Mozart Chronicles: Who Was Mozart the Moluccan?

Mozart was a very old wild-caught Moluccan cockatoo from Indonesia. He abhorred captivity, it broke his heart he would say many times.

He had been imported by a breeder but the breeder soon removed him from the breeder flights. He wouldn't breed. Unlike many male Moluccans in a breeding situation, he never harmed one of the females he was caged with. Instead, he mashed their eggs. So the breeder removed him and brought him inside to be a pet.

There he was ignored for 10 years. When I adopted him the rescue coordinator explained his egg mashing behavior to me. She said they joked that he was gay. But contrary to this, I received my first instantaneous communication from Mozart, "he doesn't want his children to be born in captivity," I told her.

Later when Mozart and I were to appear on the Pet Psychic with Sonya Fitzpatrick, she confirmed that he didn't want any more girlfriends and that for this reason he might be gay. Mozart wouldn't have cared what anyone thought about his sexual preferences, like any good Buddha, as long as he didn't have to propagate under duress.

Mozart Chronicles: Reality or Something Like It

Practical Advice on Modern Living from a Geriatric Cockatoo
Sometimes I tell people how Mozart talked to me, out loud, in English, in complete sentences and fully cognizant of what he was saying, and I get a half-cocked grin in reply, especially from people who have parrots themselves. The ones who have parrots themselves get mad or jealous. Their parrots don't talk to them like that, they say. "Well," I reply, "maybe they don't because they know you think they're just a bird brain or that you think you're some advanced being when actually it's them who are the advanced being."

That's usually the end of the discussion. But sometimes I know the person is a true bird lover, who really does admire the intellectual capabilities of their feathered friends. And to them I say, "Well I think that maybe deep, deep down part of you doesn't really believe they're as intelligent as yourself. You maybe think they are somewhat intelligent but you still think you're smarter." Then that's usually the end of the discussion. Then there are the two or three people I've met and heard about over the years, who believe in the deepest parts of their soul that their precious feathered friends are not only equal in intelligence but also in every other way. And those people and I get really excited when we talk to each other because we've had similar experiences. Then there are those people who nod silently, who 'know' but are afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled a nutty bird owner. And lastly there are the people whom do have these experiences with their feathered friends and simply ignore them, unprepared for what it may mean.

Fourteen Years of Silence Broken
I don't know why Mozart decided to start talking to me this way. He'd never spoken before in his fourteen years of captivity until the day we brought him home. I feel he sensed my deeply seated belief that his life and my life were on equal planes. But, as I've noticed some animals do, he probably watched the movie of my life which is playing above my head in my crown chakra in an endless rerun and saw that one day when I was eighteen years old and walked into a pet store. I hurried through the store looking for a certain kind of fish food for my goldfish, Romulus, when I came around an aisle and stopped dead in my tracks. There in a much too small cage, as is so often the case, in front of me, was a majestic Moluccan King Lory looking out at me.

His eyes held me captive. In them, I saw an intelligence, a sentience, a depth and a sorrow of which magnitude I don't often even see in the eyes of my fellow humans. I choked, his sorrow filled my heart with a profound sadness and a sense of injustice. This is the surge of clairsentience that any true animal lover is familiar with. For weeks afterward, his eyes haunted me. I never forgot him. Today, my heart still pangs with remorse for the fate of this gorgeous, wild being who should have soared his whole life over the mountainous gorges of Seram, Indonesia. So maybe Mozart saw that moment in my life, or other moments like it when I've connected with a nonhuman intelligence and been haunted for days and weeks afterward and been forever changed, forever pivoted into another being's point of view and unable to ever really go a full 180 degrees back to my own, wracked by some gross injustice I was powerless to stop.

But talk to me he did. Not very much at first, just simple stuff like saying 'thank you' and requesting favorite foods. I noticed his pronunciation was not that great though and I set about to help him speak more clearly. Parrots learn more about mimicking the sounds of human mouths by watching how those mouths actually form the sounds than by listening to them. So one afternoon, I set about to teach him one of the hardest sounds for a parrot to make, the 'b' sound, a plosive, as it's called. With my mouth close to his, as he hung off the side of his cage, I said distinctly, "Mozart, you have a black beak. Your beak is big and black," emphasizing the b's. He turned his head to one side and zoomed a big black eye up next to mine and said slowly but clearly in a sweet little voice reminiscent of Felix the cat, "And you don't have one?"

