racoon

shadow wrestling

“Good morning, from a chilly England. You will have noticed the postings have slowed down a little from every week to approximately every two weeks, just because of the demands of work and life’s happenings.

That’s frost you can hear, crunching under foot, it’s a really cold morning. Sunrise was a glorious pink, with a base layer of orange shining through.

Todays reading tells a tale from my last trip to Vancouver, now a distant thirteen years ago. Vancouver is a haunted city, it’s both new and very old. Before it was given a name it served as a natural harbour to marine mammals. It’s estimated that it was first settled about eight to ten thousand years ago by the Coast Salish peoples, though of course it could have been much l longer ago than that.

The woodland here has been thinned out behind me, I can see right up through the forest floor. They’ve thinned it out to encourage fern growth, to invite more species into the area, more biodiversity. In Vancouver there are entire trees washed up on the black sand beaches, bleached by the sun, by the weather, their branches reach out like the arms of the kraken.

A few of you have asked why there’s a racoon on the Visible from Space logo, I will share that tale in detail in just a moment, though the short answer is—it serves to remind me that how we experience others, has a great deal to do with what’s occurring in us, in any given moment. We may not be consciously aware of our state of being, but it does shape our behaviour, which can be mistaken for personality - though we are not the adaptations that we have formed in response to the things that we’ve experienced, the adaptations that we’ve formed in response to the things that we have suffered.”

---

It had been raining hard for days when all of a sudden the weather cleared, so I set out early to walk along the seawall around Vancouver’s Stanley Park.

There’s sea salt on the air to be tasted, marine life to be glimpsed and Osprey to be seen soaring, or judging, as they always seem to be to me.

After an hour or so, I decided to step off the path and take a shortcut toward a favourite cafe. As I emerged from the woodland into a clearing, I noticed some indistinct movement a little way ahead. 

A Racoon appeared and began scurrying toward a black and yellow slither of banana peel that lay between us. I was surprised not only by its boldness, but also by an intense and competitive stirring within me.

Of course I had no interest in that raggedy banana skin before then, but just as the Racoon was almost upon it, it became as important to me as a personal treasure. 

He rose onto his back legs and swaggered forward, front paws in the air like a wrestler about to engage. I stopped, confused and incredulous at the challenge from this critter, who was not much bigger than a football. 

He stooped and snatched the peel, clutching the delicious morsel to his chest like a bandit with a bag of gold, —then ran, glancing back over his shoulder before disappearing into the thicket of trees. 

I had an impulse to give chase, but the part of me that identifies as a gentle man of the world whispered, “Its a small mammal with a banana peel, not the incarnation of all those you believe have taken too much from you”. I gathered myself and reorientated toward the cafe.

Intermittent spells of mirth and self-recrimination came over me in waves, “Man that was a bold critter, I’m glad no-one witnessed my weirdness”, interspersed with “You should have fought for it, he was laughing at you, say if someone had seen you getting bested by a Racoon”.

This conflicting narrative swirled around in my head, was mirrored in my nervous system and felt in my body as a cycle of tension and release. There had been many times when the ability to protect myself had been overwhelmed by the extraordinary dimensions of the incoming trespass.

The fight response that would have been helpful then, instead lay bound within me and took the form of coiled resentment, waiting to be projected onto the world at the speed of sound.

As ridiculous as being triggered by a Racoon and its competitive drive for a banana skin seem, there it was—a response made disproportionate in the moment, because the moment vaguely resembled unresolved conflicts from my past—the outburst surprising both myself and anyone else present. In this instance, a Racoon in Stanley Park, and perhaps the Osprey above.

Music by Yoav