By Mark Fernquest
These mornings are heavy with fog which burns off to reveal bright blue sky by about 10am. I sit in the garden and feed sticks into the camp stove to heat the coffee kettle. When the water is hot, my friend the Animal Whisperer joins me and we do pour-overs in the sunlight, surrounded by verdant green grass.
Life was never so good.
The Animal Whisperer is very specific about her coffee and brews not so much a cuppa as a potion replete with oil and God-knows-what-all magical herbs in it. It’s extraordinary stuff. But I prefer mine with a touch of cream, unstirred.
The Animal Whisperer and I go back many years. I’m proud to say I knew her before she whispered to animals. And I’m proud to say I was there the first time she ever spoke telepathically with an animal, when she gave me a message my cat, Shadow, asked her to give me. It was a message the Animal Whisperer couldn’t possibly have understood, but which I did. I later found out that this remarkable moment didn’t occur in a vacuum; it occurred shortly after the Animal Whisperer struggled very hard to hear something very specific in her inner spiritual world—and succeeded.
The Animal Whisperer is an extraordinary person, given to extraordinary ways. I call her a yogini, though she doesn’t practice yoga. She once lived in a Himalayan Tibetan Buddhist monastary, though she is not Buddhist. She is many things, including my muse, and to write about her is to write about love itself, for, though we transitioned from lovers to friends long ago, every thought I have of her is a love poem. Such is the delight between souls.
Over coffee the Animal Whisperer tells me about her conversations with my cat, Elijah, to which we often chuckle, as animals say the damnedest things. For instance, when we set off for town the other day, Elijah told her, as she walked out the door, “I know you love me. But I love you, too.”
The Animal Whisperer has many stories to tell; enough to fill a book. But the fire has died, my joe grows cold and those truly are stories for another day. Join me now as I raise my tin cup to cowboy coffee, kitties and animal whisperers everywhere.
Mark Fernquest lives and works in West County. He imagines he is a writer. His friend, the Animal Whisperer, can be reached at [email protected].
