Joyful to the Heavens Cry

There, above noise and danger,
Sweet Peace is crowned with smiles.
(Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans)

It seems scarcely credible when I think about it now, but in summer 2002 not only did I not know that I was a fur, but I didn't even realise what the word "furry" meant in its anthropomorphic sense. =:o Really, the last year or so has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride at times, and new experiences have been rushing by me at almost breakneck speed. So maybe it's time that I paused for a moment and reflected on the events that have brought me to where I am now.

Watership Down is, of course, at the root of it, as it is with so much else that matters to me, so in that sense I suppose you could date the start of my furry journey to the day that I first read the novel at the age of twelve. However, a more realistic date to put on things might be the 22nd September 2002, when I joined the watershipdown Yahoo Group, and for the first time had an outlet where I could chew over what the book meant to me, and the importance of rabbits in general, with others who were at least reasonably likely to indulge my crazed ramblings.

Bits'n'Bob-stones was also born in the autumn of 2002, although at first it was a rather small Geocities site (in fact, it remained on Geocities until May 2004), with not much at all in the way of original content. I had a bit of a problem there, as I very much wanted to put a site together almost as a way of saying, "thank you" to Richard Adams and to the whole WD community - but I couldn't for the life of me think of what to put up there that would be in some way original. Gradually, I realised that one thing that fascinated me about WD that very few people had considered in any detail was the Lapine language, but in some ways it was frustrating too, as so little of it was revealed in Mr Adams' two books. Just for fun (as I thought then!), why didn't I put together a couple of basic lessons in how to speak Lapine? After all, some work had already been done in the area by Zoe Kealtan, although I considerably simplified the rather complex grammar she had embarked upon creating. Still, my complete lack of any lingustic qualifications beyond a French A-Level wasn't really important where intellectual rigour was going to cede prime importance to making the embleer thing workable and reasonably easy to learn!

So, over the following months, a few more Units were added to what came to be known as Frithaes! A Guide to Colloquial Lapine, and it started to approach the great lumbering behemoth of a course you see there now. The site was expanded in other ways too, such as the inclusion of a few bits of fanfic and various reviews - including what I believe is the most detailed review to be found anywhere of the BBC Radio 4 adaptation broadcast in September and October of 2002. By the run-up to Christmas, I was scouring all corners of the net for pieces of information about WD, however minor or obscure. B'n'B did not gain much at that stage from being a member of the WD Webring, which in late 2002 was a moribund affair, drifting along aimlessly with no real administration being done, so I did a lot of my own searching. I am a long-standing user and admirer of Usenet, so of course I searched there too, and before too long I came across a mention of a newsgroup called alt.lifestyle.furry.

I bet you all think you know what I'm going to say now, don't you? Well, you're wrong. I had the misfortune to surface from Google into the middle of a flamewar, and quickly decided that I wanted nothing to do with these furry lifestylers. My snap judgement there was a poor one, but it took some little time for me to accept that, as we'll see in a minute. Still, at least I could now write "furry" instead of "anthropomorphic" when writing about books and so on, which was a nice time-saver.

Christmas itself was the real launching pad. On Christmas Eve, I added a comment to my About the Site page to the effect that "furry types" were welcome on B'n'B because "by most definitions, I'm one myself". Looking back now, that was a more important addition than I think I realised at the time. Even when the next day (yep, Christmas Day) I began to use the text rabbit smileys ( =:) and so on) as a matter of course, I didn't really consider it to be all that significant. I went away to stay with relatives over Christmas, and spent a lot of my time there thinking. I had an ordinary pad of A4 paper, and page after page of it would fill up with scribbles and scrawls about furriness. For example, I'd write down sentences such as, "I am a furry", and just sit and look at them for minutes on end, to see whether they "felt right". Or I'd doodle a rabbit (well, a vague approximation thereto) and draw an arrow pointing to it labelled "Me". I even drew the "Proud to be a Furry" badge in the condensation on my bedroom window one night!

By the time I got back, things were moving fast both on the Webring front - with the appointment of Entei-rah as webringmaster, a much-needed sense of direction was restored - and in my brain (which is a rare occurrence =;) ), and all sorts of thoughts and emotions were flying about. I'm not the sort of person who can give myself, say, a month to think about something and stick rigidly to that deadline - I needed to get something down there and then. So I took the opportunity of a previously-planned long post to the WD Group about Lapine, and added a little bit to the beginning about the linguistic nuances of the word, "furry" itself.

Well, it was supposed to be a little bit, anyway. In fact, it ended up accounting for over 700 words of the post, and so it has come to be known by a word I used early on in the article - my superwaffle. One interesting thing about it was that although I referred to myself as "a furry" (which was a first in itself), I was still holding back from going any further, and stated that I was "certainly not 'a furry lifestyler'". Seeing that up in print, though, the doubts began almost immediately. I still needed to get more out of my system on this topic before I could really be comfortable with myself, and so I wrote a short essay about whether Watership Down qualified as "furry literature". This is, naturally, a silly question - of course it qualifies - but if you can see what I mean here, it was writing the essay that was the important thing, rather than what it actually said.

