Colorado—A late evening cougar sighting near the very human environs of a university tennis court sparks dreams, a “door to another world,” as this author examines the idea of large carnivores in the context of Jung’s archetype of the Shadow.
I’d seen ghosts of them now and then: the recently cleaned spine of a deer lying on a mountainside, bloodied ribs reaching up from the ground like arms trying to hold on to empty air; on another day, a carcass so fresh I thought it was an injured deer lying with its head on a rock. I began walking toward it but stopped when I saw the shiny dark flask of the stomach removed and placed prominently on a nearby rock, ravens beginning to gather above it. I thought better of my approach then.
I spent one winter tracking them for Colorado State Parks. That’s when I learned that mountain lions crave fresh meat so much they will not eat the predigested stench wrapped in the stomach of their kill. Cats are finicky eaters. They carry the stomach away, like an offering to the needier scavengers. I also learned to walk very upright as I tracked. Bending down to, say, study some possible sign more closely was not a good idea. It would have turned my two legs into four, giving any nearby lion a familiar line of sight up my spine to my neck. A lion is generally stymied by the teetering, humpty-headed stature of two-leggeds—perhaps one reason why attacks on humans are so rare.
I always presumed I was in the presence of a lion when tracking. There are just too many cats in the foothills of Boulder, and too many signs. Still, during those six months of steadily following cougars, I never saw even the tail of a cat as it ran away, never saw a distant lion pacing on a far-off cliff or heard one caterwauling under the shivering Colorado stars, though nearby residents said they heard lions almost every night. No doubt, lions were watching me as I searched futilely with my human eyes—probably looked right at a cat—and never saw one.
I never thought a tennis court would be the place. Imagine the “What to Do If You Encounter a Mountain Lion Here” instructions. “Make yourself look big. Face the lion and don’t turn your back. Never serve but always volley if served to. Avoid running for the ball; this could spur the lion’s chasing instinct. Keep your eye on the ball. A lion could take direct eye contact as a full court challenge.”
It would be pretty unlikely to see a wild cat striding across that smooth green surface where, earlier in the day, Edgar and George, vacationing from Texas, donned white shorts and tees and ran with their creaky, sixty-year-old knees, on spindly hairless legs, chasing bright yellow balls and calling, “Good shot, good shot, Cowboy.”
But predictability is not any big cat’s strong suit. My first, and only, sighting of the lions native to my Colorado home was on a tennis court in the Boulder foothills. I was staying in what I have come to call my office—a cabin I use in Chautauqua Park when I need a little extra solitude for writing. After work that night, I had walked into town with my partner for dessert; on the way back we were feeling good. We’d had some kind of gooey chocolate-caramel ice cream thing, a split of champagne—why not?—and we were, maybe, a little bit buzzed. We were certainly oblivious, but no less so than the average person coming home, unlocking the door, and entering the house every night. It’s just one of those human tendencies. As we rounded the corner to the cabin, though, that common obliviousness vanished. Lisa stopped talking mid-word and tugged my sleeve. “Look,” she said. I thought she was pointing to the silhouettes of two great horned owls sitting in the ponderosa pine. I looked up, but something pulled my eyes down. I saw it—in the spotlight of the green tennis court—a lion.
I’ve seen bears in the wild before and have often mistaken them for something else at first glance. My mind, an unfortunate stranger to wild animals, clicks on the bear cubs and says, “Hey, that’s one huge dog,” “one strange looking deer,” “a very fat black housecat.”
It was not that way with the mountain lion. It was unequivocally, distinctly, and deftly a lion.
Even though that recognition struck me with certainty, it was hard to discern the figure of the cat. I’d spent six months looking for this creature. I had begun to believe in mountain lions the way some people believe in God. I knew they existed, but I had given up finding anything other than circumstantial evidence. I never imagined meeting one in the flesh. Stunned, I watched the cougar cross the court, crouched, shoulder blades jutting from its back like the jagged slabs of rock it had emerged from. I guessed it was a male, weighing in at over one hundred pounds of pure muscle. Still, it looked afraid. It looked as if it knew it was in unfriendly territory. It prowled along a decidedly precise path, as if it had a specific place to go and regretted having to cross the tennis court to get there. Its massive head turned slightly from side to side as it slunk across the concrete, then leapt, all one hundred pounds of it—soundlessly—up onto the spectator’s ledge. It passed between two houses and emerged onto the street, caught between the headlights of a car and a group of teenagers.
