Insight: Connecting with my spirit animal

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Earlier this summer I had a conversation with a friend who asked me if I knew about spirit animals.

Gracie was a rescue cat that traveled with the Pierce Family
from Florida to New Hampshire to Maine in her lifetime.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

Not having a clue as to what that is, my friend shared with me that in some spiritual traditions or cultures, what is known as a spirit animal helps guide or protect a person on a journey through life and whose characteristics that person may share or embody. 

The term itself may be based upon beliefs held by Native Americans that it’s possible to connect with your spirit animal through meditation and they act similar to what some Christians believe are guardian angels.

My friend told me that spirit animals often visit us during times of great uncertainty or change and that identifying and interacting with them can provide us with new perspectives about our lives and a deeper spiritual connection to our place in the world.

Spirit animals are creatures we may be naturally drawn to, and my friend said thinking about what animal could be my own spirit animal would take time but once I did identify it, I could begin to see how this could be of some sort of service to me in the future.

According to my friend, studies conducted worldwide show that the most popular spirit animals are the wolf, followed by bears, deer, horses, and eagles, based upon a person’s personal strengths, weaknesses, and traits.

 
For example, a wolf can symbolize a mix of power, loyalty, guardianship, teamwork, and wildness, while a bear is known for strength, power, and tenacity. A deer is associated with gentleness, kindness, and innocence. Horses are known for freedom, nobleness, and endurance, and eagles can symbolize independence, freedom, and self-expression.

 
With my busy schedule, I never really gave the conversation about spirit animals much thought until last weekend, when an odd thing happened to me. My favorite baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, are playing games on the West Coast and on Saturday evening I stayed up late and watched the Orioles’ game against the Seattle Mariners on television.

 
The game started at 9:40 p.m. and went into extra innings before the Orioles won, 1-0, at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday. I went to bed and was sleeping soundly when something unusual woke me up.

For many years, our cat Gracie would sleep at the foot of our bed. She was a rescue cat that I took in before Nancy and I got married. She was very gentle and had been used by her previous owner as a companion to her husband, who was dying of cancer. After he died when Gracie was only 1, the owner was going to dump the cat at the local animal shelter before flying to New Jersey a day before a major hurricane was about to strike the area.

 
I volunteered to take the cat and give it a good home. Nancy came to love Gracie too after we were married the next year. We almost lost her before even getting to know her though. In the first year we had her, she was diagnosed by our veterinarian with bladder stones and was in bad shape. Money was tight and when we were told that she needed an operation costing $2,100 to save her life, we wondered how we could come up with it.

 
But our veterinarian told us he trusted us, and we agreed to pay him $300 each time we were paid. Gracie had her surgery, and the veterinarian completely rebuilt her bladder so it could function properly. She was placed on a special dry food diet so she would not encounter further bladder issues.

 
With her health restored, we then enjoyed Gracie’s company for many years, and she went with us through moves from a rented condominium to our new house in Florida. She rode on the backseat of our car when we moved from Florida to New Hampshire, and then with me in the U-Haul truck from New Hampshire to Maine.

 
She loved to sit and sleep in the sunlight and was a great companion on rainy days while reading a book or sitting in the chair beside me while I worked on the computer. Once when my cousin, his wife and their daughter visited us in New Hampshire, Nancy joined them in staging a “cat party” with Gracie as the special guest of honor.

 
But two months after we moved to Maine, Gracie’s health began to decline sharply. She was now 16 years old, and she stopped eating. One day Nancy and I came home from work and found she had died. It was very sad and although years have passed since then, both of us miss her to this day.

 
Early last Sunday morning, I woke up feeling something laying across my leg. It felt like Gracie’s paw as she used to do at night for years when stretched out on our bed. I reached down to pet her, but there was nothing there.

 
I was reminded of my conversation about my “spirit animal” and I thought to myself that maybe Gracie had returned to watch over me, fulfilling that role in my life.

 
That would be simply perfect for me. <

Insight: Possible pre-requisites for matriculation

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

Right now, many students in Maine and across the nation are preparing to head back to school and some of them are wondering what classes they will be signing up for this fall. 

Back in my final year of college at the University of New Mexico, I had already wrapped up the requirements for both my major (journalism) and my minor (history), so I had my choice of five three-hour elective courses to complete my studies and earn my Bachelor of Arts degree.

In looking over the list of available courses and discussing it with my friends and family, I was faced with a tough decision. I could either load up on fun and easy classes or try to learn something meaningful and make it worth the cost of my tuition. I decided to choose courses that offered me opportunities to relate to my daily life and upcoming professional career in journalism.

My schedule included an internship in the newsroom of the Albuquerque Journal newspaper starting at 3 p.m. every day, so my college classes needed to be mostly in the mornings. I enrolled for Spanish, Introduction to Astronomy, Film Appreciation, History of Native Americans, and American Constitutional Law.

I figured that each one of these courses would be challenging, but each one also would give me some basic knowledge to use going forward as a newspaper reporter. 

The Spanish class came very early on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 7 a.m. The Spanish instructor was the daughter of an American diplomat and had lived in Panama growing up. She was patient and funny and frequently would include singing in her lessons. Just imagine a room of adults swaying and harmonizing to “La Cucaracha” early in the morning and you’ll get the picture. Whatever she did, it worked because almost four decades later, I can still remember basic Spanish words and what they mean.

Astronomy was a large class of about 300 students and was held at 9 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays in a large science lecture hall. It included a large theater-sized projection screen for our professor to show us slides of stars and galaxies that he was talking about during each session. From that class, I carried away a rudimentary understanding of astronomical terms such as what is a quasar, where to find the Big Dipper in the night sky, and that one of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede. is the largest moon in our solar system, has its own magnetic field, and is bigger in size than the planet Mercury.

In Film Appreciation class, we watched and discussed some all-time classic movies, many of which I had never seen before. We learned about film directors, film genres and techniques used by filmmakers to tell their stories. As a huge fan of Westerns, I recall watching “Shane” for the first time in that class and being enthralled with the cinematic landscape of frontier Wyoming that director George Stevens and cinematographer Loyal Griggs depicted in that film. It’s a great story too, especially the showdown between good guy Alan Ladd and the menacing villain of the movie, Jack Palance.

The History of Native Americans class turned out to be one of my favorite courses I ever had in college. The professor was eccentric and dressed in an unusual fashion. (Think German lederhosen outfits if you know what those look like.) But he was a masterful teacher and I learned so much about Native American culture and tribes that it left me wanting to know more about the original inhabitants of the North American continent.

I learned about ancient burial mounds, inspiring Native American leaders such as Sequoyah, Tecumseh, and Black Hawk, and elaborate systems of government such as the Iroquois Confederacy.

In American Constitutional Law, I gained understanding of the structure and functioning of the U.S. government, what a tort is, and studied famous U.S. Supreme Court decisions. To this day, I can tell you why “Miranda warnings” are required to be given by police officers during an interrogation, or that in the 1963 landmark case, Gideon vs. Wainwright, the court ruled that all defendants have the right to an attorney and must be provided one by the state if they are unable to afford legal counsel.

Each of these elective courses served to broaden my education and helped me to better understand the world I live in. If I had to do it all over again and was back in college and faced with a decision about what to take, I would probably follow the same path and enroll for those same elective courses once more.

In my opinion, the purpose of education is not merely to accumulate useless facts and knowledge that you may never use again, it’s really all about growing as an individual and learning to think critically to make informed decisions later in life.

Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if everybody had some valuable insight about the subject or subjects that they tend to spout off about? <