Meditative Nuggets

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Below.

Sometimes there are real nuggets in these meditations, especially the Saturday  morning  ones  when  The  Treat usually shows up.

Today was another lovely one with me at a festival of some sort. I was sitting on the perimeter, watching all the people come and go, talking to my readers who dropped by,  and  signing  the  occasional books.  The  mood  was light-hearted and friendly, and I knew the authors sitting on the perimeter with me, chatting with me. All friendly and lovely.

Someone left a book for me there. Some sort of book of days that  explained people and personalities and told their  deepest  secrets  and  what was  best  and worst  for them. The book was filled with important knowledge for whom and what we are. It was like the Grand Poobah of all personality keys. Someone asked if it was the Bible because it was so big. Someone else thought it was the book in which our names are written in  the heavenly realms. The Book of Life.

I flipped gingerly through the book, noting dates and names of people I knew, looking for my own and skimming past it because I already knew most of the information there,  looking  for the authors  and  teachers beside me, talking with them about the book. I couldn’t  even remember who’d  left  the  book  for  me,  but  they  were some sort of guide or teacher who’d thought it would be invaluable to me.

As I looked through the book, The Treat walked by, a little too shy to just come up and say hello as did other readers. But  instead he sat beside me and proceeded to talk with the man he’d come there with about psychology and philosophy. We never really said hello, but there was an awareness between us that the other was there. This was a very pleasant occasion when we were both out and socializing  more  than  usual  instead  of locked  up alone with our thoughts and projects.

While I flipped pages and talked with other writers and new friends and he talked with his…business partner, I think…he didn’t sit still for long. He was up and about, talking to different people about different things that interested  him,  learning  what  he  could  from  this  new venue, and then he was back beside me but talking to his friend, explaining everything to him.

The Treat kept looking over at the book I was reading and somehow we were sort of in conversation and sort of not. Too many distractions. But it was light and fun and enjoyable for us both, and there was a nice  connection between us. He touched the book and looked at its title, then asked if he was mentioned in this book of days and life.

Then, again, something  caught  his attention  and he jumped up to go look at it. A festival of this magnitude has many shiny things!

While he was standing perhaps 20 feet away from me, looking at  something  shiny  and  talking  with  its  owner about something similar a  friend of his dads’ had once given him, I found his name in the book.

I don’t remember everything I read—there was a lot— but I do remember two things that stood out to me as he loped back over to where I sat and took the seat beside me, then began to lean in close to read the book with me and talk animatedly with me about it.

The first of the two things I remember is that he has a totem animal working strongly with him now. A leopard. That confused me at first because I thought the book was saying that his personality is like a leopard’s or his movements are like a leopard’s.  I though  the book  must be wrong until I realized  it was a power  animal meant to help him.

I’d never seen the leopard anywhere as a totem, so following the meditation, I did a little research. The leopard tends to be a solitary  animal, very intelligent,  often not staying in one place very long, yearning to travel and find new things. As a totem entering someone’s  life, it works with the person to bring self-reliance,  mastery, intuition,  confidence, and a new life. It shows the person how to take advantage  what’s offered  around  him and become the master of his field, to know what he can do and to do it quite well.

But there’s something of a dichotomy in what I was shown. For as much as a leopard is a solitary and secretive creature,  he’s also often alone, and that’s where the final thing I was shown in the book leaves me curious.

On the last of many pages where his name is written in this book are the words:

“Satan is in his isolation.”