The other morning I was taking the long way to breakfast when I spotted the bobcat off to the right, 20 metres up the road, half hidden in the prickly pear cacti. I stopped walking to watch it, and the bobcat did the same to me. We studied each other for 2 or 3 minutes. I resisted the urge to try to take a picture; I wanted to stay with the experience of watching and being watched. Eventually the bobcat walked confidently out on to the quiet road, stopped midway, looked at me again, and then gracefully glided away into the creosote bushes, prickly pears and ocotillos on the other side of the road. I backtracked to breakfast, all the while buoyed up by my meeting with this cat.
An auspicious appearance? Perhaps. I’d seen a bobcat walking outside the chapel windows the morning I was to begin my spiritual direction training two years ago. A year later, the day after I finished my training, I was again sitting in the chapel and caught sight of a bobcat walking across the chapel parking lot. Perhaps I should pay more attention to what’s going on inside rather than outside the chapel.
On a website called universeofsymbolism.com, it claims that
Bobcat brings the symbolic powers of the art of surprise and listening
Bobcat offers the totems of patience and silence
Bobcat holds the magic of interpreting hidden messages and invisibility.
Really?
Could my encounters with the Bobcat have any relationship to the open, companioning nature of my practice of spiritual direction?
Vincent Hanlon