My Bush Soul, the Mountain Lion
by Suzanne Duarte
Over
the years many animals, both wild and domestic, have called and spoken to me in
countless dreams as well as in "real life." I have been blessed to have lived in the Rocky Mountains
where encounters with wildlife are frequent. But the dreams of powerful "fierce creatures" of
the wild were the ones that got my attention and focused it on the
transformative significance that animals have had in my life.
Two
of the most memorable and meaningful of these dreams occurred when I was on a
wilderness retreat in the late 1980's. In order to reconnect with the Earth and my own heart, I did a six-day
and -night solo among the wild cliffs on the west side of the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains, on the northern edge of Crestone, Colorado. I have found that solo time in the
wilderness is one of the most effective ways to get out of my head and back
into my body so that the wisdom of the unconscious may speak. The following vivid animal dreams
convey the power of that experience.
As
I made my camp among the cliffs on the first night, I noticed that I was laying
my bivouac sack and sleeping bag right in the middle of an animal trail. I had to remove abundant deposits of
mountain lion and deer droppings in order to have a relatively smooth and level
place to sleep. Since I'd been
warned that I was in mountain lion territory and was alert to the possibility
of a visit by one, I was not surprised that I was visited by the local cougars
in a dream that night. But I was surprised by the content and
direction of the dream:
A mountain lion cub padded into
my camp in broad daylight when I was sitting up in my sleeping bag. I had no weapons. I sat very still, not daring to make a
sound. The cub was sniffing
curiously around the foot of my bag when its mother followed it into camp.
Knowing that there is nothing
fiercer than a big mother cat defending her young, I realized how futile any
attempt to defend myself would be if she decided I was threatening her cub. I was paralyzed with fear, frozen,
barely able to breathe. But as I
sat there, I slowly realized that it was an honor to be joined by the cub and
its mother. I felt admiration for
and kinship with them. Caught
between the conflicting emotions of fear and love, I concluded that if the
mother cougar wanted to take me, there would be nothing I could do, so I would
give her my life. I relaxed,
surrendered to the situation, breathed quietly, and just watched.
The mother mountain lion had
sauntered in and stretched out on the ground some feet away from me, seeming,
as cats do, not to take any notice of me. She was the picture of nonchalance. Following the cats' etiquette, not wishing to challenge her,
I didn't look her in the eye. We
simply sat in each other's presence for a while without making eye contact. Then a strange thing happened —
the mother cougar turned into a woman, and the woman became my friend. Suddenly we were going to a party
together.
This
dream turned out to be the first in a series of dreams about mountain lions,
which lasted for several years. The next animal dream occurred a couple of nights later, after I had
settled into the retreat and was feeling a deep level of relaxation and
contentment.
The dream began with a scan of the
outside of a sterile institutional structure, a building that expressed a
linear mindset, like one of the schools I had attended in the 1950's. The basement of the building was
crowded with indigenous women — Native North American, Latin American,
Black African, Australian Aborigine women, and others — all dressed in
traditional costumes and speaking very fast in their native tongues. They were very agitated and were
gesticulating and expressing their feelings vehemently. Among these women were two other kinds
of creatures, huge serpents and large cats. King cobra, python, boa constrictor and other enormous
snakes were coiling and hissing and arching in strike poses. Black panther, cougar, jaguar, leopard,
tiger and other great cats were pacing and snarling and roaring. None of these beings were in conflict
with each other; they were all
feeling the same entrapment in this awful structure and expressing their
frustration. The basement was
seething with the tremendous energy of these women, snakes and cats. They wanted out!
When
I awoke from this dream early in the morning, I thought, "No wonder
they're all riled up, being trapped in that institutional structure. I would be, too." Then I fell asleep again and forgot
about this dream until I was back at home.
One
night towards the end of the retreat I lay in my sleeping bag unable to sleep
for most of the night. There was a
different energy in this night, the first I was able to stay awake long enough
to see the stars. A lightning
storm thirty miles to the west in the San Juan Mountains — no thunder, but
great, silent flashes of diffused light — lit up half the sky every few
minutes. This lasted long into the
night. Between these bursts of
white light I gazed at the Milky Way arrayed brilliantly across the
crystal-clear sky. It was the time
of the new moon and the week of the annual August comet shower. Between the lightning flashes, shooting
stars enlivened the deep indigo sky. I felt incredibly blessed to be able to witness Nature's own spectacular
fireworks.
