The Animal Spirits
by Stephen Levine • New Mexico

From the book Turning Toward the Mystery, to be published by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2002 by Stephen Levine. All rights reserved.

I have for most of my life received remarkable teachings on how to be a human being from the animal spirits. It was their invitation that began my opening and it is still that quality of wholeness experienced on the land that regulates the beat of my heart. When I first heard someone say that in fifty years all the songbirds might be extinct, it wakened that song learned so long ago from the thrushes. Waking as a child, listening silent in my warm morning bed.

It broke the heart that recalled that robin shot with my BB gun. The pride of accuracy instantly vanishing when I saw the torn bird empty on the grass.

If there are no birds, who will transmit from the ledge outside the frightened child’s window that somehow everything is going to be okay; that we are an integral part of something very big and indescribably beautiful?

Somewhere along the way I was entrusted with a half-paralyzed cat. I used to bring her with me to the Unity Press office in a shoebox. Off to one side of my desk she could be turned and fed as need be. It may have been Joseph Goldstein, while working on his book, who first called her "Shoebox."

The paralysis, the veterinarian said, made her "half a cat, a brain-oriented genetic failure." The effects of her disease would progress up the body from unusable back legs to the inability to move and eventually to breathe. He reached out as if to take "this problem" off our hands. We replaced young Shoebox in her palanquin and off we went.

Three weeks and a hundred doses of slowly swallowed concoctions of warm olive oil with a smidge of garlic and long massages later, the paralysis halted just before it overtook her front legs. Gradually it began to reverse itself. Six weeks later the cat brought to me for some sort of animal last rites was doing the two-step on my meditation pillow.

But there was a moment before she was well, just on her comeback, on what appeared to be a very bad day for her, when she seemed to be losing strength very rapidly as the paralysis advanced back up her body. Meditating near her, I heard her drag her back legs as she pulled toward me. So I lay with my back flat on the floor and put her on my chest, thinking she might just die there. About ten minutes into this process, she made a rasping breath and, it seemed, stopped breathing.

I, half in faith and half immersed in some episode of mystery theater, the real illusion of birth and death, breathed my "breath energy" heart to heart back into her limp body. Perhaps she had not died or had a little kitty NDE (near death experience) and discovered her body, like ours, was rented not owned. With a shudder she began once again to breathe. As she opened her eyes close to mine, I think I smelled a little garlic when she burped.

Some months later, at 3am, she jumped onto my bed, turned her rear end to the side of my face, and pushed her first baby into my ear.

One Sunday afternoon in my 1964 drug bardo (a bardo, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is sometimes designated as an interstice between lives), misled by the braggadocio of old ghosts, I attended the bullring just outside Mexico City. There was nothing heroic there. In fact, after two "brave bulls" had been ceremoniously slaughtered, the torero doors swung open and the third sacrifice entered the ring.

It did not charge out snorting and bucking, as had the others. It was shoved reluctantly into the ring. It did not want to fight. It ran from the matador. It bellowed and pled. It was not a death-black, square shouldered fighting bull, but a brown steer that looked like someone had sold a pet 4H project to the wrong vaquero. The "bull" was terrified and ran around and around the ring. When the picadors pierced its hide, it shrieked for help. The matador was young and flustered and missed several passes, only further wounding and terrifying the animal, which ran about looking for escape.

After many failed passes by the clearly disturbed matador, the crowd, horrified by this blatantly unheroic scene, went mad with mercy and rage. It began to stomp and yell, “Mátalo, mátalo." "Kill it, kill it," again and again as the poor animal wailed in terror. Mátalo! Mátalo! Mátalo! A compassionate rage vibrated the blood-spattered walls of the torero.

We experienced compassion and rage in the same moment. The crowd was on its feet shouting at the inexperienced matador. There was even a sense of danger to the matador, a feeling that at any moment someone might spontaneously jump into the bullring as novicieros occasionally do to prove their courage, but this time to dispatch the matador and save the bull. People were stamping their feet in outrage, "Kill it, kill it, have mercy, kill it!"

