Do you have an Animal Familiar?

I’ve written about her in some of my posts before. And my entire second poetry book, Die with Me: Surrendering to Suffering, is dedicated to and inspired by my relationship with her. Tabby is my animal soul mate, my familiar.

This blog post is about animals and our relationships to them. It speaks to the unconditional love that emanates from them. Specifically, it’s about the deep connection and soul bond between some humans and animals. It’s a story about me and the animals who keep me.

It of course, started in childhood.

My first pet I remember having was Sally, a boar hunting dog my dad kept. She was white and stocky, strong yet fiercely gentle. We lived in Florida at the time and my dad kept company with cowboys. Him and those cowboys used to go out into the Florida swamp lands and hunt wild boar. They had dogs they trained to help. I was too young to remember where Sally came from, but I remember we kept her outside tied to a chain in the backyard most of the time.

Sometimes I was allowed to play with her though and I remember somehow strapping that wild dog to my little red toy wagon and letting her steer me down the street in it.

And I remember when they docked her tail as a puppy. It’s a cruel practice, mostly illegal now. I didn’t see it happen, but those cowboys saved her tail, salted and dried it, and gave it to me as a good luck charm. I hung it from my bicycle handle.

One summer we went on a trip and Sally was left in the backyard on her chain. When we got home she was tangled up in it, lifeless, her water just out of reach.

The next animal I remember having was a black cat, named Kirsty.

We lived in the Appalachia mountains in southwest Virginia by that time. Kirsty was an indoor/outdoor cat, allowed to roam as freely as she pleased. I used to play with plants a lot at that age. I would go searching for flowers with stems long enough to make crowns and leaves and berries that looks delicious enough to make pretend meals.

My imagination was in full force as I would pretend I was in an orphanage and I would gather up all the plants to make beautiful meals with. There was a picnic table in the center of a hollow that I played in and I’d arrange all the plants on it, fit for a feast. Kirsty would come and watch, then play in all those delicious plants I’d set out.

She was never fixed, and she had kittens a few times. Sometime when I was 11 years old, Kirsty disappeared. She just never came home one day.

Years later, in my early 20s, one of my family members confessed to driving her miles away and dropping her off in some remote, isolated woods too far away to find her way home. She just wouldn’t stop having kittens, they said.

It was around that age when the spark of life and protective innocence of childhood began to fade.

Things got dark for many, many years.

We had a couple more animals during those dark years. A golden retriever named Zeke. And for a short time, a mate for him, Bailey. I hated them both.

There was no good reason why. They just weren’t mine. Or I wasn’t theirs. Our bond was not that of an animal familiar. I was too scarred in my heart, too protective of my vulnerabilities, to trust, even animals. I preferred the wild to the domesticated at that point in my formative childhood.

We lived in an isolated house that was tucked back into cow fields edging expansive woodlands and mountains. I don’t have many memories from those years, except the ones of the woods. Frequently, I snuck out and lost myself in those woods. I fell in love with birds I’d watch flying over the hills. I used to wish that I too, could fly away.

Then I was a teenager, and I was angry. And I was lonely. There was a park I used to frequent, especially after I could drive and had my own car. I would skip school some days, on the really hard days where it felt like too much to go be around other fractured kids and unknowing teachers. I would go to my park and spend my day wandering through the pine forest. It became a haven for me.

It was also the park where my high school cross country team practiced. I was on the team, but only because my three best friends were too. Each year we picked a new school team or activity to join. I hated running, but when our coach would release us into the park to practice our distances, my friends and I would dash off into the pine forest and get up to some good mischief.

One day, we found a puppy.

I tell the extended version of this story in my poetry book and in my post about surrendering to suffering, but in short, the puppy was abandoned. She was a bit feral. Certainly had been abused. She was near death from starvation. We had to lure her and catch her. We weren’t sure which of us would take her home, but knew one of us would.

Then, I was the only one that mangled up pup let touch. After we had lured her close with some food, she let me pick her up, hold her.

And that was all it took. She was mine. I was hers. We were kindred, one of the same. She was my animal familiar. I took her home.