An Intelligence That Mirrors Our Own
My eyes opened wide and my jaw loosened and then dropped. I stared into his eye for a moment or two. In that big black eye, I saw glimmers of wisdom earned from years of jungle living and untold, harrowing adventures in short quick flashes. I thought about how this incredible bird was older than me, older than my parents even, and smart enough to be able to engage in conversation with a totally dissimilar species. But I didn't want to lose this moment. I fumbled and thought 'what do I have instead of a beak?' I parted my lips and bared my teeth, "No I don't have a beak, I have teeth," I said and tapped on my front teeth with my fingernail to show him the hardness of them. His focus turned to my teeth which truly fascinated him. He leaned out, reaching his beak forward and gently tapped one of my big front teeth with the curve of his huge beak. The two biological tools we shared, meant for rending food in some manner, clicked together and then he straightened up. His question was answered. He understood.

During that first week he shared with us, we immediately learned he abhorred any type of activity with the slightest hint of violence to it. One evening we sat back to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Mozart. A favorite scene came on in which two knights engaged in a standing joust. As the knights heaved and hoed back and forth between thrusts of their lances, Mozart imitated and leaned back and forth and groaned and moaned much like anyone you might see watching a prizefighting match. Then one knight put his lance through the eyehole of the other's helmet and gallons of blood then gushed forth out of the lanced knight's helmet. Mozart froze, looked at both us to see our reaction and then screamed! He screamed and screamed in protest until we finally acquiesced and changed the channel. This type of violent entertainment was totally unacceptable to him.

The Parrot Pacifist
We soon learned that other unacceptable, seemingly violent, programming included basketball, hockey, and football. Any hint at all of physical contest and especially prizefights were totally unacceptable for us to watch with Mozart. Even if my husband, Christian, and I were to watch television downstairs with the volume turned down, he still knew what we were watching. We finally figured out he could see everything we could see and hear regardless of where we were physically. He would scream with a loud, angry shriek that was truly deafening. Even cracking an egg to make scrambled eggs on the weekend would elicit an angry shriek from the little Buddha Bird watching us in his mind's eye from upstairs. Our penchant for blowing away virtual people and creatures on my Playstation was just as unacceptable. Finally I would explain to Mozart over and over again, "Motz! (pronounced Motes) They're not real! It's ok! They're not real! It's just a game (movie, etc.)." After several years, Mozart was able to handle television violence and Playstation games a little better but he still had a tolerance threshold. During that time we discovered the antidote for all this horribly upsetting behavior was to watch ballet or Riverdance or some such programming. Elvis movies were a favorite. He stood transfixed in front of the television gently swaying his head back and forth in the true Moluccan cockatoo waltz as he watched Celtic dancers or ballerinas seemingly float across the stage, and Elvis too.

The Humorous Buddhist
As Mozart loosened up a little with his Gandhi-like approach to life, he displayed a sense of humor too. Playing with Chris one evening, he playbit him softly on the thumb. Chris seized the opportunity to admonish our little peace loving friend, "Hey you bit me!" he cried to Mozart in mock indignation, "I thought you were a Buddhist!" Mozart swung his head out near to Chris' and said smilingly, "I am!" After living with Mozart for about four years, I had come to rely on him for practical advice on daily living. Thinking he could foretell future events, I asked him about returning to a job I had very much disliked. "Pat," he said sadly, "don't go back." I ignored his wise advice and went back to that job, needing money very badly at that point. Six months later, I lay sleepless in my bed, pulling my hair out as I reviewed the day's events of working at an abusive corporation. Agonizing over the verbal abuse I dealt with daily, I could think of nothing to ease my mind and remove the heartless corporate vampires from my thoughts. At last, around 3am when all hopes of a restful night's sleep were lost, Mozart piped up from his cage, next to my bed. "Pat!" he said softly, gently, "they're not real."

Relief from Reality
Nothing in the world could have relieved my mental agony at that moment, nothing! But those three little words caused me to burst into hysterical laughter! I buried my face in my pillow and laughed as heartily as I have ever laughed in my whole life!

