Episode 8 of The Writer.
TW (aka The Writer) knelt and picked up the wooden carving off the floor. He sat down on the carpet, leaned against the wall and rubbed the butternut wood. It had a beautiful brown tan.
Into the wood, Sylvia had carved a butterfly riding a robin. She had given it to him for his twenty-sixth birthday. When he asked about the butterfly, she smiled. Her smile always gave her face a glow. “Oh, it’s a monarch. It’s my spirit animal. And I wanted to share it with you. If something ever happened to me, I would be with you still.”
“What’s a spirit animal?” he asked, feeling the smoothness of the carved wood in his hand.
“It’s a guide. Kind of like a guardian angel.”
He gave her words some thought.
She continued, “Everybody has a spirit animal. It’s a gift.”
“A gift?”
“Yes. From the One.”
“From the One?”
“You might call the One the Tao. The One has many Names. The Great Spirit. Father. Mother. Yahweh. Jesus. Buddha. Allah. Vishnu. Shiva. Brahma. They all apply.”
TW looked at Sylvia. He didn’t really know the person who sat before him, her legs crossed into a full lotus. This was someone who had a depth to her. The kind of depth no one else he knew had. It was as if she were an onion, pealing the outer skin off. There were many more skins to pull before he would know the real Sylvia. He wasn’t sure he deserved her. And her love. That scared him. What was he going to do?
Sylvia reached over and touched his head. A warmth surged through his body and he felt calm. It was like a peaceful evening on a beach with the ocean singing to him. Tears rolled down his face. Sylvia wiped the tears away and embraced him, and they made love.
As they lay side by side on the floor, he realized he had forgotten something. He rolled over and faced her. “What about the bird?”
Her green eyes twinkled like stars. “The robin also is my spirit animal.”
“You have two?”
“Actually the butterfly is transforming into the robin. I was a butterfly once. Now I am a robin.”
“Well, that’s interesting. Do I have a spirit animal?” he asked, frightened that he might not have one.
She reached over and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Of course, silly. You might even have more than one.”
“What is it?”
She laughed. “I am not the one who should know.”
“Then who?” He was anxious to know.
“Don’t you know?” She asked as if she was trying to get him to dig down deep inside and pull the insight out.
Now he was confused. He had always been good at digging out information from the most unlikely places. But this didn’t seem like information he could discovery through research.
He looked down at his hands. She had been holding them all along and he didn’t realize it. Her hands exuded some kind of energy from them. The energy felt like joy and peace and happiness. It was at that moment he saw that the two of them. They were levitating a good foot in the air.
“Don’t think,” she whispered. “Just enjoy.”
Uncle Bardie's Stories & Such 