The animals were very vocal at the zoo today. My toddler and I got to hear close up the lion and sea lions, and from just outside their homes we heard a jaguar and the elephants. The lion roaring was especially cool. He looked right at us and snarled! The sound reverberated through me. Since he was clearly making eye contact, I decided to reach out psychically and see what it felt like to be a lion.
I immediately felt a shift in relationship with the landscape and the air. It's difficult to describe. Everything became a continuum, snow to earth, rock to sky, self/lion a part of it all. He is aware of his female companions as different than landscape, but not in the same way that we think of other human individuals. All is like a jigsaw puzzle with moving pieces. We humans smell different. Kind of like when a boy comes in from playing soccer all afternoon and you can smell his sweat and the air and boyness as he moves through the house - that's how the lions smell us. Only it's perfume and human odor and cooking smells.
The air itself felt different from the lion. Thicker. The temperature of the air carried information about the land, his companions, us humans, and the coming weather.
I don't know what inspired him to growl. It felt like an assertion of selfhood in the midst of the continuum of life. And probably there was a little bit of just being a guy, letting us humans know that he is king of the zoo. Or perhaps he was just telling us about his cushy heated rocks in the middle of Predator Ridge.
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