animal of choice

It is a question whimsically asked on occasion, if you were an animal what animal would you be? Or what animal do you feel you most resemble? Now it would be cheating, I suppose, to say ‘a human’ for people forget every now and then that we too are animals. But I have had difficulty with this in the past just as I have had difficulty with choosing favorites. There are so many options, so many good things to be or traits I posses, so many possibilities that I can not narrow it all to one. The more and more I ponder it however I have in recent months settled on a conclusion. The subject of my conclusion, of my settlement is an adventurous creature, full of energy and curiosity. He is tame and docile, yet contains a vein of ferocity and rebellion. He is a wanderer, a nomad at times, yet loves attention and affection, willing to return such affection in abundance. He is playful, generally passive, and struts a tinge of arrogance. These have been my thoughts through the last few months and today I read the following description of this animal by D. H. Lawrence. Said he in his book Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, “Of all the animals, there is no denying it, the Timsy is the most pretty, the most fine. It is not her mere corpus that is beautiful; it is her bloom of aliveness, her ‘infinite variety’; the soft, snow-flakey lightness of her, and at the same time her lean, heavy ferocity.” I find these words accurate and beautiful. The common cat is a very alive creature and one of note. There are so many qualities that it possesses and I feel it a worthy vessel of an animal embodiment of my personal attributes.