It was anything but aggressive. It hunched down and away from the headlights, like a housecat confronted with a mighty vacuum cleaner. With the car clearly in its line of travel, it had nowhere to go, so it turned and followed the teens, walked within ten yards or so of them, and the second it saw an escape route, it vanished. I didn’t see its escape route. Simply, the cat was there, and then it wasn’t. My eyes couldn’t follow it. No sign of it remained in its wake.
I wish I could say I walked quietly back to my cabin, let the whole event sink in. I didn’t. I had finally caught sight of something I’d been looking for, something sublime. I was exuberant. I called out to the kids, “Hey, did you know there was a mountain lion right behind you a second ago?”
A boy looked over his shoulder. “What?”
“A mountain lion!”
The whole gang glanced back at me, then burst out laughing. “Right,” one of them said. They went on about their nighttime carousing.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I woke every hour or so, looked out to the tennis court. When I did sleep, I dreamt about the lion over and over. In my dreams, it was less shadowy, more familiar. It seemed at home there, in my sleeping brain where all sorts of impossibilities become real, where the reality of them vanishes in the light of day.
In Carl Jung’s theory of dreams, the unconscious mind is layered. The most accessible layer is the personal unconscious. It consists of memories and repressed thoughts or experiences. The deeper, more complex layer is the collective unconscious, and its contents—the archetypes—are common to us all. A dream that strikes us with indelible power has likely risen up from the collective unconscious. In its logical extreme, the collective unconscious is not bound by time or limited to humans. It suggests that we are all one—a notion that in Jung’s day had not been diluted by pop culture as it is today. It changed the course of psychological inquiry. Dreams, Jung said, are the doorway to the personal and the collective unconscious, and the degree to which we become individuated, conscious beings is equal to the degree to which we integrate the unconscious.
I can’t say I understand the unconscious mind entirely, nor do I know what it would feel like to be fully individuated. But I know what it feels like to dream something powerful and indelible. The cat came to me like a dream, like a door to another world, a world so foreign and distant that I stumbled over the threshold of it; a world so familiar and integral to who I am, maybe to who we all are, that I longed for it. It was not a sentimental longing. It was the recognition of a necessity, not of a romantic accouterment.
One of the most well-known of Jung’s archetypes is the Shadow. It is often misinterpreted as solely the negative side of the Self—the potential for each and every one of us to be everything that we fear in others: from self-absorbed and snotty, to liars, thieves, even murderers. And although all that unsavory stuff is true about the Shadow, the Shadow also holds within it all our internal repressed fears that are positive: the part of us that may be afraid of success, or of being loved, or losing our temper, or of the very daunting possibility of becoming whole.
It doesn’t seem coincidental that the mountain lion is often called the Shadow Cat. It is nocturnal. It shows itself when most of the world is dreaming. To ranchers and owners of livestock, it is a thief. Cats are often seen as mysterious, not to be trusted. Even more often, they are seen as killers, and it is becoming more and more likely that because of this perception, they will be killed (and we, the killers).
It’s the most natural response one has when confronted with the archetype of the Shadow. We see that which we fear and despise about ourselves manifested outside of us, and we seek to eradicate it. We view it as Other—unwanted and unnecessary.
But eradicating the Shadow, rather than integrating it, would mean a breakdown of the personality. And eradicating the mountain lion from the wilderness we all know as our history, our “collective unconscious,” if you will, would cause a breakdown of what remains of that wilderness, to say nothing of the effects it would have, consciously or unconsciously, on the human psyche (which in Greek means “soul”). Annihilate all that you hate and fear, and it takes with it all that you love and desire.
If the world dreams, it dreams in the language of cats. It’s not any more New Agey to say that cats are symbolic to Americans than it is to say the eagle is symbolic. If the eagle has come to symbolize some collective sense of freedom, the cat has come to symbolize solitary strength, self-awareness (awareness even in darkness), keeping to one’s boundaries (in the way a lion holds to its territory); it symbolizes the heart of the wilderness we all need and desire—the wilderness that is shrinking beneath us, unconsciously, like a dream forgotten upon waking. Palpable, yet distant.
The next morning, when I went to check out of my cabin, I mentioned my sighting to Kathleen, the concierge. We’d become friendly since I began staying in the Chautauqua cabins, and it felt okay to speak to her about it. Still, as soon as the words left my lips, I wished I’d kept them to myself. I’d witnessed, the night before, a messenger from a place I hold to be divine—wilderness. True wilderness is pretty much gone now, but a remnant of it remains in something as sheerly and unyieldingly wild as a mountain lion.
As I walked downtown that morning, I knew my world had been shifted in the same subtle but certain way it shifts in the aftermath of an unshakable dream. Likewise, to describe the exact matter of the shift here would be as impossible as explaining the impact of a dream to someone who was not there dreaming it with you.
