Many thoughts.

The predicted high today is 36 degrees F. The sky is white, yet it's dark and ominous out. I wish it would snow, and hopefully it will.

Tomorrow night: Brother Bear with the boys. Afterwards bonding kitty-style with spiritcougar, if he can make it.

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Feeling better after so much sleep. Not 100%, but brain's working overtime. Spirit's crisp and clean-feeling, like mountain snowfall.

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My friend snow_lynx's initial entry inspired me to write my experience as a lynx person:

I only know my individual experience as a lynx, or living with lynx, as for me it's both simultaneously.

Confused? Picture a finely cut diamond with many glittering facets. Each facet represents an aspect of what makes us whole. To favor one facet over the rest it to overlook what makes us balanced and complete.

The diamond is me, Sarah. One facet is being a good friend. One facet is music. One facet is art. The others are writing, being a lesbian, being disabled, being pagan, and many more. Some facets have yet to be discovered. And of course, some facets are lynx.

Not only one. Several facets represent lynx because lynx is multidimensional. One facet is the lynx that seems to be outside of me, using me as a vessel when I meditate and "shift". When I refer to "shifting" I simply mean allowing the human mask to lower and the lynx to take full command. When lynx is in charge, lynx isn't just a common biological lynx (though I've studied them and love them). Lynx is the spiritual embodiment of lupine and feline, as Finnish and French Canadian trappers believed.

Another facet of lynx is the one integrated with me at all times. This is lynx so entwined with me that there is no separation.

I feel there are probably more aspects to lynx, but I've yet to discover them.

So then... Sarah diamond with lynx/artist/gay/writer/disabled/pagan/music-lover/good friend/etc. facets is all one being -- me.

How do I know this? Simple: I don't. It could be delusional BS. It could be wannabe role-playing. It could be a coping mechanism for my failing body. Then again, our lives could be dreams. Perhaps nothing is real, but by placing faith in it we make it so. We only use a small portion of our brains. We’re constantly making new discoveries. There’s so much we don’t know, and will probably never know. How is a spiritually symbolic lynx and a human sharing the same being so impossible to comprehend?

When I was five I wore my parents’ sheepskin rug and padded around on all fours as the family sheep dog. I did this up until the age of nine in my parents’ music store. I always played as either an animal, a bipedal animal, or an elf who communicated with animals. Until I turned eleven. I then saw the made for TV miniseries Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. The creepy bald vampire character Mr. Barlow terrified me so utterly that I was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom at night. It suddenly dawned on me to be a werewolf, as the werewolf’s thick neck fur would protect me from any vampire. >;-)

Cute, I know, yet to me at the time my life changed significantly. I saw this in a serious light, and voraciously set about studying lycanthropy, wolves, werewolf fiction and media (the ultra-cheesy to the brilliant). At twelve I saw American Werewolf in London on video when it was first released. Ah, the transformation scene! I was both frightened and exhilarated by the film. It felt familiar. Not the killing but the shifting, releasing the animal within. I broadened my research to pagan, Wiccan, and New Age studies.

I loved wolves and knew I was a werewolf. I told everyone in 8th grade who was a friend, my parents, my parents’ friends. Because I wasn’t foolish with it, and mentioned it off-the-cuff like it was no big deal (which it wasn’t -- it was just part of me), no one ever made a fuss about it. Maybe I was just lucky to have understanding parents’ and friends.

Even during this time, though, I felt something was missing. I had been raised with cats from day one. I made up my own comic, an exact copy of Elfquest, though instead of wolves they were cougars *laughs*. I wrote stories about a race of bipedal leopards that lived in treetop societies. My best friend was my cat Pye.

It wasn’t until I turned 23 that a local Asian coyote friend of mine spoke to me about it, and we did some work with Medicine Cards. I kept drawing lynx, and felt I should look into it. I did plenty of research, discovered alt.horror.werewolves in 1995, and everything fell into place.

I don’t feel that I changed or switched my non-human facets, nor do I feel like a hybrid cat/wolf. I was always lynx, but in my realm of understanding at a young age there were only werewolves. The various totemic explanations of lynx people behavior, particularly in Ted Andrews‘ Animal Speak, the Medicine Tarot, and various on-line totem pages, ring frightfully true with me.

Just because my facets of lynx are not like the scientific biological lynx in behavior, does not mean I haven’t studied natural lynxes and their behavior. I feel a surge of excitement doing so, and a longing. It’s as if seeing myself in a Canadian lynx’s eyes. My cousin studied lynxes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for her major in college. Maybe it runs in the blood? >;-)

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A highly respected “elder” from alt.horror.werewolves has deemed me as “Were” Community Threat #1! My account has been suspended and now deleted from this person’s site despite the fact that I’ve been on it from it’s inception. I’ve never once even posted on the forum there in six years.

So why am I now “Were" Community Threat #1? This, believe it or not, relates to lynx. Lynx sees through BS. Anyone who knows me knows it. Particularly as I’ve gotten older. I don’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. Most of you who know me haven’t seen me angry or fed up. When I’m either, I give no quarter and go for the throat. I never cowered before or kowtowed to this person, which apparently labeled me a lying bitch who toys with people.

Oooh, all young “Weres” out there, you’d best unsubscribe from my Friends list before I… uh… before I do what? Shout “BOO!“ at the screen? Turn all of you into lynxes? Ah, sheesh, I know… enslave you all in my “Were” Sweatshop!

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Popcorn snow drifting outside -- yes! 34 degrees. Happy.

Now to answer a virtual sleigh-full of email…