Of course he was right! They really weren't real! They were just hollow shells of non-awareness, judgmental sticks in the mud, stuck in the drudgery of the corporate rat race! They were just caught in the matrix of a slave world where people expend almost their entire lives in pursuit of the bottom line trapped behind a desk for fifty or sixty hours a week like captive birds in a pet store. I was still real. I hadn't sold out and lost my humanity in the process and caused others to suffer mental agony for the purposes of my own advancement on the corporate ladder.

I had learned from my sweet feathered friend that there is an entire reality of intelligence and altruism existing in natural harmony with the universe, the world of nature. I had learned that animals and every living being attunes easily, with almost no effort, to the universal intelligence to achieve whatever goal it sets for itself according to its desires. I had learned that wild animals living in nature were as evolved as they wanted to be and that we seemed to be more a pawn of our own evolution than truly free within it. The real world was the world where Mozart had come from, the rainforest, and in that place, spoken language is not a measure of intelligence, it is a veil that conceals the meaning of life which is simply to feel alive. I went to work the next day and put a sticky note up next to my computer monitor which read in large, bold letters, "They're not real." When the corporate vampires walked by, they saw it and looked unsettled. Who knows what they thought. It was their turn to lose some sleep.

Mozart Chronicles: The Spaghetti Incident

Mozart had been living upstairs in the bedroom with us for his three month quarantine period.

His cage was too big to put anywhere else really. So we set him up for the winter right next to the bed and bought him an infrared panel heater to keep him warm.

Mozart enjoyed eating and when we first adopted him, he was rather portly. He would tell me years later that the only good thing about captivity was the food. I learned quickly that his favorite food was macaroni and cheese. After giving him a bowl of it one evening, I walked away down the hallway when he called after me "Thank you!" at the top of his lungs which means it sounded like he was using a megaphone, "THANK YOU!"

I decided to try giving him other pastas. So after a spaghetti with meat sauce supper one night, I took his bowl and filled it with some leftovers. I expected him to start scarfing it down immediately but instead he gave me a kindly compassionate look and ignored the dish entirely.

I was puzzled. "Mozart," I asked, "don't you want to even try the spaghetti and yummy meat sauce?" He used one of his big black eyes to zoom in quizzically on the bowl, tilting his head to one side. Now that he was sure he had my attention, he put his head in the dish and began to eat.

Or so it seemed.

In amazement, I watched as the huge bird spent nearly an hour tenderly picking each tiny piece of beef out of the pasta sauce and placing them all to the side of his bowl in a little pile.

I couldn't believe my eyes. One after the other, a seemingly infinite number of tiny little pieces of meat made their way through his beak away from the spaghetti and into the little pile beside it. He was so careful that not a single piece of the meat was bruised or broken.

Mesmerized, I sat down near him and watched him as he continued this daunting task. The little pieces of beef seemed endless in number. Yet he kept on, with the same patient gentleness extended to each piece of meat.

Finally he was done and then, and only then, he began to eat the now cold spaghetti. He sat back on his perch and slowly sucked a long piece of pasta up into his beak. I stared at the pile of ground beef which had been extracted so painstakingly from the pasta sauce and noticed that he had also carefully licked off all the pasta sauce from each piece of meat. Each piece of meat was now as clean as it was before it had been cooked. The little pile of meat was not a pile, it was a funeral mound.

He looked at me, smiling a cockatoo smile, his cheek feathers curled up around his beak in contentment. My eyes watered. I knew that he had been teaching me that he considered each little piece of meat to be sacred, that it had once been a cow and that he respected that cow, that he was honoring the soul that had once animated this flesh and that he would never, ever eat the flesh of another being.

I lowered my head and felt ashamed. Here this gentle bird, who had the capacity for such destruction, had used his powerful beak in gentleness to honor a life that I had not even considered for one minute. I looked at my huge pink bird with new eyes.

"Are you a Buddhist or something?" I asked him.

His cheek feathers curled up even more totally concealing his beak in a big smug smirk. From then on we began calling him our "Buddha bird" and wondered to ourselves how we, people who dedicated all of our resources to helping and saving animals, could have turned our backs on those on our dinner plates. And so we began to struggle with our diet and started a long, arduous journey towards becoming vegetarians.

