the bison's the one on the right...
Excuse my prolonged absence. I’ve been falling in love and adjusting to the idea that it’s happening to me really for the first time, at 36, when I was trying to convince myself that it would be ok if it never happened. I was planning the next move by myself. But now I’ve resettled with my fella in San Francisco.
Our place is two blocks from Golden Gate Park…where bison live!
I’ve been into bison/American buffalo for awhile. The first one I saw was at Yellowstone National Park. My family and I were in the car one summer driving through and we saw a buffalo leap over a wood fence just as gracefully as a deer. Pretty incredible for an animal so hulking. But in person, in the park, they don’t seem that massive—maybe because they’re so chill.
I think the American buffalo is one of my personal totem animals. Sounds a bit woo-woo maybe, but sometimes I fixate on a certain animal—I seem to think about them a lot and usually start noticing them in designs or just around. Bats for awhile and then buffalo. (Maybe they all have to start with “B” since my last name is Browning.) Anyway, a friend suggested I investigate the significance of the particular animals that were ‘visiting’ me. Some of the descriptions seemed to make a lot of sense.
Here’s a bit about buffalo in the personal totem sort of a vein:
Abundance, incorporates our own efforts to embrace and hold life, burdens and rewards are carried, keep self well grounded, follow the easiest path, don’t use force in areas of life, flow with it. Teaches creativity, courage, sacred knowledge, sharing with a sense of community, survival strategies, teaches how to challenge with forthrightness and grace. A time to honor your path and ask for assistance from Spirit. Buffalo teaches abundance and strength of character along with harmony and expression of gratitude and honor for all creatures. Do you have gratitude? Strength? Surviving with courage?
A lot of this seems very appropriate for starting over in a new place, with a new partner and new opportunities to pursue various creative paths. When making my last move to Seattle, I met a lovely recruiter with an unusual name I can’t quite remember (Agata, maybe?) who challenged my idea that it would be “too lucky” to find exactly the job I wanted in the city I wanted to live in. She said, “Focus on abundance—not on scarcity.”
Having to do with buffalo:
Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta
Cool bison necklace on Etsy (lots of cool buffalo-inspired jewelry)
A Path Between Houses by Greg Rappleye
AMuWoFo'Fi 
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” – Crowfoot quote