Compass & Quill

Yesterday I went on a shamanic journey to attempt to interact with my animal guide. Here’s a link to a blog post that describes our first meeting, though it’s not nearly as long or as detailed as it should be, I’m realizing. Eventually I’ll write out the long version that’s seared into my memory, but the very short version is that I met her in a dream. I was in Paris, close to Notre Dame. I saw Snow Leopard pacing the rooftops above me, watching over me, and later she helped me clear a path through the crowd. Until yesterday, I’d never seen her in a dream or vision again, but I thought of her often.

I won’t go into the minutiae of going into the spirit realm, since I’m new to this and I can barely make sense of it for myself. But I did want to capture a couple of things that happened, because I think they’re important.

First off, when I arrived in the lower realm, I did so without specifically asking to speak to Snow Leopard. I did set an intention of speaking to and/or meeting with an animal guide, but I wanted to be open to the possibility that maybe seeing her was a one-time thing, and a new guide might appear.

Secondly, I was surprised to have a somewhat clear mental image of the lower realm. As I’ve mentioned before here, I’m an aphant, and don’t typically “see” mental images. I was prepared to not be able to see anything, and to have to get a feel of the other aspects – smell, texture, etc. However, I could actually see the landscape. I was standing in the desert. There was a man with me, standing just behind me and to my right. I couldn’t see his face, exactly, but I knew somehow that he had kind eyes and a half smile. I think he was wearing pants made out of animal hide (like buckskin, maybe), but I couldn’t quite focus on his shirt/chest area. The teacher had told us specifically that if any unexpected entities made themselves known to us in the spirit realm, we could ask them if they were negative or positive, and tell them to leave if necessary. I asked the man if he was negative, and he didn’t move his mouth but I got a firm “no.” He was a little amused, but really patient. The energy was kind of like when a nurse is talking to someone in the memory care unit, where they’ve had the same conversation over and over again with a patient, but they keep having it because it helps the patient stay calm. I felt like I was supposed to know more, maybe know him. I wondered briefly if he was someone I’ve talked to in my dreams before, but then I remembered that I was there to see my animal guide.

I looked around. The landscape was vast and flat. The sky was purple and orange, like sunset on another planet. It didn’t feel like a place we’d see on earth. I didn’t see any other creatures or people, just sand in every direction. Then I realized that it wasn’t sand; it was snow. The man told me (again, mentally) to look over there, to the right. I looked, and there was suddenly a large rock formation. Not a mountain, but far taller than a boulder. I started walking toward it, and suddenly I was on the formation, near the top. Snow Leopard was there.

So here’s where I’m going to irritate you. For the life of me, even though I know we had a conversation, I only remember a couple of pieces of it. I don’t know why. I wasn’t sleeping. I was awake and cognizant that my body was on my couch and the rest of me was on a journey. But the moment I got back to the physical plane, I lost most of what we’d talked about. Here’s what I do remember:

I’ve always wondered if Snow Leopard was male, female, or non-binary. In recent years, as my awareness has grown, I’ve endeavored to be polite and not apply a gender to her without knowing for sure. During this conversation, she told me that she was female and the mother of many, many children. She said this with an air of exhaustion, but not because she had a lot of kids. She was telling me that she had thousands (or more) children, but none of them had been as difficult as I have been. She wasn’t telling me that she was giving up on me; it was more like, “I don’t think you realize how important – and busy – I am. I don’t have time to coddle you.”

We talked without talking, just like I had with the man. Maybe that’s why it’s difficult to remember everything she said. It was images in a mind that was already working hard to hold on to the images in front of it, if that makes sense? I saw that she had giant paws, and she was sitting on this outcrop because it gave her an excellent vantage point of the world below. She was still, silent, and patient, but not in a soft way. She was coiled tight and ready to pounce, but I knew that she never actually had to. From her spot on the cliff, she could see all of her children everywhere. She implied that most were very successful, but it wasn’t a jab at my lack of success. It was more of an acknowledgement that there are infinite paths, and we travel them at our individual rates. Even if the slow ones do try her patience.

The teacher had instructed us to ask our animal guides if they would like anything, and to give them the gift that they requested. Snow Leopard asked me for something that in my imagination showed up as a green glass bowl, kind of like a fishbowl. But I realized that she wasn’t asking me for a bowl, she was telling me that she would like some water. I brought her water in my hands. It became a silver pool, like a watering hole made of quicksilver, with a flat, mirror-like surface. She drank from it. That’s really the last thing I remember before leaving the lower realm.

Today during my voice lesson, my voice teacher and I discussed some of the themes I’d learned of in the shamanic healing classes. Of course, being singers, a favorite for both of us was the intersection of vibration and healing. There’s so much there to unpack and so many avenues to explore.

But one thing my voice teacher said today stuck with me, and made me think of Snow Leopard and her silver pool. We often talk about how singing isn’t just your breath or your voice – it’s all of you, plus the things around you. Part of learning to be an opera singer is thinking about how your bones and guts vibrate and how you can manipulate your inner body to give you more space to make noise. He mentioned the fact that when two people are speaking to each other, we’re both creating vibrations, and the stronger vibrations win out. When they do, we begin to mirror each other and vibrate at the same frequency or a complementary frequency. Anyway, that mention of mirroring made me think of Snow Leopard and her watering hole.

I do remember asking if Snow Leopard wanted to come back with me, but it felt like a very selfish thing to ask a mother with an infinite number of children that she needed to keep watch over. I’m sure she’ll pop back in if and when she wants me to course correct. I do wonder about the man. Was he my spirit guide? In my original dream of Snow Leopard, during an earlier part of the dream, I was meeting with a medicine man on a reservation somewhere out West (but with lots of snow). He was maybe in his 50s or 60s, though. But I also can’t remember his face, so that’s interesting. Maybe this is the same guy, and age is a silly construct.