On the 9th January, I decided to add the Proud to be a Furry logo to the site. This was significant, as it was prominently displayed on my front page, and thus likely to be seen by all visitors, whereas things like the superwaffle were fairly dense and wordy, and only read by a few people. I was now more or less entirely comfortable thinking of myself as "a furry", but not (yet) as "a fur". A mere 24 hours later, I did something that proved to be one of the most important aspects of embracing my furriness. No, not hearing "The Raccoon Song" for the first time, although that did happen on the same day! Previously, I'd signed all my posts to the WD Group simply as "David". But now, I began to sign them "David/Loganberry", the first public appearance of the name I now love so much. This "dual signature" didn't actually last very long - I was signing things simply as "Loganberry" after the 24th January - but nevertheless I think it is the earlier date that is the more importance; I haven't renounced my RL name, after all.

By this time, my thoughts were returning to alt.lifestyle.furry , as despite my bad first impressions of it, I'd since come across it mentioned favourably in a number of the furry websites I was now searching regularly. In any case, the alternative, alt.fan.furry , didn't seem a very pleasant place to be, not least because of one particular poster who seemed (and still does) to spend his entire time putting down furry and those who enjoyed it. (Yes, you are thinking of the same person that I am!) Over the next week or so, I read almost all of the previous couple of years' posts to alt.l.f. , paying particular attention to the Furveys, as they seemed to me to be where I would be most likely to find the authentic voice of furry lifestylers, especially the questions about how they first became aware of their furriness. It was reading these, more than anything else, that brought home to me just how broad a church furry was, and what a huge range of beliefs and values were associated with "the furry lifestyle". The more I read, the more I was attracted to it, and the more I realised that this was where I belonged.

If any date can be said to be the start of "my life as a fur", then it's the 20th January, as this was when I posted my own Furvey to alt.l.f. It might have been a couple of days earlier, in fact, except that I simply couldn't pluck up the courage to press "Send" - I had the whole thing sitting there in XNews, but something stopped me going further. Still, various factors conspired to stop me waiting longer. Firstly, I was already comfortable with the way Usenet operated. Secondly, at that time it was the only way I had of talking to other furs, other than very occasionally on the WD Group. I had no LiveJournal, and didn't know any furs well enough to email them. And thirdly, my Furvey took quite some effort to write, and the thought of a great long piece like that just sitting on my hard disk for all eternity was too horrible to contemplate. I like my writing to be read!

I could stop here and say, "the rest is history", but I'm not passing up the opportunity to ramble on for a while longer yet! After my first "Loganberry-only" signature on 24th January, the next significant happening - and like several of the others, I didn't really realise just how significant at the time - was my publishing of my poem FLR on alt.l.f. (It was uploaded to B'n'B a fortnight later, and eventually came here to Logan's Runes in October 2003). Perhaps oddly, at first I didn't really understand just how personal a poem I'd written - that last verse in particular is one that I now find hugely uplifting to read. (And yes, the title of this very essay comes from the final verse of that poem. This probably makes me amazingly pretentious or something.)

By now, I was certain that my self-description as "certainly not a furry lifestyler" was just plain wrong. A fur I was, and a fur I was delighted to be. On 20th February, I used my Furry Code for the first time, albeit only in passing (on the WD Group), and five days later I posted the original version of Rabbiting On to my FictionPress account. That essay was intended as an overview of furriness for those who knew nothing about the subject, but in the event the great majority of reviews (which were almost embarrassingly positive for the most part) came either from existing furs or from people much like me, who had felt some kind of animal connection for many years, but hadn't realised that there were so many others like them, or even that the furry community existed. If there's one thing I am really proud of in the furry sphere, it's helping those people. Doing that has been a most fulfilling and pleasurable experience. =:D

11th March brought two important events. Firstly, for the first time I filled in the "species" field of another fur's guestbook. That other fur was a snowkitten by the name of Eliki - I can't imagine what might have happened to him... =;) And secondly, I made my last entry in my old blog, in which I used the specific words, "I am a fur" for the first time outside of alt.l.f. It's maybe worth quoting a short extract from that final post:

Obviously I'd known how much Watership Down affected me for years... but it wasn't until I read a lot more furry literature that I realised that the fact that the heroes were rabbits was so important in itself. I'm not the sort of fur who believes that they were a rabbit in a former life, or has a rabbit "power animal" or suchlike. Rather, I'm an "empathic fur" - someone who feels a deep, intense kinship with rabbits, beyond anything I can rationalise, to the extent that even the sight of the word is exhilarating and elating.

Not a lot happened after that until late April. On the 27th, I posted an announcement to the WD Group containing two important pieces of information: one being that the fanfic author "AndrewB" was in fact me, and the second being that I was a fur. I worded the post rather badly, unfortunately, making it appear to a casual reader that I considered this a "confession". To clear this up once and for all: it was nothing of the kind. The confession was that I'd been covering up "AndrewB"'s real identity: the announcement of my furriness was one of unalloyed happiness. And the next day, my Furry Code box went up on Bits'n'Bob-stones. There could be no doubt about it now - I was a fur, and everyone who visited my site was welcome to know it.

Thanks to Eliki's generosity, I got my LiveJournal on 21st May, and I've met quite a few more very fine people (mostly, but not all, furry) that way; but essentially by this time I was relaxed about my furriness, and happier in myself than I could remember. The summer did bring one more very important happening, with a friend finding furry themselves, but I shan't be going into any more detail than that here, as it's not my story to tell. For myself, I can honestly say that I am enormously happy to have found furry, and that my only wish is that I'd done so a little earlier in my life.