Meandering Post About Lions

I dreamt last night I was wandering through Spring Grove Cemetery.  Not surprising, I have spent a lot of time there over the last five years due to my hobby obscura and have learned more than most people will ever know about its stately grounds and hidden beauties because of my fellow hobbyists.  SGC is the second largest cemetery in the US, behind only Arlington.  It houses 19 Champion Trees - the largest of their species in the state.  Sandra schooled me on that factoid and I feel obligated to share it so that locals can really appreciate this cool locale in their back yard.  The cemetery is designed to also be an arboretum and encourages all sorts of activities there.  But I digress.

In my dream I am wandering through the grounds near the front with all its over the top statuary and mausoleums.  The sunlight is filtered through the leaves of the trees dappling the ground.  All around me is lush and green.  I am completely calm and at peace as I move about without seeming destination in mind.  It feels good to move this way.  I begin catching glimpses in the distance of a lion also seeming to meander among the headstones.  A young male Barbary lion.**  I am not afraid of the lion.  Nor do I seek him out.  He never gets any closer to me, but seems to be meandering his own path.  The last time I see the lion he is being led away on a leash by a figure all in black and wearing a bowler hat like in the Magritte painting.  That makes me wistful.  I want the lion to roam free and to chance seeing him there.

An interesting dream that I documented and will take to dream group to see what they have to say about it.  In and of itself perhaps not majorly life altering.  Until I got this weird urge to go see Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  The movie was on my list, but so were a lot of other ones.  Suddenly I have to go see it and it has to be today.  NOW would be even better.  So I throw down breakfast, pull on some clothes, brush my teeth and hair and go.

Amazing movie.  I love cave art always have.  The idea that neolithic mankind felt the same urge to create links me to them over 20 thousand years.  But this cave is different.  Pristine.  The oldest known paintings created by man that survive and only recently discovered.  The floor is littered with skulls from cave bears.  The usual antelope and horses are shown.  But there are also walls with cave bears and entire prides of cave lions that I have never seen depicted in cave art.  As the camera pans across the wall of lions I start to cry.  Oh gawd - what now.  The lions are just so real.  And here is an artist's interpretation of an extinct species that I will never see except in these pictures.  Suddenly those twenty thousand years don't seem so far away at all.  And because the movie is shot in 3D there is the sense that I can reach my hand out there in the dark theater in Newport, KY and touch these beasts on a wall in Chauvet, France.  A sense that I might live in a world where cave lions still wandered.

I have a deep personal connection to lions.   Doubt it check out the chucks I'm doodling. Shoes to me are also symbols of wandering.  I DO like my barefeets, but inside only.  Outside requires a bit more protection.

So what's up with the lions?  Dunno.  They're not talkin.  Just kinda popping in and out.  If they got something to say, I wish they would get on with it.  Yeah - as if lions can be coerced to do ANYTHING.... these are giant CATS remember?

As an aside - while I was googling for pix of SGC I might include I came across the photo (left).  Yeah I know exactly where that is in SGC.  There's a pair of them.  This melancholy looking one and another more alert looking one.  They were donated by the same person who gave UC their famous pair of lions Mick and Mack - Jacob Hoffner.  I told you I knew alot about the cemetery.  BTW - note that this is a Barbary lion.  So what the hell?   Are the very statues coming to life and walking my dreams?  Tomorrow definitely calls for a trip to SGC and see what's up.



**I became very interested in lions a while back.  Before that I thought lions were all one species - a lion was a lion was a lion.  I was surprised to find that while there is a single genus species, Panther leo, there are numerous subspecies.  Sadly those subspecies have suffered from hunting, habitat destruction and avid collection for sport or zoological specimens since the Romans.  Subspecies characteristics have been lost as zoological specimens have interbred.  So what constitutes a 'true Barbary lion' is unclear to me.  By my definition, arbitrary though it may be, it is a lion that has the traditional light colored mane behind which grows a darker mane that is sometimes black.  That darker hair extends down the chest, neck, back and the back of the legs.  I included a picture just for reference.