I Have a House Panther.....

I have a house panther.

At least he thinks he is. And, it’s kind of true.

He is 20 pounds large of a gorgeous sable black cat that likes to jump on my body at 3am. He’s not fat, he’s just gigantic. Big, tall, lanky and beautiful, and he knows it.

However, his strength and cunning does not hold a candle to an equally gorgeous and much larger black bear. Yeah….YOU tell the house panther that. He does, after all, believe he is a panther. And, beliefs matter.

One day I was sitting in my office working by my window. My driveway is about a third of a mile long, and I live in the country. As happens in the country, we have a neighborhood black bear that is routinely looking into windows and gathering apples from the orchard, sometimes a little violently. He is, after all, a bear.

So, I was roused from my computer when I saw the neighborhood bear booking it down my driveway. When I got a closer look, I saw that my much smaller house panther was the cause of the bear fleeing through my property.

Bagheera did not realize he was smaller than the bear, that the bear could turn around at any second and take every single one of his nine lives, or that he didn’t have every right in the world to chase that frickin’ bear, when apparently it did something quite egregious to piss him off.

He was completely focused.

And, he didn’t just chase the bear, he treed it in a 300 foot tall redwood tree. My cat treed a bear. He just never gave the bear the opportunity to realize it was larger or had the upper hand. Ever.

Completely bold badassery.

How should we be bold in ways that others think are foolhardy or stupid? What in our lives can we chase down?

You are a badass and capable of more than you can imagine.

Why else would you chase a bear?