I was still a teenager then and had no ability to care for a living thing. With much reluctance, my parents let me keep her, and my mom did most of the actual caring for her- the feeding and the training.

But Tabby, that puppy, gave me something during those last few years I lived in that house.

She gave me a lifeline.

Then, I turned 18 and had to go, and I couldn’t take Tabby with me. So I left her there. I left here there with my mom. And she became my mom’s dog too. And she became a link between my mom and I.

Nearly six years passed. I was in Colorado for grad school. I was a damned wreck. An awful relationship I was in had just ended. I was in the throes of a Ph.D. program, in an elitist academic culture I had no place in, and I had just separated from military service. I was vanishing away, quite literally, from all the mental health symptoms, including disordered eating.

After a visit home in Virginia, my mom insisted Tabby go back to Colorado with me. So she did. We did.

And she saved me, again and again and again. Just as I had saved her all those years ago. She became a sort of mother spirit for me. A sanctuary I rested into. A wilderness I adventured among.

And she was with me the rest of her life here.

We got about eight good years together after she came to live with me in Colorado. And then, living in Illinois, about sixteen years after we found each other in that park as broken babes, she started dying.

She died over the course of a year. She had doggie dementia, or Canine Cognitive Degeneration. Her little body remained in tact and healthy, but her mind left her. She got to forgot those early years. She no longer remembered that park, or the home I first brought her to with my own family, or even my mother.

But she never forgot me. She never stopped knowing me. Our souls were bonded. Knowing me was knowing herself.

She stayed with me until the very last breath.

After her passing, I felt my world tilt on its’ axis. I wasn’t able to fully and completely articulate what I felt without her physical presence here with me, but I knew it was simply and utterly wrong. I was not meant to be here in this physical dimension without her being here too– without my animal familiar here with me.

So she sent me a companion to hold down the fort in her absence.

She sent me my sweet and nonsensical Moon kitty.

It was only two weeks after Tabby’s passing. Ryan and I were on a vacation in California, one that was perfectly timed for the week after Tabby’s death. It was the end of the trip and we were starting our travels back to the midwest. And I started to sense something. It was the energy of a cat.

I wasn’t a cat person. Nor was Ryan. I had long forgotten about my cat, Kirsty, as a child.

But I could sense it. And I told Ryan so. That I couldn’t get another dog yet, not for some time, but that I needed another animal in my life, in our home. Okay, of course, he told me.

So it was to be a cat.

A first I told him I wanted a black cat, male, who we would name ‘Moon.’ Sure, he went along with it. I intuited into it a bit more and then said, “Actually, a black cat with some white spots, the opposite of Tabby.” That would be hard to find, he told me, but we will try.

We had just boarded the plane for our flight out of San Francisco. Before setting my phone to airplane mode, I opened google and did a search for a local animal shelter back home. I clicked on the available pets tab and scrolled. I gasped.

There he was. A black cat with white spots, named “Moon Moon.”

But the website said it was a female cat. Something about that felt wrong. I knew I wanted a male cat. I just sensed it.

First thing Monday morning, I called and asked about Moon Moon. The gave me all the details about the adoption process. “Oh, there’s one more thing,” they told me before we hung up, “Moon Moon is actually a male, we had that incorrect on the website.”

And so it was.

Moon was very hyper. He was full of youthfulness and play. It was a breath of fresh air after the long, grueling year caring for Tabby in her aging body and demented mind.

I worried though, that Moon and I would not bond, and that he would not be gentle and physically affectionate in the way I had grown used to with Tabby. But then, the first day we brought Moon home, he shared something so very special with me.

It was a few hours after we brought him home. We’d let him wander around and explore, eat, and we were all settling in. Ryan had fallen asleep on the couch and I sat leaned back in my old recliner, with a journal on my lap. It was the same chair I used to hold Tabby in.

Moon hopped up on the arm of the chair. I stilled, unsure of what he would do and wanting to remain open to any love he wanted to show me. He gently, and slowly, walked into my lap. He started purring and I began to gently pet him.