At last with an awful bellow from the steer and an anguished wail from the audience, the bull was killed, dead as Lorca at the firing wall. I knew that bull. At that time, I too felt the frightened hope of escape. The teaching did not elude me. In the face of suffering, help is needed! Not the least of the lessons from animal spirits came from that terrible moment with the bull.

Indeed, years later I thought back to that poor animal’s death as a profound teaching in mercy and euthanasia. Particularly when I heard a respected religious teacher say that his cosmological fantasy insisted that people must, at the end of their life, continue suffering no matter how great the torment. He used as confirmation of such rigid mercilessness a quotation from distant scripture that even a broken-backed old horse dying in agony in the gutter with a crow pecking at its eyes should not be aided in its death.

Many, fearing the loss of a heaven they long ago felt they were unworthy of, somehow equate suffering with holiness. Not having resolved their personal guilt and grief, they still believe they deserve to suffer. And deny mercy to themselves and a world of pain so worthy of compassion, calling out for surcease.

About fifteen years ago, living amidst a world of wildlings in the forests of northern New Mexico, a few days after nestling in a few dozen chicks, I entered the coop one morning to find a dozen dead chicks with their heads bitten off. Skunks!
Recognizing too our responsibility to the skunks, in whose territory we had plopped a tantalizing chicken coop, rather than harming them, we began improving the fencing under which they had apparently entered. Digging all day along the fence line, we buried it well into the ground. Nothing short of a badger was going to dig its way into that enclosure. But the next morning, more headless chicks.
We presumed the skunk had this time gone over rather than under the fence. It had seemingly climbed the chicken wire! We worked for most of the next day clumsily stretching sagging chicken wire across the top of the pen. When it was completed, we "knew" the few chicks remaining were at last safe. But next morning proved they were not. Somehow the predator was still getting in.
We had exhausted all of our nonlethal options, but before taking more drastic measures, I decided to sit out one night in the well-fenced chicken yard in hopes of discovering the means of entrance. After sitting outside in the cold for a few hours, I noticed that ego-glorifying self-righteous sense of wounded innocence slipping in. Self-interest-above-all was accumulating. Anger arising, animosity for this remarkably resourceful though deadly invasive creature. It was me against him. I considered what sort of buckshot to use. I was slipping into hunter identities. Catching my body hunching over, contracting like my mind, I spread wide my arms and arched my back to relieve the pressure. As my head tilted back, I looked up.
The enormous southwestern sky was wild with fiery asteroids. It was the Perseid meteor shower. A half dozen streaks of light at a time stretched across the sky. Never had I seen such a full display. One after another and then five at a time, then crosswise another and another.
And wanting to rest my neck, I looked back down. And there, not ten feet in front of me, was the skunk. He had slipped through what had seemed far too slight an aperture between the corner post and the fence.
He was beautiful as anything in creation. For a long moment, bathed together in a surreal star shower, we looked deeply into each other’s eyes. And beneath a singing sky we simultaneously bowed and retreated.
I returned with hammer and nails to secure the corner fencing. The skunk went home, and the sky kept on singing.
Another teaching from the animal spirits was recalled while I was waiting to have two extractions in the dentist’s office. I remembered kneeling by the side of the road years before, unsuccessfully attempting to loosen the wing feathers of a dead great horned owl for an artful shamanic project. I pulled as hard as I could without crushing the feathers, but they wouldn’t budge. Then I was reminded of the Native American way, the original way of respect and interconnectedness with all creation. I stopped exerting such force on the long-flightless wing and instead respectfully asked its permission to remove the feathers. I bowed to it. When I tried again to extract the powerful feather, they slipped effortlessly into my palm.
I gave permission to those two old teeth to go on their destined way, to let go. And so they did.

Stephen Levine is a poet and teacher of meditation and groundbreaking healing techniques. His bestselling books include A Gradual Awakening, Who Dies?, Meetings at the Edge, Healing into Life and Death, A Year to Live, and with his beloved partner Ondrea, Embracing the Beloved. See SpiritSite.com for more info.