After
counting twenty shooting stars, I surrendered to a sense of wonder. I became aware for the first time,
though this was my fifth night out, that it was far from silent among the
cliffs. In the background, the
rushing sound of the creek far below echoed off the rock walls. But there was something else. I began to sense a kind of music in the
hanging world surrounding me. Even
beyond the echoes of water and the sounding and resounding of the stars loud
with light overhead, there was the music of the life around me. I became aware of the life around me. It wasn't the rustling of animals, it
was subtler. I thought about the
cougar dream and the fears I'd had that first night. Now I felt surrounded by a world that was not only friendly,
but singing to me, inviting me to a party, letting me in on its secrets, giving
me a glimpse of the magical quality of our living Earth, the living quality,
the power of ancient rocks and trees and stars. Perhaps this was the party the cougar mother was leading me
to.
It
was not until much later, years later, that the full meaning — and irony! — of the basement dream
sank in. In the short term, I
recognized the images of the dream. There was a strong presence of feminine energy, not only among the women,
but among the snakes and cats as well, associated as they are in Western
tradition with the feminine. The
indigenous women represented to me the primal feminine wisdom that is intimate
with the Earth and knows the secrets of Nature.
The
big snakes represented powerful transformative energy. I had been sympathetic with snakes
since childhood. During a field trip when I was ten years old, I had thrilled
at the smooth sinuousness of them as they wrapped and coiled themselves around
me. In later life I had outgrown
and shed my psychological skin several times, like a snake. Images of the Goddess often have snakes
coiling around Her arms. The snake
is an ancient image of the soul emerging from within the Earth.
In
my adult life I had been fascinated with big cats, and also had small cats as
my companions. The big cats
represented power, grace, beauty and a strong maternal style of leadership and
responsibility. I also recognized
that those powerful archetypal energies were trapped within myself in a rigid,
sterile institutional structure — the intellectual mindset that
structured my life. I realized that my rational, linear ways of thinking and
living were repressing the instinctual and intuitive elements of myself in the
unconscious. I saw that those
powerful forces "in the basement" were unhappy being imprisoned
within that structure, and that they could be a strong creative force in my
life.
However,
I could not foresee at the time the extent to which the dynamic image of this
dream would mark the beginning of a long rite of passage, a journey of the
soul. It was a turning point after
which the process of change would take on a particular character. I couldn't appreciate the elegant
simplicity with which this dream would symbolize the path that was to unfold;
for I couldn't foresee just how many structures in my life would be transformed
from the "basement." Both the cougar dream and the basement dream turned out to be prophetic:
it was animals that slowly, gently led me to a deeper place of heart and
grounding within myself.
• • • • •
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Once
animals had gotten my attention, I began to consciously follow the passion I
had always felt for them. That is,
I consciously attended to the coincidences in my life that involved animals and
looked for the significance of them. The Medicine Cards, by Jamie Sams
and David Carson, became a helpful reference for interpreting the gifts and
powers of North American animals according to the Native American
tradition.
Many
psychologists, particularly Jungians, have studied dreams of animals, and have recognized
animals as messengers of the wisdom of the soul. The Latin root for animal is anima, which variously connotes breath, mind, and soul, as well as
the feminine aspect of a man's personality. An animal is literally a being with a soul. Anima, as in "animating," is
the enlivening factor. Indigenous
"animistic" traditions perceive the entire natural world as alive and
ensouled. The anima mundi is the great maternal soul of the world, conceived in
various images and known by many names in the diverse cultures of the world.
The
Christian tradition gave both animals and indigenous people a bad name,
projecting onto them uncontrolled carnal appetites, beastliness and savagery,
which were actually more characteristic of immature "civilized"
humans than of animals and indigenous peoples. However, depth psychology is helping to restore animals to
their helpful, healing role in the human psyche, and also is validating the
wisdom of indigenous cultures.