Five years later, and only about a month after Mozart had left his body and traveled into spirit, we sat in the sun room of our new house. It was a difficult time. We had lost our beloved Mozart, a pet who had become our mentor and sort of our grandfather, and we had moved into our new house without actually owning it yet due to the incompetence of our mortgage broker. We were trying to celebrate and lift our spirits a little. Chris had bought a couple of steaks and grilled them up. I didn't want any but I knew Chris was not ready to become a vegetarian and bringing this up now would only add to his stress. So I remained quiet.

Chris put the plates on the table and sat down. He picked up his cutlery and began polishing it with his napkin. "I wonder," he perused, "if we're going to get ripped off in this real estate deal."

From our neighbor's yard came a loud scream! It wasn't a human scream! It was the unmistakable territorial yell of a Moluccan cockatoo. I knew it was Mozart, his spirit had been hanging around for weeks making incredible things happen. He was watching over us. But would Chris realize this also?

"What was that?" Chris asked, startled and rattled. I said nothing. "That sounded like Motz!" he added.

"It was Motz," I said quietly.

Wide eyed Chris looked at his plate. He was not surprised that our cockatoo friend had the ability to still manifest in the physical world. I waited while he stared longer at his steak. I could hear Mozart now in my head, his deep but soft voice was gently urging me, "BE-come vegetarians..."

Finally I broke the silence, "What are you thinking about?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about Mozart picking all those little pieces of meat out of the meat sauce," he answered incredulously. I knew it! I knew Mozart was right there, working us both over as best he could. But would he really be able to get through Chris' sometimes very thick skull? And his selfish attachment to flesh food? Yes! He was that powerful.

"He wants us to be vegetarians doesn't he?" Chris looked at me rather dolefully.

"Yes dear, he does. Can we be?"

"We'll work on it," he replied.

It would be another year and two Moluccans later before Chris' realization would become reality. Chopin would come and go and then Happy, the 9 year old domestic raised Moluccan, would join us. He and Chris became extremely close and somehow, Happy managed to pick up where Mozart had left off, and Mozart was able to continue his work through Happy! For one summer day after spending the entire afternoon snuggling with Happy, Chris announced during dinner, "I think we should do it. We should get ready and take the plunge and become vegetarians. I think it's the right thing to do."

Silently I rejoiced. Now Mozart wasn't the only Buddhist in the family. We all were.

---

As I prepared to write this story, one I have told to many friends and acquaintances over the years, I sifted through old photos of Mozart. I was stunned to find this photo which is an actual photo of The Spaghetti Incident and clearly shows the pile of ground beef in a little funeral mound in his bowl. Surely Mozart planned everything carefully, including my finding this photo.

Mozart's Starling's Epitaph

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man (as opposed to the cockatoo), was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave on a rainy December 5, 1791. His pet starling, who had died years before, received a first class funeral and a grave marked with a headstone. The headstone engraving (see below) was written by Mozart himself. As you read in my post from yesterday, this little starling read Mozart's mind as the composer walked by a pet store and whistled the theme from a concerto Mozart was composing in his head at the time.

Mozart's Starling's Epitaph

A little fool lies here
Whom I held dear-
A starling in the prime
Of his brief time
Whose doom it was to drain
Death's bitter pain.
Thinking of this, my heart
Is riven apart.
Oh reader! Shed a tear,
You also, here.
He was not naughty, quite,
But gay and bright,
And under all his brag
A foolish wag.
This no one can gainsay
And I will lay
That he is now on high,
And from the sky,
Praises me without pay
In his friendly way.
Yet unaware that death
Has choked his breath,
And thoughtless of the one
Whose rime is thus well done.

Read more about
Mozart and his musical bird

Mozart Chronicles: Magical Mystery Tour

Mozart's Magical Mystery Tour

by Patti Henningsen

May 27, 1784
Vienna, Austria

Wolfgang Mozart skips down a crowded Vienna street, coins jingling in his waistcoat pocket. Times are good. He's just completed composition of a lovely piano concerto in G Major. The main theme of it plays repeatedly in his head as he contemplates the structure of the credenza he'll add to the finale.

He passes a pet shop, a beastly place packed with filthy cages and various animals barely surviving. Suddenly, the composer reels about! He looks up at a bird cage dangling above his head and stares incredulously at the starling therein who is boldly and defiantly whistling the main theme from the concerto he has just written!