Then he turned around and he got right up to my face. He looked directly in my eyes, just a couple inches from my nose. He purred loudly. And then he rubbed against me, his cheeks to mine. Both sides of my face. And my tears started flowing. I felt it again– the bond of an animal familiar.

I felt it deep within and I knew, he was a gift.

Sent from Tabby, to infuse my broken and weary heart with the laugher of play and the wild, unrestrictive freedom of the feline.

Over the next year, Moon became a lifeline, he kept me as my animal familiar, as I navigated the waves of grief and circles of nonlinear healing that arose with Tabby’s physical death. It became more than that though. The more I got to know Moon, the more I felt into his presence and the more I saw into his eyes, I knew he was ancient and he was familiar.

His soul contained the energy of a knowing, a power, of much more than I held in my consciousness.

Moon is selective with affection. He does not give it out freely or frequently. If I’m lucky, a couple times a month he will venture into my lap when I’m seated in that chair with a journal open in my lap.

Yet, every night, when I sleep, Moon does something conspicuous. He curls up next to my head and he purrs and purrs and purrs. It’s so deep and vibratory that it often wakes me, momentarily. Sometimes I reach up to pet him, and as if he’s keeping a secret, he will jump down and scurry off at the meeting of my touch.

But like clockwork, every night, Moon sits on my mind and infuses me.

I’ve known Moon was holding space, this whole time Tabby hasn’t been here and my world has felt off kilter.

I have a dear friend, Heart of Britt, who specializes in Akashic Record readings. She is the most gifted see-er I’ve ever worked with. Two days before Tabby’s passing, she gave us a reading. And she told me Tabby would return.

“She wants to come back as a protector,” Britt told me. “A bigger, stronger dog. She will return.”

And so I have been waiting.

I have known. I’ve been listening with my heart for when I would feel her presence back in this realm.

Six months ago I started to feel her again. I told Ryan sometime in October, “Tabby is near. It won’t be long now.”

I kept my eyes peeled for any signs from the university, from Her.

And I kept dreaming of her. I saw her colors and patterning change.

And finally, I had a vision. “A black dog with white coloring, with white over an eye,” I told Ryan.

Then one nonchalant day in November, I was mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. And I saw it. A post from my cousin’s wife in Virginia. Their dogs had a litter of puppies. And I felt her.

I asked my cousin to share pictures with me, one of each puppy so I could see their faces. She posted the pictures a few days later. I started scrolling. Past the first, past the second, then I halted. And there she was. There was my girl. There was my animal familiar.

My mom even saw it too, subconsciously. She saw the pics posted too and she knew I was considering getting one of the puppies. She scrolled through, and one the same photo of the same pup I knew had Tabby’s energy, my mom left a comment, “This is Jeni’s,” she said.

And so it was.

Tabby became Astroid and my world regained balance.

I felt harmony once again. My animal familiar was home.

There is so much more I could say. But some of it, I desire to keep for myself. Some of my moments with these animals, these familiars, feel so sacred and intimate that I will keep them tucked into the corners of my heart to light up my own smile on the days I need most to remember.

I write this post, and share so much about the sacred bond I have with these souls from the animal kingdom–of the animal familiar bond– to say this: they are of the pure elements.

A purr from Moon is like bathing in a hidden mountain stream. Watching Astroid sprint around the backyard is like feeling the thunder roll in the sky. Holding Tabby in my arms felt like being held by that pine forest.

Being receptive to the bonds of animals can ground you and root you into the Earth in a way nothing else in this world can. They can heal us. They can teach us. And they are here to guide.

---

A Poetic Puppy

Do you want to sit with me,
my baby girl? 

Do you want to sing and dance
and spin and twirl?

Let's go for a walk today
no matter the rain or clouds.

Let's bark at that full moon,
give Her our best howl.

I'll love you and hold you
and learn patience as you grow.

I'll tend your needs and
we'll find our flow.

I welcome you home,
my baby girl

into my heart and soul
and poetic untolds. 

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