I’ve taken to visiting my friend Ellie several times a week.  She has been so helpful and open, letting me practice with her, helping me decide on a rate for readings.  She’s even offered her shop to me after store hours so I can have an in-town location to offer readings.  Friends are such gifts.

Ellie is an animal lover, with multiple pets:  two dogs and a cat.  One of her dogs is a white bichon frise named Juliette.  Juliette has been saving up things to talk about and gives me her list as soon as I walk in the door.

Juliette has expensive tastes.  When I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, all of the things she showed me were expensive things her mom couldn’t afford.  She knows she can’t have them, but she LIKED them, and so in answer to the question “What would you like for Christmas?”  the reply was quite literal.

I would like another Fat Cat.  I would like a cupcake with pink frosting.  I would like that collar you were looking at in the boutique in New York.

Funny girl.

I asked her, “Tell us a story from when you were a puppy?”

Juliette showed me in a cloud of her brothers and sisters – almost two dozen puppies rolling over the green grass.

“Wait,” Ellie said, “Juliette was born in December.  There was snow when she was a puppy.”

I was confused for a moment, and then it dawned upon me:

“Okay Juliette, now tell us a story from THIS life!”

Juliette had been a bichon more than once, apparently.

It’s amazing to me that many animals seem to incarnate rapidly.  A beautiful finch on the beach informed me that this was Her Family’s beach.  That they were the guardians of the beach and that only they, the finches, stayed year round. 

“The hummingbirds come and take over in the spring, but they leave by midsummer.  This is My Family’s Beach.”

The finch was a female goldfinch, I think.  Hues of greenish yellow and a creamy breast.  She showed me how she and her family cycled through finch bodies in this same location, over thousands of years. 

It truly was their beach.

I’m beginning to understand that some animals have experienced thousands of incarnations, many more than most people incarnated as humans right now.

Juliette said she has been a stray dog many times.  She likes to be a stray dog sometimes, because it reminds her she’s self-reliant and gets her back to the roots of being a dog.  In the lives she shared with humans, she was mostly a smallish house dog, whose job was to kill vermin and keep women company.

Our white cat Sunshine is a special cat.  She is quite the talker.  She wanted my partner to understand that she had been her cat in a past life. 

She then shared with us a slew of other lives she’s had.  Sunshine has been a stray cat herself many times.  Stray cats have very short lives, but she also saw it as “taking a break”.  I guess looking after people is hard work for animals!

She also shared that she is a very wise cat, and we should ask her for business advice.  She said she advised queens in the past.  Then she said “Queen Anne, younger girl Margaret.”

Sunshine showed me a velvet blue pillow with white silk rope trim, that she had blue eyes and wore a blue sapphire collar.  She gave me the impression that she was a cat version of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.

She showed me mountains, and the vista looked like Switzerland to me, but I also heard England.

My partner did a little research this week and found out that there was a Queen Anne in history.  She had a younger sister named Margaret. 

Queen Anne lived in Bohemia, which is a country with mountainous vistas like Switzerland.  She then married King Richard the second, of England, and moved there.  Just look at all of that blue velvet:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Bohemia

And get this:  the coat of arms of Bohemia is a white cat: 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia