Garfield Is My Spirit Guide

My spirit animal revealed itself to me earlier this month.  I was not on a vision quest per se, and I wasn't fasting or meditating.  I went walking in a park in the Ravenna neighborhood in Seattle one Thursday night and decided to climb a nearby tree because tree. After some initial hesitation about how to go up and best routes and so forth, I managed to ascend to some of the lower branches where I could meditate and where I could look around and recite what I could remember of Erroll Flynn's dialogue from "The Adventures of Robin Hood".

I'll say here that my spirit animal did not reveal themselves to me on the way up the tree, and it did not turn out to be the Wolf or any of the really cool and highly sought-after ones.  

It was only after I began to think "I ought to get down now - I have places I must go", that I became aware that I was, spiritually, a cat. I could not think of a single workable plan for how to get down from a tree.  Jumping?  I was low enough to make that work but it would aggravate hell out of the tendonitis in my right knee. Not good. Climbing?  All of the hand and foot holds I'd used to get up the tree had rearranged themselves so that I could no longer find them. Plus, it seemed several hundred feet farther to the ground every time I looked down.  

A very kind, older lady offered to wait until I actually managed to get down before going on her way and, I think, she would have called a fireman if I'd needed one.

A Religious Thought

In church today, the responsive reading/sung response involved God asking the musical question, "Whom shall I send?"

I had a lot of fun pointing at random people in the congregation and saying, "Them, God. You should send them.  The guy with the finger up his nose, or that lady in the upper right.  They're the ones.  I'll stay home and read an edifying book."

I obviously demonstrate a keen sense of religious duty.  Of course, for all I know even some of the saints may have felt the same way.  St. Francis at prayer may have sounded like Bill Cosby's "Noah" routine.

Random Sunday Thinks

My turgid brain has been surging with thinks this entire week but, of course, when I begin to set them down I get the mental equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death.  Here are some thinks that I've had recently:

• I was looking at a picture of my late brother Patrick before church today and it felt as though our life together was a dream that I'd had a long time ago.  He strongly resembles my mother facially and I know that I had a brother and that he did certain things and thought certain things but it feels like I've always been alone although it's only been 23 years since he died.  
• I've been extremely grateful for my study of the martial arts and for my brothers and sisters in martial art.  That I've lived to experience the therapeutic benefits of martial art is beautiful to me. 
• Chocolate donuts are no one's friend.  Not three at a time, anyway. 
•  Growing up is really not so scary once you seriously begin doing it.  Peter Pan missed out.  
• If juror B-37 refused to convict George Zimmerman of manslaughter because she "knew what was in his heart", then she had no business being on a jury.  A juror needs to weigh the facts, not their supposed knowledge of the suspect's intentions or motivations prior to committing a criminal act.  
• I refuse to dread things now.  I'm grateful instead.  Grateful for every minute, good, bad or indifferent, of life that got me to this point.  

Random Think(s)

Literally, these are the things that are kicking around my surging and turgid brain at the moment:

- Just how fast is "Godspeed"?
- I like being blond because the gray hairs resulting from my advancing age are - for the moment - limited to my sideburns, a wicked long ear hair, my chest hair and my eyebrows.
- It's okay to believe in love at first sight, but what happens if you've got bad eyesight?
- Will Rogers once said that the art and legacy of Charles M. Russell would last "Maybe as long as the Republican Party is under suspicion."  Talk about a guarantee of immortality.