dreaming with a bobcat skin.

imagining past impossibility and exploring thresholds at the cusp of summer.

Trying to dream with a bobcat skin is like trying to sleep on a bowstring.  The memory of salty air and dry grass comes off this pelt in thick, soupy sheets.  I try to relax my skull on the skin, soft tail brushing my nose, but my neck will not fully let go.  So I move her – yes, I know she was a she – to the foot of the bed, bidding her to take me with her into the underworld, just for a night.  What am I doing?  Who asks the skin of a bobcat – viscera gone nearly 3 years now – to help her dream?  Or more importantly, why are we so hell bent on keeping “reality” yoked to the wake world?

As my jaw finally drops and the weight of my skull deepens, the silky mottled skin becomes a doorway to journey deeper; I touch down on a cavernous space of another time. 

It’s warm and bright here within the circle of coals, piles of skins heaped on the ground nearby: bobcat, beaver, bear.  The sleeping humans here are nearly invisible under the layers of old life, barely detectable among the musk of fur and damp stone.  I wonder how they fall asleep with so much memory in the room – or is it that their reality is just one long breathing memory of all the beings mixed together, none more conscious than another?  Bear, stone, resin, water, coals, human…all are equally entwined as the night comes on.  I look on in wonder, but my dream body offers no weight to add to this reality.

As I sleep, a squirrel is becoming a tree as it frantically plants acorn after acorn, then curls inside the trunk to sleep.  Deer, who step quietly in the woods, are a part of the landscape emerging and receding over and over.  All is continuous, arising and resolving in and out of form. 

I don’t want to be one of those people who long for the past and fantasize about its perfection, but I do want this.  I want to be included, entwined, rightfully placed among the living.  Where the wind tells the story the grass is longing to hear, and the curve of another animals skin infuses it’s longing into my own.  To be enveloped in fur, protected by the wiser, older animals of this place.  I want to be unencumbered by my own persistent stories of who, or what I am here.  I want to sense the resin in the dark, the spring inside my marrow, the embrace of the earth on my vulnerable skin.  We humans have no shell, no formidable fur, no wing to flutter away.  We need these others deeply.

This bobcat I met after all the life had gone out of her.  A friend found her by the roadside, close to a wild stretch of Pacific Ocean on a windy rural path.  She was perfect, save the cracked skull.  He kept her, perhaps strangely, for almost a year in his freezer, before passing her to me and my 10 year old, who was especially keen to work her skin.  I remember 11a.m., the steady strokes with the sharpest blade, down the middle and along each limb; the knife tracing the soft midline that ran swift across the grass.  His kind hands slipped between skin and sinew and eased them apart with care, his high, young voice ever humming a wandering tune.  

Several seasons ago, a neurosurgeon did this to him, only his cracked skull got a titanium plate, and his life continued. 

We buried her frame under the wide, laden oak, nearly ready to drop her hefty nuts.  I remember it was a hot day in the sun, in an ever-drier season, and it was important to work quickly, with focus.  Stretched taught, the skin dried behind the woodstove from equinox to solstice.  Then we took turns scraping, peeling, egg washing, drying, and massaging the soft inner shell into a smooth surface.  It took until the following Spring, in all, for her skin to be ‘finished’, a flat memory of wondrous flesh. 

The child’s hair had grown in, the long wandering scar on his scalp nearly invisible.

So what now?  What can we imagine this skin becoming?  There was a thought of making something to wear, to carry, to hold, but this skin wanted no more of that.  This skin wanted to be free from any burden of containing.  The bed was the obvious place to both remember and honor that wild life, and besides, the cat took to sleeping there.

With this bobcat coat on my bed now, strange wonderings surface before each sleep.

Like what if each raindrop held little memories for us to integrate…a peony opening along the Mediterranean sea, the last drop of a labored breath, the first inhale of a newborn whale. 

And why don’t we humans have fur - oh how that would have made for a different story of Earth all together.  And what is sleep, but a cave to hide in while the world spins relentless in its fury for life? 

Like how to be real and un-manipulated.  How to stay alive long enough to meet oneself.

I lay down in the light, cover my eyes with cloth, and practice being still.  Maybe I’m practicing sleeping, maybe doing nothing, maybe being dead. 

Maybe I want to feel what it feels like to just be a skin, emptied out, released from all the holding, and loved anyway.

Some other offerings:
Join me this week for a deep dive into yin states through the daily practice of qigong.

I’ve been a practicing clinical herbalist for over a dozen years, and am taking new clients because the old ones keep getting better.

elemental vessel is my current creative home with dance artist Dana Iova-Koga.