I will say this: I walked into my favorite coffee shop–bookstore that bright morning and took a seat at a table where someone had left a stack of books. On top was a slender volume titled Caught in Fading Light, and it had on its cover the dusky outline of a cougar. It told the story of the author, Gary Thorpe, tracking a mountain lion daily for over a year, and never seeing it.
Jung would call this synchronicity, two events connected by something stronger than chance. I didn’t call it anything. If I’d been in another state of mind, it might have impressed me. Today, it just made sense. Just as it made sense that the next book in the stack was by Rainer Maria Rilke, and when I turned to the first page, my eyes fell on a poem in which Rilke, the poet, is struck silent by a sight so beautiful and unfathomable that it shifts his world. To him, it was an archaic statue of Apollo, an ancient god, an archetype. In the presence of the piece of art, Rilke sees everything that is possible in him, but which he has not yet become. He ends the poem with these lines:
Otherwise the shoulders
would not glisten like the fur of a wild animal:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like pure light: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rilke, nearly a full century ago, called upon the image of a wild animal to illustrate that peaceful yet powerful strength that comes to us rarely and shifts our world. The possibility of it exists in all of us. It is the dream of a common mind that hearkens back through history, provides a connection between us all. Here, there is no place that does not see you.
I finished my drink, bought both books, and, well, as soon as I left the bookstore the mundane world wiggled its way back into my life. My cell phone rang. On the end of the line was a park ranger. “We have a report of a lion sighting in Chautauqua.”
“Yes, I saw a lion.”
“It stalked some teenagers?”
“It didn’t stalk them. It walked behind them, looking for a place to go. It acted just like a lion should act. It was a good lion, a good lion.” I knew that any behavior illustrating this cat had grown too accustomed to humans could label it a “bad cat” and put the animal at risk.
Though I knew that Kathleen had done the right thing by reporting my sighting (the cougar was on the tennis court, after all), it also felt somehow wrong to me.
Maybe my personal unconscious understood the need for monitoring a large predator’s behavior, especially when people have chosen to live virtually in the predator’s habitat. But at the same time, something in me, maybe my collective unconscious, wanted that cat to remain untouched by human eyes, uncontrolled by rangers, and completely wild.
The conversation I had with the ranger edged too close to an absurd moment I’d experienced in my little suburban home. I was out one morning at dawn, working in the garden, when a red fox emerged from the blonde, dried grasses in the open field behind my house. I stopped, leaned on my shovel, and fell momentarily in love with that fox. With its long, lean body, its bushy coat, the red that deepens to black on the tip of the tail—oh, yes, it really was love. Just then, a car pulled up to the stop sign on my corner. The woman in the car caught sight of the fox, too, and her jaw dropped. The window of her SUV was down, so I waved and called out to her, “Gorgeous, huh?” She picked up her cell phone and put it to her ear. I thought, What an unfortunate time to receive a phone call, right when she could be taking in the sight of this magnificent fox running across the field at dawn.
She looked frantic, though. So I picked up my shovel and walked closer to see if I could help. Close up, I saw she was indeed wan and frightened. “Did you see that animal?” she said.
“Yes.” I kept up my bright smile.
She kept up her frenzied glare. “Good, good. Yes, I’m calling animal control right now,” she said. Actually, she screamed it.
I wondered what this woman would do in the presence of a big cat. I wondered what she did in the presence of her Self. I wondered if it was different values that separated us, or different worlds. I wondered at the fear bubbling up so readily inside her, and at her trust in something—a phone call—that could so easily put that fear in check.
Luckily, my conversation with the ranger turned out to be nothing like my conversation with my neighbor. I had feared it might, until I realized, in true “Shadow form,” that this ranger was doing exactly what I had done when I worked for the state parks. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Yeah, we know that lion, or at least we know of it. No one’s seen it, but it has a kill over on the north side of the mountain. It was no doubt just heading out for its food.”
Jung once said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
If the lion, in all its dark, nocturnal otherness, in all its light, internal sameness, does not exist for future generations, if we destroy its habitat, or call open season on it, what could we possibly find to replace it? It is precisely because we fear large predators that we need them. They hold within them so many things we have lost, or are on the verge of losing, personally and collectively, permanently and forever. If we sacrifice the fear, we also sacrifice the strength, the wildness, the beauty, the awe.
In those few seconds when I was in the presence of the lion, I did not say to myself, You must change your life.
I knew, right then and there, that my life had been changed. A piece of something necessary had clicked into place inside me. I had become more aware, more intimate with my own fear and my own possibilities. I remembered what it was like to be humbled by awe. I became more compassionate. I became a better person.