A Familiar Presence ~ a refined version of this story appeared in Spirit of Change Magazine a while back. I've presented the original version here for it's raw immediacy, for the spontaneity of the writing.

Simply put - the cat came back. Garf died almost two months ago, at age 17. She was an old friend, and I was with her at her birth. A week ago Sunday, I was up during the night. The house was silent. While in the kitchen, without the light on, I smelled a familiar aroma. It stopped me in my tracks, leaving me forgetting what I was doing. I began to work my nostrils like a cat does, and the smell intensified. I followed it to determine if it was a physical manifestation, and found that the dispersal pattern was indeed physically correct. The aroma was that of Garf's breath. I felt her presense strongly. I knew that smell intimately from countless times I had rubbed noses with the cat. It was not just a cat smell, it was distinctly her respiration. In analyzing it, I instantly realized that if she had brushed up against my leg, or had meowed, my innate skepticism would have passed it off as imagination. But the aroma of her respiration was unmistakeable.

Garf was a familiar to me, in the magickal sense. So when I realized that she was visiting me in spirit, I wanted to see why she was there at that time. I walked into the living room, still in the dark, and asked her to allow me to see as she sees now, in her noncorporeal state. The request arose intuitively without decision on my part. Instantly, I felt huge.

The perspective of the room morphed in my vision until I felt myself as larger than the room. The room looked tiny, and I was still aware of my body's actual physical size. A feeling of awe enveloped me. I can honestly say that I felt more real than I usually do. All of the items in the room had a faint glow to them. But the most amazing thing was the feeling of gentleness I was experiencing. I felt that I was so large, and so powerful, that I had no need to be anything other than gentle! In gentleness, grace, and confidence, I had nothing to fear, there in the dark room.

Our fears live in the dark places in our lives. Cats are at home in the dark, because they have more rods in the retinas of their eyes than humans do. At my behest, Garf showed me how it feels to be powerful. This leads me to speculate on the archetypal significance of my spirit encouter. Garf's sense of smell carried her through when her blindness set in. She appealed to my sense of smell when she came to me that night.

Her blindness was a result of a degenerative heart condition. When we are not fully centered in the love that flows through our hearts we experience fear. And in fear we cannot see clearly. Garf showed me how much power is present when one rises above doubts, and then above fears. The darkness is still here, but gentleness opens the heart to a place that is larger than the fears. So the fears need not be banished nor extinguished. They can stay.

While she was still alive, toward the end of her life, Garf would often howl in the night. It was a soul-wrenching sound that I now know was a vocalization of the fear she had from her weak heart and blind eyes. But beyond that howling, she was as gentle and as peaceful as could be. I know now that she chose the love instead of the fear; and that she only howled to let the fear out, and to keep it from consuming her.

These are lessons that I learned from the spirit of a beautiful being.