"Das war schon," he proclaims ("That was beautiful!"). In the compulsive daze which most people find themselves in during the moments they purchase an animal they understand little about, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hands over 34 Kreuzer to the shopkeeper and proceeds homeward with his new pet starling. As soon as he arrives home, he jots down the song his starling has been singing. It is nearly identical to the theme of his just-completed concerto, not yet sold or even published.1

For three years, the bird and composer would be closest of friends and eventually, after the bird's death, Mozart would give him a first-class funeral. Mozart himself would end up in an unmarked, common grave with the ink still drying on his Requiem Mass--perhaps the greatest travesty of genius in history.

December 10, 1997

Vienna, Virginia

He's Leaving Home

After ten years, Don and Jane have finally decided to donate their maverick Moluccan cockatoo to Parrot Rescue. For a decade, he's perched silently atop his living room cage watching their children grow up and learn to speak. And watched the two macaws across the room receive all the attention he, as a wild-caught, semi-tame bird, cannot accept. His wildness has kept him at arm's length from the deep emotional bonding his species demands from their companions. Don and Jane are tired of feeling guilty and place a call to Dede, the Parrot Rescue coordinator. The bird they call Conan is picked up and on his way to four months of foster care while an adoptive owner is sought out.

Through a truly strange, serendipitous event, I make the acquaintance of Dede in person one day. We have actually known each other several years through online correspondence--we just didn't know we were practically neighbors. I tell her I want to adopt a large bird, as I already have two medium-sized parrots. My Amazon couple are starting to need me less and less as their pair bond deepens. The male, Pumpkinhead, now about seven years of age, has reached sexual maturity. I know it will be several years, if not more, before he returns to his previous, loving self and craves my attention as he did when he was three months old. After convincing my husband, Chris, that we should get a cockatoo, Dede tells me about this 'huge, pink Moluccan' she wants to adopt out to an experienced parrot person, like me.

I've Got a Feeling

That first night, we put the bird we had decided to call Mozart in a cage in our bedroom where it is quiet and peaceful. It was recommended that he be quarantined from our other birds for at least three months. Mozart, the big, pink cockatoo, would feel safe here and more like we were all roosting together. In the wild, according to villagers on the island Mozart is from, large families of cockatoos sleep together in their hollowed-out tree nests and snore loudly all night.2 Luckily, Mozart did not snore, but about 3:15am on the dot, he softly began imitating the sound of an alarm clock. He would do this every night at this precise time for the next week. I discovered that's what time his foster father got up every morning to leave for an early shift. The precision of Mozart's alarm clock call was eerie. I began awaking at 3:14AM and was amazed that he began his alarm call the split second that our clock turned to 3:15.

I'm Looking Through You

But this feat did not compare to what happened about 4:30AM that first morning. (Luckily, it was Saturday and we could sleep in!) Chris and I began stirring about the same time just before dawn. We were both awake and heard the sound of Mozart eliminating and the plop! of his droppings on the cage floor. Amazingly, this was followed with Mozart uttering, 'Doo doo! Good boy!' We both shot straight up in bed, 'Did you hear that?î I yelled to my husband. 'Yes! He said what Pumpkinhead always says!' Mozart not only was talking for the first time in his fourteen years of captivity--with perfect enunciation I might add--but he had somehow picked up on the phrase I'd been using for ten years to potty-train my other parrots (yes, they can do that!). How did he do this? He hadn't even seen my other birds and came into the house when they were already sleeping so he couldn't have heard them either.

What was going on here? I was totally spooked. I actually began to feel afraid of this huge, angelic looking creature who somewhat resembled a wedding cake. Softly scalloped tones of pastel coral and buttercup blend together all over his feather-cloaked body giving him an ethereal, unworldly beauty. For weeks I would stare at him for long periods like Danté beholding Beatrice. He would continue to speak during the next week, and ever on after that. Sitting near him, transfixed by his rose-like beauty, I wondered endlessly about his odd abilities.

Do not curse the king, even in your thought; Do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom; For a bird of the air may carry your voice, And a bird in flight may tell the matter.

