirit animal?”  Listen to its response.  If it answers no, let it continue along its path and allow the next to arrive.  Repeat until your totem is found. 

My restless personality led me to method two: the active route.  Set an intention, and head out into the world, letting the universe reveal your animal.   

I called God and said, “Could you please show me my spirit animal?  And let it be a hummingbird. Thanks.”  That evening, I went to the Sacred Well, the magic shop by my house.  I intended to buy another hummingbird sticker to decorate my water bottle.  When I arrived, there were no hummingbird stickers left.  Only fox stickers.  Foxes?  I never had a thing for foxes, but the foxes were smiling and decorated with roses, so I bought one anyways. 

When I returned back to my apartment building, I noticed that my neighbor had replaced the frog statue in her windowsill with a terra cotta fox.

The next morning, my Dad texted me a picture of the backyard with the voice message:  “Jen!  You’ll never believe this!  This morning I woke up and saw FIVE foxes in the backyard.”

I was pissed.  A fox?!  Foxes are sneaky and sly.  Ostracized creatures of the animal kingdom.   After a day of sulking, I headed back to the Sacred Well and checked out their spirit animal book, praying for different information.

I learned,to my great delight, that foxes are fabulous!  They are intelligent, attractive (obviously), and messengers between the earth and the spiritual realm.  Folks like me with fox totems possess great magical powers.  One of these is the ability to become invisible.  This I have been testing out with great success.  Last week after the lunch break in my Aura reading class, I turned my invisibility switch on.  The teacher looked around the room and said, “Someone’s missing.  Who?” The woman next to me said, “Just Jenny.”

Over the past year, I have fallen in love with my spirit pet.  Once you discover your animal totem, you can invoke them for protection, guidance, support, anything you desire.  I even bought a pet fox, Caramelo, that I carry with me on all of my travels.  Numerous times this year I found myself in murky situations: a dark alley in Oakland, an overly-turbulent plane en route to Brazil.  I closed my eyes, and held Caramelo, or imagined a fox by my side.  I immediately felt more relaxed, safe, held.  Call it luck but here I am, safe and sound.

Traveling to El Salvador with Caramelo back in June

Once you discover your totem, pieces of your life begin to come together.  Your face, for example.  Why does it look the way it does?  Once you know your spirit animal, it jumps out at you in the mirror.  Especially now with my short hair, I look just like Caramelo.  I remember back in Septermber, my Argentinian friend Santiago asked me what my animal was.  When I told him I was a “zorro” (fox in Spanish), he erupted into laughter.  “Claro!!”  Now whenever our paths cross he sings, “Zorrrrrrrrrrro!”   

 

Me and Caramelo

And once you get really acquainted with the animal spirits,  you can use your powers to discover other people’s animal totems.  This is one of my secret pleasures here.  Whenever I feel I’m about to doze off in a workshop, I scan the room and guess the spirit animal of my peers.  Some people are obvious.  In my nature school group, I knew instantly when I saw my friend Camilia that she was an owl.  And that Rodrigo oozed wolf.  I knew Danilo was either a gorilla or an eagle, but probably an eagle.   For weeks he asked me, “What’s my animal!  I know you know it! You’re so cruel!” Just like Angelina, I never tell others what their animal is.  I explain the process, then at best will smile once they guess it for themselves.   I gave Danilo a pep-talk, and watched him soar off to discover his animal.  The next morning he came back cheering, “I’m an eagle!  I’m an eagle, right?  I knew it!  I just saw three of them!”

But not everyone’s totem is so easy.  I was convinced for months that nature teacher Maira was a rabbit.  Then she told me her totem was an ant.  An ant?  No one looks like an ant! But once I remembered how I always see her working in the greenhouse from 7 am until dinnertime, I began to understand.  

Some people immediately love their animal.  Like Ornella the panther.  Or Leticia the black cat.  Others, like my friend Jennifer, rebel even more than I did when they discover their creature.  Jennifer is a Leo with angelic cheeks and a curly mane.  She  expected that Angelina’s Animal Totem class would confirm she was a lion.  She recounted her experience as something like this…

Angelina guided us in a meditation where we wandered in the forest and let our spirit animal present itself to us.  The first animal I saw was an ant.  I thought to myself no way. That ant is tiny.  There’s no way something so small can be my animal.  Then suddenly, the ant began expanding.  It grew bigger and bigger, and bigger and then lifted me up on its back.  It kept growing until it was the size of a mountain.

After we were brought back to consciousness, Angelina asked each of us which animals we had seen.  I started shakily with the ones I saw in the distance.  “A horse?  A bear?  A rabbit?”  Angelina kept shaking her head.  Then finally I muttered, “I also saw an ant.”  Angelina’s face lit up.  “That’s it!” she smiled at me.  “That’s your animal!”  I growled.  “An ant?”  WTF?

Even Jennifer (who does look a little bit like a beautiful ant when you look closely enough) has learned to embrace her antiliness too.  I remember many a meal with Jennifer where she kept looking over towards the kitchen between bites  “What are you looking at?”  I finally asked her.  “I’m waiting to see when they put out the dessert.  Sugar!  I’m an ant, remember?”

These past few months, I’ve sauntered around Piracanga, so proud that I discovered my spirit fox sans Angelina’s class .  Yet in the back of my mind, I’ve been consumed by the fear that Angelina would burst out from the bushes and blurt, “You’re wrong!  It’s not a fox!  It’s a mosquito!”  That would have to return Caramelo.  Change the name of my blog. 

This week, during my final aura reading class, the truth finally came out.

Angelina sat down with our group and began a lecture about dream interpretation.  “A car in a dream represents your body, your vehicle on this earth.  Any person in the dream is some version of yourself.  Etcetera, etcetera.”

At the end, she got to the juicy part.  “Animals each signify something different.  Ants for example signify teamwork, dedication.  Bears signify rest and retreat.”  Then she stared straight into my eyes and smiled, “And foxes, they signify “um despertar”.  An awakening of what had previously been asleep.” 

Ode to my spirit fox

Fox and me sitting in a tree,

watching the ant parade,

agreeing on our favorite costumes:

black carapaces strapped with leaves. 

Fox:  For shame! I can only carry half of my weight on my back.  

Me:  My lovely liar!  Everyday you carry around me, my ancestors, the pogroms, the destruction of two temples, 40 years in the desert.  That's at least 50 pounds.  Let’s eat!

My spirit fox commiserates best with an apple in his claws.  

We have so much to macerate together.

So much fear to alchemize each dusk.

Me: What is a synonym for scream?

Fox and I count our blessings on his paws. 

Mother, father, sister, world.

Fox stores his wings in my backpack. 

He acknowledges that often, my plight obstructs his flight path. 

And he loves me anyways, I conclude.  

We have so much to share on the dinner branch,

even if Fox eats rodents and I eat apples. 

For fox always devours my anger,

as long as it’s dipped in honey

or shrouded in the pockets of my soul.