The Illusory Porcupine

With all the brouhaha over The Secret and its Law of Attraction, I can’t help but recall my own experience in this vein. At the time, about 20 years ago, I was reading Richard Bach’s Illusions after having enjoyed his Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Illusions contains some similarities to the Secret, one being: our true nature is not bound by space or time.

I read Illusions as my family and I drove the cross-Canada highway from Ottawa to Iron Bridge, a tiny wee town found in western Ontario, to visit my sister and her young family.

The whole gang of us soon took advantage of the snow to cross-country ski in the bush on a wonderful trail groomed by local enthusiasts. We too were enthusiastic and enjoying the day until one of the youngest, Amy, tired of the adventure. She had fallen over, was tired out, and having a stubborn nature, now adamantly refused to get up. Despite our entreaties, she screwed up her face and started to cry, more in frustration than from cold. She had just had enough!

I wondered what it would take to get Amy going again. She was too big for us to carry. She had to get up and ski home under her own steam. But how to get her past this “end of her rope” moment? Suddently inspired, I pointed to a stand of conifers facing us across the meadow. “Look, Amy! Look! There’s a porcupine! See it? C’mon, get up. Let’s take a look!!”

Everyone else was asking “Where, where??!!” as I worked at getting Amy back on her pins without falling on my own nether parts. Then I heard “There it is!” “I see it!” “I see it too!” and the excitement in everyone’s voices including Amy’s: “I see it, I see it!!” as she stood up, wobbling.

I was dumbfounded. I had to ask “Where is it?” feeling a little foolish since I had been the one to point it out. Everyone pointed. Sure enough, there was a porcupine clinging halfway up a tree facing us.

Now the miracle of this story is not that we got Amy going again although that is certainly one small miracle. No, the miracle is that I hadn’t seen a porcupine at all; I had faked the whole scenario…yet there it was: a porcupine! I had only wracked my brain for anything to motivate Amy to get up and get going. It's logical a porcupine might be in the woods but my thinking was, if that idea got her up and then she couldn’t see it (because really, it wasn’t there), why I’d just fudge things a little and say he’d moved over to the other side of the tree, and now we can’t see him. I’d never anticipated a real live porcupine!

The others were incredulous when I told them I’d dreamed up the porcupine.

“Aww, you must have seen it and didn’t realize you’d seen it…”

“Yeah, right. You did so see it…who are you trying to kid?”

Their responses ran the gamut from scepticism to derision. But the truth remains: I had never in my life (16 years of having lived in a bush town in Northern Ontario) seen a porcupine in the bush until the day one "appeared".

In the years since this incident I’ve only seen two more: one in Sudbury’s Science North exhibit (one put there on purpose for display) and another one we happened to see without any forecasting involved) in a tree on the edge of a field in Quebec.

I don’t often share this story because, of course, people don't believe it and it never fails to puzzle me. Coincidental? Yes. Law of Attraction? Had I unconsciously seen it but not consciously noted it? Who knows? But I’ve always wondered what part I played in that porcupine showing up just in time….