Ecclesiastes 10:20

Unable to sleep anymore since I had brought this unusually talented bird into my life, I lay awake thinking all night instead of sleeping--as I am wont to do and as is my curse in life. Many thoughts swam through my head; I thought about the saying, 'A little bird told me...,' I thought about the legendary Merlin (the magical owl friend of King Arthur), I thought about Old Abe, the battle Eagle of the Union Army during the Civil War, I thought about Mozart. I queried silently to myself in my head, 'I wonder if Mozart's telepathic?' 'Yes!' he proclaimed from his perch, answering my thought question aloud, his first utterance all day. I froze in fear where I lay. My mind raced, 'Are you really?' I thought again. 'Yes! Yes!' he once again answered aloud. Two more times I asked him and twice more he answered affirmatively, 'Uh-huh,' and 'Yeah Yeah Yeah!!!!!' In the cold, dark room, I panicked, totally spooked and frightened by this revelation. I passed out from fear.

Across the Universe

The things I continue to learn during the next three years from my precious pink cockatoo, who happens to be an endangered species, would reverberate through my life and the lives of my family and friends. I was brought kicking and screaming to the conclusion that science as we know it falls far short of understanding even the rudiments of the natural world. And it would remind me, ever so oddly, of the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his starling and what this genius of long ago must have discovered for himself from his little irridescent-feathered friend. To both Mozarts, I say, voila!

---

1 Sturnus, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 1993), "Mozart's Fine Feathered Friend," by Malcolm Gladwell. North American Starling Fanciers Association.

2 BirdTalk, May 2000, pp. 76-83, "Spice Birds," by P. B. Henningsen. Fancy Publications.

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The Holographic Wolf

The great expanse of time. The ultimate mystery. I have read that quantum physicists like to compare the theory of time to swirls of creamer in your coffee. It is folding in on itself, an uroboros chasing its tail, the beginning meeting the end and the middle a big bowl of jelly.

That is something hard to wrap your mind around but I do understand the idea of time being nonlinear, I just didn’t experience it like creamer in a coffee cup when I saw the man on the other side of the red plane which I wrote about yesterday. The red plane, like a great pane of red-tinted glass, which I saw dividing the Earth seemingly in half, I interpreted as a representation of time.

That early man and I were in the same space, the same spot on Earth but we were not in the same time. Yet we stood there together. The red ‘filter’, like a filter on a camera lens was the key, it was a window through time and it was suspiciously like a hologram as well. At the time, I hadn’t yet read Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe but later I would and then I realized the significance of the similarity of my experience to a living hologram.

Later I would study such things in great depth, holograms, quantum physics, remote viewing, and while doing so, I read about a remote viewing exercise called “open search inward” and I had a spontaneous experience of this almost immediately. The result was the direct experience of some of my past lives. Now I had gone through past life regressions before and one in particular was simply astonishing but these were different. This wasn’t just one past life, this was five or six of the very first ones! And in each one, I was an animal. I’ll save the first ones for another post but the last one that I saw is the pertinent one here.

You guessed it. I was a wolf. And I was looking at another wolf from my pack and he was looking back at me. Around his neck was a metal collar and a broken chain link hanging down. The accompanying information of the lifetime was also immediate, this wolf had escaped captivity and he was the leader of the pack and had returned to his pack. And I knew, looking in his eyes, that the soul which occupied his wolf body was the same soul which now occupied my collie, Wolfgang’s body.

There is a thing called ‘soul recognition’ which is the very basis of sentience. If you cannot see the soul which animates all life, then your soul is still stirring in the dark depths. This soul I saw in this wolf was one I had been traveling with for a while. After experiencing this spontaneous open search inward, I was very excited to have seen some of the animals I had been. Of course who wouldn’t be! But I was even more excited to see at last, that my old friend Wolfgang had been a friend to me for such a very long time. I ran outside to see him and he lay out there in the summer sun, relaxing, now an old man for a dog, thirteen years old but still just as magnificent as ever. He looked over at me and I ran up to him, calling to him under my breath, “Wolfie! Wolfie I know! That was you! I know!”

He diverted his eyes from me for just a moment and then looked back into mine. “Finally,” his eyes conveyed a patient expression. Then our eyes locked and laser beams of wordless, timeless thought passed between us. He had been that unchained wolf, and he had been that stone age man. He was not only my ancestor, my dog, my protector, and faithful companion through the eons, he was me. Our souls sprang together from the same source and were inextricably interwoven for eternity. United as companions on a soul survival journey, he had shown me the raw power and grace that I would need to successful find my way in a brutal Universe. And now his job was done. He could pass on now and attend to other tasks. But he would be back later just in case I should ever need him and of course, on the next go around, he would be there as well as he always had been for thousands of years. Now that is my definition of a best friend.

