Spirit Guides

Those of you in the UK: Fox Welfare Society
Fun site about foxes! The Fox Box III
Shamanism & Working with Animal Spirits
Interactive Animal Spirit site: chat & message board
The Four Winds Society - Inka Shamanism

Here is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago when I was living in Boca Raton, Florida. I really did not like that place at all, but I had a good job, a man I loved, and lived in what was theoretically paradise. Although the job was good experience and just what I had dreamed of, it was a hectic, stressful job that had me dealing with a lot of very difficult people. The "luxury apartment" that we lived in sported loud, obnoxious neighbors and landscaping machines that ran every day. "Beautiful" Boca Raton was hot and muggy 300 days out of the year.

On the Window Sill

Last night one of my spirit guides visited me in a dream. He is a cat I used to have who died years ago. His name was Alistair and he appeared in my dreams several times back when he was alive. In one of the dreams he showed me the way home across our whole city, so I knew he was my spirit guide. He showed me things I had never realized and showed me answers I had in me, but couldn't find.

I dreamed that he was living with me and six other cats. The cats were young and very energetic except for Alistair and some of them would try to steal each other's food, so I had to have a setup and a plan to feed them. In addition to this craziness, the rest of my life was in chaos. Then I realized I hadn't seen Alistair in a couple of days. I had forgotten about him because there was so much else going on. Instantly I thought, oh no, he must be dead. He was old and he must have died somewhere and that's why I haven't seen him. So I was looking around and I found him lying on the window sill. I thought he was dead and I went to pet him but he was alive - weak, but alive. I rushed to get him some water - it looked like he hadn't got down from the sill because he was too sick. I felt so horrible because I had forgotten about him for two days and hadn't been there to help him. Then I woke up.

The neighbor's TV was so loud (at 9:00am on a Sunday morning) that I could hear the actual words of the show, so I got up and decided not to go straight to the computer and log on to the internet as usual, but to clean the house while playing my own music very loudly to combat the neighbor's TV. After doing this for just a few minutes, I suddenly stopped. I was just standing there in the middle of the kitchen and I couldn't keep cleaning. I sat down and said to myself, "What's wrong with you?" The answer was "I don't know." I looked out the window and saw a fast-food cup rolling from side to side in the apartment parking lot. There wasn't any more noise from the neighbors, all was quiet and you could hear the wind blowing leaves around and blowing the cup. I started to cry. I sat down and cried for a long time not knowing why and then the dream about Alistair came to my mind. He was dying and I needed to bring him some water and I had forgotten about him.

Then it came to me.

The window sill in the dream was the computer, where I sit for hours everyday, where I'm too sick to get down from, and Alistair was the Earth. I'm living in an ant farm, a beehive, a cubicle in an upscale concrete ghetto where I can't change anything and nobody cares that the Earth is dying. It needs me to bring it some water, and I don't know how to get out of where I am and go to it. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the everyday insanity of the lifestyle I'm stuck in that I forget for a couple of days, but the desperation always comes back. The only way I know how to get out of here is through my computer, through the internet - my window where I sit on the sill and watch the world. Where I can touch other people's lives for the better. Where I can click and save the rainforest.