Be Careful What You Task For
by Kimberly Snow
On the morn of Valentine's Day, I donned my favorite white robe with little gold stars, slipped on a pair of furry house-booties, and decided to greet the day head-on by stepping out onto the porch to give my succulents a drink of water from the hose.
As I opened the front door sunshine spilled into the house, and there, sitting on my welcome mat, looking quite dapper himself with furry feet and a full-length coat of white, was a five-pound rabbit.
Tame as a lap dog, the white rabbit wiggled its nose and looked at me, then hopped over to my succulents and attempted to eat the blooms. It was obviously someone's pet. I inspected the small black harness strapped around his chest and shoulders, and found a short rope attached, the end of which was frayed as if it had been chewed. This rabbit was an escapee.
I was faced with several options. The first was don't do anything and let the rabbit wander off. But could I live with the guilt if he became supper for a hungry coyote, or worse, neighborhood roadkill? I could keep it, but the thought of shoveling mounds of tiny rabbit turds didn't sit well with me. And there was that little issue of the no pets lease agreement we signed. I could spend the day making signs and posters that read, "Found: white rabbit!" and paste them up on every telephone pole and street sign in the development. But that would take time, a commodity I had very little of. I could call the humane society and have them pick him up in the pet paddy wagon. But I had spent time as a child doing volunteer work at an animal shelter, and I remembered all too well the day I opened the back door that I was never supposed to open, and saw the truck filled with the lifeless bodies of euthanized animals. I wasn't willing to take the chance that the rabbit would be adopted.
And then it dawned on me. You're a TRVer. TRV it! I immediately sat down and using the cue "Kimberly's found rabbit/Last human domicile," I began the session.
The immediate raw data was the color "white", followed by typical data of the sort you'd get TRVing a house in my neighborhood; brown, green, gritty, prickly, hard, fresh. The sound perceived was a "pink, pink, tink" sound, and I had the data of "worker." My sketch immediately revealed a two-story house, with a garage to the right as you faced the house. The color blue also cropped up, as well as amber, hard and metallic, followed by the AOL of "car". My only aesthetic impact at the target site was "familiar", and the two intangibles that I got in the session were "criss-cross" and "embellishment".
That was it. A seven minute session done up to the first stage four. It was all I had the time to do. Hopefully it would be enough.
I put my daughter in the stroller, tied up the rabbit in the shade, and with my session in hand I was off to find the rabbit's home.
As I got to the end of my street I was faced with an entire development of houses that looked relatively alike, as the same builder built them all. They came in a myriad of colors and shapes. So what was I looking for? Well, the first piece of data was white. I was looking for a white house. Most of the houses were adobe colored: shades of tan, yellow, or rose. So a white house shouldn't be too hard to find. But there were probably at least twenty white houses in the whole development and I didn't have much time before I had to pick up my son for school. What else could I look for?
My second clue was the sketch. The house was two stories. Most of the houses in the development around my neighborhood were single story. So a two-story white house would not be too hard to spot. I also got something amber, hard and metallic, followed by an AOL of "car". So that would be something to keep a lookout for. I didn't know what to make of the "criss-cross" or "embellishment" intangibles, but I kept those in mind as well.
Down the main street I spotted the first two-story white house. It had blue trim around the door. It was also a house I was familiar with, as whenever I drove by it I always admired the fuchsia bougainvillea growing up the side. Parked out on the street near the house was a brownish-gold car, and the house was on a corner lot.
Criss-cross! It's on the cross street, I thought. This could be the house. White, two-story, garage on the right as you face it, blue trim around the door, and it was familiar to me.
I knocked on the front door. A breathless girl answered, wearing a sleeveless tight red dress with her white bra showing, and spiked silver shoes still unstrapped. Holding a cell phone in the crook of her neck with her shoulder, she greeted me. "I think I have your white rabbit," I said.
"Oh no! That's not my rabbit," she said. "My brother-in-law, he's the one you want to talk to. We found that rabbit outside on the sidewalk, and we took it to Mr. Hotchkins across the street, he's a teacher, and he said it wasn't his. Then someone asked Mr. Hotchkins if he had seen their rabbit, and he sent them to us…"
The story went on and on it seemed, and as I stood in a daze and watched her lips move, stunned that I had even found a house that knew about the rabbit, I realized she was embellishing the story. She didn't want me to dump the rabbit at her house, and so in no way did she want to look as if she had any part in the rabbit's life. Embellishment! There was the second intangible. I let her finish her long story, and at the end she told me that the owners of the rabbit had come and picked him up, and that she had no idea who they were or where they lived. "Ask my brother-in-law," she said, pointing to a man walking up to the house. When I asked him about it, he told me that he had indeed found the rabbit and had kept it for the last two days at the house, and that the people across the street in the opposite direction from Mr. Hotchkins's had just come and claimed the rabbit as theirs.
Last human domicile. Doh! I had just learned a very valuable lesson in cueing targets for the Matrix. The rabbit had spent the last two days at this two-story white house. Although it wasn't the rabbit's real home, the Matrix had delivered the exact data I had asked for. If I had cued the target: Kimberly's found rabbit/domicile, the Matrix most likely would have delivered up information on the house across the street, the house belonging to the real owners. But I added the qualifier "last", and so the Matrix gave me the last dwelling that the rabbit lived in. The two-story white house. A perfect example of how specific the Matrix is in delivering data.
Moments later, as I stood at the front door of the house belonging to the rabbit's true owners, I looked up and heard the "pink, pink, tink" of a dainty wind chime near my head, the same sound I had heard across the street. A woman who spoke no English answered the door, and after embarrassing myself by making bunny sign language using my fingers for ears, she claimed to be the rightful owner and called around the corner of the house. The gardener appeared, and she told him to follow me to my house to the get the rabbit. As an interesting side-note, the gardener was a migrant "worker."
Like Alice in Wonderland, I followed a white rabbit, down a hole into a wondrous world called the Matrix. I had not the foggiest notion where the data would lead me. But lead me it did, and in following the clues retrieved from its data banks, I led the rabbit home.
