If you find yourself with a little too much time on your hands and you decide to research animal totems on the Internet you will be overwhelmed by hundreds of sites crammed full of all kinds of fuzzy affirmations and purported guidance by various North American animals with lots of pretty pictures, almost none of them original. These sites frequently also deal in crystals and vortices and healing herbs available at a generous discount. Many people take this very, very seriously, and they take your spiritual needs very, very seriously. So far not one of them appears to be Native American. A cynical person need go no further.

But if you persist, you start to find some similarities between the general traits and virtues various animals embody no matter what tribal beliefs or mythology you look at. You also notice that animal spirit guides are always creatures of the woodlands, the desert or the prairie. No swamps, no oceans, the occasional lake sturgeon but mostly land-based spirits. Lots of wolf and raven and buffalo guides. No one has alligator listed, or salmon, or chickadees. Maybe those spirits don't have much oomph in the guidance business and yet I'm sure there's something very important to be learned from the determined chinook making his way upstream against the strong current, dodging bears and eagles interested in all-you-can-eat sushi, leaping over other salmon in order to spawn and die in the shallows where he was born. Maybe that lesson is a little bleak; perhaps that's why no one ever calls himself Joe Salmon Brother or Swims-Like-Sockeye.

What I want to know is how can I be sure my spirit guide is from here? What if it's from Africa? I've been to Africa. Maybe my spirit guide has to fly all the way over every night to give me animal wisdom of the warthog. "Dig deep and well, young hornless one," it might say, "and always hold your tail up comically when running." How will I know what animals are teaching me the way of harmony? I can't just say I think horses are pretty so my spirit guide is going to be a horse. It isn't supposed to work that way.

All the sites recommend meditating on being receptive to your guide. Ask it or them to come to you in dreams or while in a trance. Many of them have written guidelines on trancing out: you are walking through the woods, listening to the birdsong, you come to a glade and seat yourself, an animal steps into the clearing, and bingo, you have your spirit guide. But I don't know how to meditate. If I sit still focusing on quieting my mind I generally fall asleep or a cat comes and sits in my conveniently available lap which is distracting. So I've been trying to invite my animal spirit guide to make itself known to me in my dreams.

For three nights running I've dreamt of the cast of The Fellowship of the Ring. That can't be right.

Why am I doing this? Because I want to get a new tattoo and I would like it to be either an earth or an air symbol. I want to know what earth animals ground me, and what air animals inspire me to fly as high as my dreams can take me. Then I want to wear their symbol on my skin. It's always animals with me. I don't want so-called tribal art. Black work hurts like hell and it would look horribly overdone on my fair, freckly Irish-American skin. You might think I'd like some Celtic knotwork or something but I've never been terribly fond of it. Something unusual and architectural in quality would be fine. I very much admired Sharee Carton's delicate archaeopteryx skeleton tattooed on her back. But I need my own inspired moment of clarity before I commit ink to skin after all these years.

The truth is my other tattoo ideas actually did come to me in a dream, as did my first name which I adopted when I was twenty-two. I believe in symbolic gestures. If there's an animal guide out there who wants me to pay attention I wish it would make itself known. Great changes are coming in my life. I feel them out there just offshore. The tide has turned again and I'm about to be awash in a plethora of opportunities and creative outlets. I need some spiritual guidance, and fast! Not you, Christians, sorry. I'm going for pagan here. Earth magic. I want to be the most powerful Wicca in Sunnydale. Oh, wait, that didn't turn out so well for Willow.

Well, then. I'm ready. Eenie meenie chili beanie, let the spirits speak! But if you're selling crystals don't bother.

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