I
asked Marc Barasch, author of Healing
Dreams, what he found about animals in dreams during his research. He said that animals are a primary
phenomenon in dream life. "Very often in healing dreams they have extraordinary presence,
very lifelike. They don't seem
symbolic. You almost have to
encounter them on their own terms rather than reducing them to icons or some
symbolic factor in the psyche."
He
also mentioned that indigenous cultures discuss animals in dreams as the
"animal familiars" or "totem animals." I asked Marc if he could clarify the
term "familiar." He said
that "it literally means you have a connection with a particular animal
and it becomes your totem animal. You aren't supposed to eat it or dire things will befall you. It's living its life, it's your 'bush
soul.'" He went on to say:
What kind of message does this have for us in this
culture? We are embedded in
Nature. What happens to the
natural world happens to us and what happens to us happens to the natural
world. This kinship system that
included the animals and that is still reflected in our dreams is a very
important thing to acknowledge. A lot
of people who have had no more contact with animals than a petting zoo still
have extraordinary encounters with totem animals in dreams — bears and
mountain lions and eagles. We
think it's a new age cliché — you know, like "What's your totem
animal?" I think that these
are spontaneously appearing in peoples' dreams and I'm fascinated by it.
Often the animal is the carrier
of the wisdom of the body, the carrier of the other qualities that we need to
incorporate in our lives. James
Hillman has a wonderful discussion of this. He says maybe you'll dream of a fox or maybe a weasel, some
animal you don't much care for, because very often our animal dreams are not
about these great, noble predators but about the smaller, more opportunistic
animals. These are giving us a
clue to some essential part of our personality that perhaps we haven't fully
acknowledged as natural and as our own. So if we dream about the fox maybe we have a sharp nose, maybe we're
clever or even a little bit sneaky. But that quality is not something we should simply reject as something
immoral, but maybe we have a trickster quality and we should use this animal
image or this animal feeling as a touchstone for our own growth and wholeness,
a more complete way of being in the world.
• • • • •
Because
they continued to appear in dreams, I became particularly interested in
mountain lions, a cat par excellence. Felis
concolor is known variously as mountain lion, cougar, panther, or
puma. Long before I talked to
Marc, I suspected that, in coming to me in dreams, the mountain lion was a
totem animal for me.
According
to the Medicine Cards, Mountain Lion
is a difficult power totem to have:
Mountain Lion medicine involves
lessons on the use of power in leadership . . . [and] the use and abuse of
power in a position of influence. . . . If Mountain Lion has come to you in dreams, it is a
time to stand on your own convictions and lead yourself where your heart takes
you. Others may choose to follow,
and the lessons will multiply. . . . [T]he first responsibility of leadership is to tell the truth. Know it and live it, and your example
will filter down to the tiniest cub in the pride.
When
I read this, my hair practically stood on end. I had been studying issues of leadership and power for
nearly a decade. I had also been
engaged for several years in a painful struggle to maintain my integrity in
relationship to my mother. As her
health deteriorated, she had become increasingly authoritarian and tried to
manipulate me in a confused attempt to retain control over her life. Also, only a couple of years before the
retreat in the Sangre de Cristos, I had left a job where I had observed disturbing
abuses of power that affected many people. I had stood on my convictions, spoken my truth, and led
myself where my heart took me, which was into the movement to protect the
rainforests. I was in the middle
of editing Lessons of the Rainforest when I went on the retreat where I had my first mountain lion dream. The mountain lion brought to
consciousness the two themes of "speaking truth to power" and leading
myself by following my heart that have been prominent in my life since that
retreat.
The
next mountain lion dream repeated a theme similar to the "basement"
dream. In this, as in the dreams
to follow, there was only one cougar.
I was in a large, imposing
university library, which in some ways resembled a cathedral. It had a very high ceiling with large,
leaded windows high on the walls, and a hushed, reverential atmosphere. The reverence in this case was for
higher learning, something to which I had been dedicated all my life. An elderly man in a tweed three-piece
suit and wire-rimmed glasses approached me and politely asked if he could help
me. But I suddenly became
distracted by the mountain lion standing by my side and twitching her
tail. The cougar was looking
toward the elevator from which a white-haired lady in a pink suit emerged with
a miniature white poodle on a leash. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I feared the cougar could attack and eat
the poodle, right there in the university library. I sent a psychic message to the cougar: No,
please don't. Not here. The cougar stayed where she was and I
breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that she would honor my message. Then I woke up.
