We Are Crazy Animals & Life Offers Us More Than We Can Imagine
Be the zebra. Sleep with cheetahs. Some wild animal news you can use.
Dear Beautiful Friends,
I have a couplet of delightful news items straight from the animal wild for you today. And then we’re going to consider the unimaginable and how life is beyond our imagination. Ready?
🦓 One 🦓
Our swim began beneath a belly of growling asshole clouds, but an hour later we swam freestyle sets in a world of blue skies, bright sun, and nabbed some late-morning tan lines. Just when I thought things couldn’t get better, Lesley dropped this beauty bomb:
“Oh, the craziest thing happened, you might have heard about it. A friend of a friend saw a zebra in her backyard today.”
No, I hadn’t heard about it.
Let’s try to put ourselves there for a moment, as Lesley and I did while staring at eagles swooping through the sky and laughing our asses off:
It’s an unusually frosty morning in a Pacific Northwest mountain town, you have a warm cup of tea in hand while padding around the kitchen, stopping to admire your backyard with this season’s rock star dogwoods busting loose in pink, when out of nowhere, strolling across your mossy backyard you see—a zebra. A ZEBRA!
Would you not feel like you’d slipped through a metaphysical crack in space and time, or slid right out of your skin casing and landed in an alternative reality—confused, delighted, questioning your sanity? I would.
With apologies to a zebra who might be scared and alone, but hopefully wild & free, here’s the story.
Consider this Lesson from a Zebra
Our imaginations are rich and wild, a bit cray-cray and unreasonable, while also lovable and human, but LIFE (such a trickster)… is so far out ahead of us, so radical and big thinking/being/giving, let’s not even try to figure out what’s next for us. Deal? Who knows when our “zebra” is going to appear, or what’s around the corner for us. We’re not supposed to know, just engage, play, listen to a favorite song a thousand times in a row, play with kids, and go out in the gloaming.
🐆 Two 🐆
On the heels of the zebra story, I saw a news bit I could only dream about:
Look at that face.
Good thing its cuddle buddy had a camera handy.
“It’s staged,” Steve, said when I showed him the photo.
“Oh, like I care!”
Look at that beautiful face with its teardrop streaks, the nose, the animal softness in the crook of the photographer’s arm. If I had a nap with a wild big cat like that, the rest of my life would be gravy. No, I can’t explain why. I just love a big cat.
Story source here.
QUESTION: If you took a nap in the wild, which animal would you most like to wake up to —putting aside danger, threats, getting eaten alive, etc? What is your fantasy pet? If the sky was the limit and we lived in a magical world?
AS A KID, MY FANTASY PET was a lion with a giant mane, or a tiger—an animal companion that could hold the full weight of my body, a pet I could lean against while daydreaming or flipping through my favorite picture book, “Come Over to My House.”
I have proof. Forget about Snoopy, he meant nothing to me.
Eventually, my mom brought home an orange kitten when I was 11, who I named Tom. He grew to be a big handsome cat who hunted mice, hid in cupboards, and loved to be photographed. I still dream about Tom. But allergies, dammit allergies, and no more cats.
The Napping Cheetah story led me to The Cheetah Experience, an endangered species breeding center. You can go there to volunteer or for a Working Holiday—two words I don’t like to see together. If you’d asked me even a year ago if I’d ever consider a working holiday on an animal sanctuary I’d give you a death stare. I’m no animal nut.
Here’s the first line from the Cheetah Experience Working Holiday webpage:
Have you always wanted to get hands-on experience working with big cats while having the freedom and time off to relax on your holiday and explore South Africa?
Why no, I have not. There’s probably not even a decent swimming pool there. But if you slapped a ticket on my desk right now, I’d drive to the airport, board a plane, and bring my allergy medicine.
Life is a trickster.
It turns in unusual directions, and takes us along, inviting us to grab its hand and run like a speedy cheetah into strange frontiers. Before we know it, we’re obsessed by African big cats and considering the once unconsiderable: like how you might actually like to feed raw meat to some lions and tigers, and shovel big cat manure in a South African village you’ve never heard of.
Consider this: Your prompt for the real world
Stop for a second, and think of one, two, even three Things that are part of your life that once-upon-a-time would have been a hard NO or unimaginable.
Mine include: move to New York City, quit drinking, run a marathon, write poetry, go to grad school, marry at 49, absolutely adore my role as aunt, godmother, grandmother, and bonus mom.
Yours: _________________________
See how our lives our filled with all kinds of Things we couldn’t begin to imagine?
So: What’s next for us? We don’t know, and we’re not supposed to. Maybe waking up to zebras and wild cats. Maybe even that is thinking too small
Let’s engage with the world, as best as we can. Let’s quiet ourselves on occasion and walk slowly down a street, and listen for the call of the wild, because:
We too are the wild.
So much is possible.
I love your wildness. xoox
Awesome. Your pursuit of mastery seems to be coming along quite nicely. I love your stylebook, and how you cover so much ground with brevity. And, of course, I love those sweet and unexpected wild things. Stay free.