Management, Worry, and Love

These days are devoted to my cat friends who are indoors--TangaRoo who is recovering from surgery, Litha who is learning about kitten life, and Puffer Vasu who apparently has a bit of a cold.

Even though my conventional vets advocate for separation, I have opted for some socializing. Roo is clear she wants nothing to do with the little gray fluff ball. Puffer appears more ambivalent. She hisses, and even makes a gesture of swatting, but she also has allowed some nose kisses. Still, she avoids the kitchen, where her feeding dishes normally are placed. For now, she’s sticking to the loft side and keeps a watchful eye on the door the little miss would come through.

TangaRoo’s healing, in my estimation, is going very well. Which means she feels well enough to really long for the outdoors. I have let her be on her own some in the last two days in the studio, cautioning her about jumping up and down. The stitches look well knitted to me and she is beginning to learn how to use the leg again. At the same time, I tell her, her surgeon wants me to keep her in at least another three weeks. This seems a very long time in the middle of summer and with cat cousins milling about outside.

Puff, on the other hand, I feel worried about. She doesn’t seem unwell, but is sneezing more than the occasional dust sneezes. I opted to not take her to the vets for the time being, but I may. Colds in cats usually mean a kind of distemper, which can quickly become a serious event.

These are the sorts of things my mind is occupied with. It wants to figure out the “right” thing to do, to make things better, to be responsible, to prevent tragedy. When I sit with Worry and the question, “Who are you really?” I find Love. I think this is the love Jesus evoked. Big-hearted, open-hearted, all encompassing love.

When I was on the edge of puberty, I attended for a while an evangelical church. I went because I really did want to open my heart to Jesus, to be “saved”. My mother, bless her heart, didn’t resist my insistence on being driven the twenty odd miles to town on a country gravel road each Sunday. She didn’t protest my wanting to attend Bible School in the summer, even though she surely had concerns about evangelical leanings. Her father was involved in both Christian Science and the Salvation Army and had developed rigid views about right and wrong, heaven and hell.

In the end, my honesty prevented me from going to the front, claiming salvation, and becoming a fervid member of a church that believed their way was the one and only way and all others be damned. I just couldn’t say with sincerity that my heart had opened to Jesus. But the longing for the love I intuited Jesus represented didn’t disappear, just subsided. Every now and then, I get a sense of open-hearted love. Warm, inviting, relaxed, joyful.

I’ve spent a lot of time becoming acquainted with Emptiness in recent years. Spacious, eternal, nonjudgmental. My terror of no-parachute-no-ground has calmed. I feel increasingly at home in the fact we are made of nothing. But what I want now is the passion and fullness of Love. The Amen-Hallelujah-dancing kind of love. I want to look around in the morning and feel bursting with celebration in what I see.

Worry, my current teacher, is what I wake with. When I ask, “What do you want?” it clearly replies, “Liberation.” It too wants to dance for joy, to smile at the convolutions of management concepts. It too wants life to live fully through the forms it sees, and the form through which it sees (“my” eyes).

Sometimes these mistaken notions unwind in an instant with insight. Sometimes they take several tries, several approaches, or an unexpected event. Willing such a thing doesn’t do it. Maybe that is the real message. The Great Love that Jesus and others have tried to help us know doesn’t go anywhere. It’s here all the time, often in disguise. Worry is one cloak it wears--love under pressure.

Puff, Roo, and Litha know a lot about following life instead of trying to manage it. They may wish for something different in the moment, but I don’t sense resistance to the wishing for something different. Acceptance is inherent in the protest.

Echart Tolle says there are three responses to something we don’t like--change it, leave it, or accept it. The cats know this. Roo, as I have been typing, has settled in to one of her favorite sleeping places. For the moment, acceptance. The next time I go to the door, she will likely shift her strategy to asking for change, “Outside, pleeeeeeease.” And I will have the chance, over and over, to respond with spaciousness and a relaxed management style, keeping in mind Puffer’s mantra: Everything is Good, Do What You Can, Everything is Good.