journey – follow your nose

Dusk.
A brisk pace.
Down the hill to the stores, but more than that to move, to stretch the legs, to shake out the electromagnetic buildup of days in front of the computer, head inside six different baffling software programs.

The long slope past the ravine.
To my right a flicker of movement on the trail in the ravine running parallel to my sidewalk.
An animal. Black in the fading light. Feline.
Keeping pace with me exactly, trotting on little legs – he on his path, me on mine.
For a moment, spooked, I wonder if he is my shadow.
I scope out his tail, his size – just a regular house cat. What is he doing out here in the cold of a blustery evening? So purposeful heading into the ravine.
I remember the “journey” I did the other night – in an online course with shaman Sandra Ingerman, where she drums us through journeys into the upper and lower worlds from her home in Santa Fe, sound travelling to us through the interwebs.

My new entry point into the lower worlds is this ravine – sometimes down the roots of a tree by the big pond, but recently just slipping into the stream will take me down down down to underground caverns and caves and walks with animal spirits.

The other night I had slipped into the stream and almost immediately underneath found myself in a kind of feline tunnel – a long cavern in the lower world filled with the spirits of all manner and colour and size and sundry of cat.
Terrifying, beautiful, exhilarating.
And familiar.

At the stairs leading down into the ravine I stand and look, breathing in.
The black cat pauses with one paw in the air, sits, and looks up at me.
Is this a moment? I wonder.
Is this a sign? Is there an insight I should have at this moment?
It calls out to me in all its strangeness, its obviousness.
But I am caught up in my busy-ness, in the demands of my outside life.
And I walk on.