In
retrospect this is a marvelously rich and ironic dream, although it took me
awhile to appreciate it. Here
again was the intellectual structure, a bastion of civilization. When I had attended the University of
California at Riverside and at Berkeley, I had worked in the libraries of both
those institutions. Although the
library in the dream did not look like UC Berkeley's library, the atmosphere
was similar to what I experienced as a student. Clearly, there was something in my ego structure that had
been imprinted by such structures of learning, symbolized by their
architecture. The wild,
instinctual aspect of myself was confronting that ego structure — in
fact, my very sense of identity. However, I was not ready, apparently, to allow my wild self to create
havoc within that structure.
In
this dream the mountain lion was out of the basement, on ground level, and was
"behaving herself" from the dream ego's point of view. She did not indicate any intention of
attacking the poodle, other than the twitching at the end of her tail, but
"I" projected that she posed a threat to order if she chose to attack
the dog. The poodle leashed to an
old lady represented to me the domestication of my instinctual nature by my
intellect, by civilization, which the mountain lion was calling attention
to. I was uncertain of the lion's
allegiance to me and whether I could "control" her, but by the end of
the dream I began to feel that this wild creature could be trusted. Meanwhile, the question of whether the
"librarian" could help me was left hanging. It was now a question that I began to address
consciously. In fact, I became
aware that the dominance of my intellect over my instinct and intuition was a
painful theme in my life.
In
subsequent mountain lion dreams, the situations involved people with whom I had
conflicts. In each of them the
cougar appeared benignly at rest in the midst of a human drama. She was there for me, like a reminder,
an ally and protector of my deepest inner truth. In the course of this series of dreams, which numbered five
in all, I became more and more comfortable with and trusting of her, until I
finally recognized her as my familiar, my "bush soul."
That
is not to say that we had a cozy, cuddly relationship — she was never my
"pet" in these dreams. Rather, she was a powerful ally with whom I had a respectful
relationship. I do not recall ever
touching her in these dreams, but there was a psychic connection between
us. She was the guardian of my
true nature, my integrity. She
bequeathed to me the confidence and courage to set boundaries and stay true to
myself in my waking life.
In
the last mountain lion dream, which was six years after the initial dream, I
was on staff at a Buddhist meditation retreat center in the Colorado
Rockies. This was the dream:
A woman who claimed to have
healing powers was adjusting people's auras. Other members of the staff were standing passively in line
to have their auras adjusted. I
was not in line, but was observing from a distance. The woman doing the adjusting came up to me and looked me in
the face. "Aren't you going
to have your aura adjusted?" she asked, as if it was something I should
do.
"No," I said, "I
don't have my aura adjusted by other humans. I get my aura adjusted by my mountain lion," gesturing
to the cougar standing next to me on the right, "and by contact with the
Earth." Then I leaned over
and touched the Earth. I woke up,
amazed.
I
hasten to add that nobody I knew claimed to "adjust peoples' auras,"
nor attempted to do so overtly. However, the dream very accurately framed for me a decision I was
compelled to make at the time. It
showed me that power relations do adjust people's auras, for good or for
ill. That is, when someone has
power over others — as is the case in every human family, group,
organization, or society — the use or abuse of that power affects
everyone's psychic field. In the
world of unenlightened people, power usually corrupts, and the effect on the
collective psychic field is negative. When challenged to prove that he was enlightened, the Buddha himself did
not appeal to human authority. Rather, he touched the Earth and said, "The Earth is my
witness."
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I didn't think I was enlightened, but this dream
signaled for me the end of a life-long struggle to prevent my aura — my
psychic field — and that of others from being adjusted in a negative,
disempowering way. Without being
fully aware of it, I underwent an internal shift and entered a new phase of my
life in which I no longer had to deal directly with abuses of power. Many confining institutional
structures, internal and external, fell away. I simply side-stepped power struggles as I stayed true to
myself and remained a free agent in my own life. It was around the time of this dream that Ecopsychology
began to call me, and it eventually became my calling.
