Thursday 5 July 2012

A slug of my own


FrankieSachs sent me a slug.  A knitted slug.  It is a small thing of perfect beauty.  My favourite shade of orange and exceedingly silky.  With it came a note…

The Slug as Totem Animal

Everyone always has sexy totem animals.  Have you ever noticed that? 
Wolves and lions and hawks and shit.
(Respectable herbivores include: stags, bison, & wild stallions.)
A totem animal, we claim, is us.  That we are, at heart, lion or boar or wild stallion and that the spirit animal is an entity outside ourselves. “It chose me,” the bison or wolf or hawk, “because it saw I am a reflection of itself.”
I suspect the case is somewhat altered – that we choose our spirit animal as a symbol of what we wish to be, who we wish to be. How we wish others would see us.
This is why you’ll never meet some hippie dude on a train who tells you his spirit animal is a slug.

“Frankie Sachs”
30 June 2012


6 comments:

Anne said...

Students at UCSC (University of California at Santa Cruz) chose the banana slug, a local creature found in the coastal redwoods, as their mascot.
Unlike the slugs in an ordinary back yard, banana slugs are maybe four inches long, and a bright yellow.

LeeAnn at Mrs Black's said...

This post so cheered me up! We've had a slug in the kitchen at night, slinking under the sink through a hole in the ancient wall. Perhaos if I view it as a totem animal it will go away. Love your slug!

Anonymous said...

How does one worship a slug?

Zoë said...

@Mud - slowly

A slug as a totem ... hmmm. Wouldn't work here. Not with iGit scissorhands and his nightly patrols. He commits gastropodicide nightly! Me - I feed them to the lions, err chickens.

If I had a totem animal, I think I would be a bee. I might be a cat. Often thought I'd like to be a whale or a dolphin. But slug? Nah.

The knitted slug however is a very fine thing.

Exmoorjane said...

@Anne - off to Google banana slugs. :)

@Minerva - slugs don't make ideal indoor pets...I try to house-train mine to remain outside the door.

@Mud - umm...slowly.

@Zoe - oops, there before me! :) Great minds. I'm definitely warming to the idea of a power slug.

F said...

Heh. I think writing the note took longer than knitting the slug. Hand is still messed up from a skiing fall this winter & writing more than a few words by hand hurts, but I can knit slugs pain free. Joints are weird.

I am so glad you like it. (I've been looking for an excuse to use that bamboo blend, it feels so nice.)