Namaste Wolfgang.

Wolves on The Red Road or A Highway Through Time

Yesterday I said I would talk about a mystical experience I had with my dogs, Wolfgang and Foxfire, many years ago.

Wolfgang, at the time, was a 95lb. mahogany, dark sable collie who had been, for the most part, feral when we adopted him. He had come to us through collie rescue and to there from a local shelter where he'd ended up because, as his original owner told us, 'he kept running away, breaking into neighbor's houses and ransacking their kitchens.' He was a hard headed dog, but never vicious, who had his own ideas about everything.

We adopted him to be a companion to the beautiful Foxfire, our blue merle collie girl. And so my husband, Wolfgang, Foxfire and I were all walking one day at the archery range where we often took them. It was a hot summer day and I had been enjoying watching Wolfgang run like lightning across the fields, his body in top form, his athleticism and sheer, rippling red fur and muscles bristling in the dragging air created by his bolting body. Low to the ground he ran, like a cheetah; front legs stretched nearly horizontally in front of him and hind legs stretched nearly horizontally underneath him, then switching, in the rhythmic, poetic motion of a wolf at top speed.

Foxfire enjoyed it too and barked at him, not bothering to try and keep up. He was doing it, after all, to impress all of us, including her, though there was no need to win the silver girl's heart, for she loved everyone and this new red dog in her life was another blessing she accepted with her usual grace.

SCARLET HAZE
As my eyes gazed upon this scene of that bygone summer day, I squinted just a bit in the bright sunlight and admired the deep mahogany color of my gorgeous collie dog friend. As I squinted in the sunlight, and Wolf tore across the hillside above the cornfield, I blinked for a nanosecond. When I opened my eyes from this blink it seemed as if there had appeared, about thirty feet in front of me, a transparent red vertical plane stretching all the way up into the sky and all the way west and east of me. It was as if a great piece of red glass had appeared and divided the entire Earth in half. On one side of this red 'filter' were myself, my husband and my dogs. On the other side, looking out over undeveloped countryside as far as the eye could see, stood a man wearing animal skin over his hips and loins, with medium-length, unruly hair, and carrying something I could not identify in one of his hands. For the briefest blink of a moment we stood and observed each other. He saw me and I saw him.

The man's eyes then were diverted back to what he had been looking at and admiring, my dogs, specifically Wolfgang. We both were united across the eons by our mutual appreciation of this stupendous dog.

And the moment was over, I blinked again and he was gone.

THE VORTEX OF TIME'S ILLUSION
For many years I wondered what it had meant. I did know that the eyes I was looking into for that brief moment were not of my time, that I was looking into the distant past, the very distant past. I also had seen an intelligence in those eyes that was the same caliber as my own, there was no cro magnon brain operating those orbs of perception, this ancient man was of the same breadth of mind and sweep of intellect as I felt I could claim to possess. And his eyes were kind, they were the eyes of a dog lover, which are usually kind. He was admiring my dogs and perhaps, perchance he was even considering the benefits one might enjoy from possibly domesticating this wolf-like animal (who also happened to be named Wolf).

At some point between that day and this day, I did deduce that this experience had been partially the result of a spontaneous moment of psychometry. Around the same time that this encounter with the man on the other side of the red plane had happened, I had acquired my from my grandfather, a couple of ancient arrowheads, one Yuma point and another even older 'point,' as arrowheads are called. And probably the man who forged one of them was who I encountered that day. Perhaps. But now, with all of the things I have learned from my animal friends since then, and all the new evidence science has uncovered about the distant past since then and also the wonders of quantum physics, I also know now that those eyes were the eyes of one of my ancestors.

I haven't put all the pieces of the puzzle together yet, that is the fun of living, the endless puzzle. It isn't solved by dying either, I have learned, so don't be disappointed to find that leaving your body isn't an instant key to all knowledge. But this man on the other side of the red plane was my relative and I was his progeny and our dog, yes, OUR dog, had been a faithful traveling partner to both of us in our respective times.

I would have another experience with Wolfgang only a year or so before he passed on in which it was revealed to me, by him, that we were both once wolves together. And that perhaps someone had tried to domesticate dogs in a forceful way without success. Their failure at doing this would stay with Wolfgang through many, many incarnations. But I will talk about that tomorrow.