I
have come to believe that what all animals and ecosystems deeply need and
desire for the health of their souls is to be free agents in their own lives,
and especially free of domination by humans. The mountain lion has been my subtle companion and guide on
this journey, and photos of her on my walls have kept her presence alive in my
life.
• • • • •
The
meditation center also had a resident mountain lion, observed by a number of
staff members over the years, although I never saw it myself. I wanted very much to have the honor of
seeing her (or him) in person, but was granted the next best thing. One spring I was thinking about this
mountain lion, wondering if it was still around because no one had seen it for
a year. I hoped it continued to
grace the land and decided to go out and look for signs.
As
I walked up the trail to the top of the valley, in the direction of the
national forest, I silently asked to be shown tracks: Please let me see a track so that I will know you're still here. Within a couple of minutes, just after
I had reached the top of the trail, I felt pulled to my right off the
trail. I walked slowly, scanning
the wet ground where snow was still melting. Much of the ground was either bare rock or a gravelly
surface, where I would not be able to see any traces, so I concentrated on the
soft ground and snow patches. Very
shortly I saw it: a large, clear front paw print in the mud, with a fainter
back paw print behind it. There it
was — definitely a mountain lion track — like an answer to my
prayer.
"Thank
you! Thank you!" I said
aloud, feeling joy and gratitude that the spirit of mountain lion was still
with me.
I
continued my walk along the Forest Service road that borders the center's land,
walking slowly and continuing to invite contact. I knew that people had been attacked by mountain lions along
the Front Range of the Rockies. But I also heard it was possible to scare them off by raising one's arms
and making oneself look bigger, shouting, throwing rocks and fighting back if
necessary. Cougars do not expect
their prey to fight back. I also
carried a walking stick, which — if I hit one with it — I'd heard can be sufficient to scare off a
cougar.*
However,
because of my deep sympathy and connection with these creatures, I felt no fear
and certainly had no intention of hitting a mountain lion with my walking
stick. I reasoned that mountain
lions are usually afraid of people, with good reason, and go out of their way
to avoid us. I also doubted one
would be interested in me as food. It's usually juveniles who have left their home territory that attack
people on the trails near populated areas. These are inexperienced hunters who are hungry and don't
know the dangers posed by humans. But I was far from the Front Range and was in the home territory of a
particular mountain lion. There
were miles of national forest, uninhabited by people, adjacent to the center;
and the surrounding forest offered plenty of other game.
Therefore,
I strode along the road with a light heart, keeping my senses open and looking
for more signs. As I neared the
fence that marks the west boundary, I saw another sign. In the middle of the road, only a few
feet within the boundary, sat a large pile of deer droppings. On top of it was another pile —
mountain lion scat, all big and hairy and white with crushed bone!
I
burst out laughing. It was as
though this sign, deer and mountain lion scat, was there to remind me that my
entire journey with the mountain lion as my bush soul had begun when I had
removed deer and mountain lion scat from my camp the first night I dreamed of
the mountain lion. Of course the
deer and mountain lion weren't thinking of me when they left their signs on the
road, but those signs had a powerful significance for me, nonetheless. "Thank you again!" I
said. "I see that all's
well. Thank you!" Feeling relieved and reassured by these
signs, I turned back and returned to my office.
Although
I couldn't have put it in these terms at the time, the spirit of the mountain
lion began my initiation into the deeper secrets of the psyche, which are
inseparable from the magic and mystery of Nature. After many encounters with
wild animals, my unconscious intuition has gradually become a conscious
conviction that the soul of the Earth, expressed through her sentient
creatures, responds and speaks to human souls who are open to that possibility;
for there really is no separation at the soul level. And that is what Nature and all her creatures are dying for
us humans to learn.
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*
Mountain lions are not friendly, cuddly creatures, but powerful predators who
have been known to kill people — but only very rarely. Nobody at the meditation center was
ever attacked, and the mountain lion there seemed to us then to be a
guardian spirit much more than a threat.
© Suzanne Duarte