Lover Girl

Thumper-Rina loves everyone, as far as I can tell. And she seems to do it with equal measure. She snuggles against anyone willing to let her, greets each one with a nose kiss, rubs against whoever will accept her affection.

She arrived here from the neighbors about the time Chata and Vespa did. For a while, it looked as if she and Beemer were going to take a job in a barn, but the owner of the barn changed his mind. So Thumper came in to be a studio cat instead and Beemer continues trying to organize everyone with his strength. Hopefully we’ll find another job for him so he can relax a bit about trying to bat the gang into his idea of shape.

Thumper has a sweetness about her that reminds me of Monkey Gurl, but Monkey loved her solitude and wasn’t very interested in physical affection. Although she’s not really pet-able, Thumper does love to do the leg weave. When I’m in the kitchen making food, she frequently comes to rub against my legs. Zo-Zo rubs against her, so when I look down, there is a curvy movement of dark and light. I figure this is as close as Zo-Zo will get to rubbing up against me.

Thumper likes to talk, too. When she comes in, when she goes out, she makes a little conversation. I think she enjoys the stories of the gang. She watches, reports back, or reports to herself. When I’m doing something she’s interested in, she comes near me and meows as if to say, “Whatcha doin’? Can I do it too?”

Her air of contentment is infectious. I gaze at her and find myself saying “yes” to receptive curiosity and delight. No worries there, no stories about how the future might bring difficulties to plan for or how the past brought tragedy that are sad, sad, sad. Her direct engagement with life is a fine teaching for me. Eat, poop, play, rest, get curious, love one another. Simple and elegant.

Curious Happiness

For some time I’ve been having a curious happiness come over me. It comes unbidden, lies quietly in the background. Or, more accurately, in the foreground. As if a shy star coming forward to be seen in its still beauty.

In the last week I’ve been inquiring daily into happiness. When it appears to be gone, where is it? I suppose another way of describing this happiness is love. There are no accurate words. As Pema Chodron said about compassion, it isn’t what you think it is.

In my morning meditation recently, I sat wondering about this. Where does it go? And then, what is surely obvious to many, I “saw” it is everywhere. It is the curtains expressing curtain-ness, the bed expressing bed-ness, Puffer Vasu expressing cat-ness, the sun expressing sun-ness. It doesn’t go anywhere. It is everywhere.

Worry, on the other hand, seems to me to be a constellated energy, like a handful of clay. How easily my attention can go to what seems more solid, more “real” than something as diffuse as all-love/happiness. Nothing wrong with that. Attention is engaged in the dance of life. When my focus is “out there”, I am more likely to be caught up in what appears most dense to my perception. When I rest back into the vastness, happiness-that-permeates-everything comes to the fore.

“Love is the dissolver of everything. It’s the great solvent,” Pamela said in satsang recently.

I continue to wake each morning with fretting. This is a life-long habit, maybe a many-lives-long habit. I note I want to quickly welcome fretting, give it tea, and then have it dissolve, never to rise up again. A kind of tough love, as if I know what is good for it. Really, it is that I don’t want fretting, have trouble seeing the use of it, and am weary to the bone of these mind games that try to organize the future for happiness.

This love, this happiness, that is in everything isn’t a doer. It has no stake in whether or not fretting dissolves, whether or not fretting recognizes its true nature.

For now, I don’t clearly see the source of resistance to this daily morning visitor. As much as possible, I bring tenderness to its nudging me awake into the day. And then I get up, get tea, sit with Puffer Vasu, meditate a little, feed the cats, and trust that this curious happiness knows the way.

Tails Up

I’m sure if I did some research, researchers would confidently inform me the “meaning” of the tails-up position for cats. I’ve become lazy about research and doubtful about the human imposed view of why animals do the things they do, so I’ll just give my own particular view just for the fun of it.

I take it as a friendly gesture, a let’s-play-and-hang-out-gesture.

I’ve been trying for some weeks to get good photos of the tails up greeting, but my little camera doesn’t do action so well. The cats are usually on the move when it happens. Sometimes there are three with tails wrapped at various angles and the cats practically falling over one another to get close.

Last week, when I walked back from the Farmer’s Market, I left the studio door open a cat’s width while I took my goodies into the kitchen. When I turned, four cats were following in a line with tails up. I laughed out loud. Maybe that was what they wanted.

I’ve only lived with one bushy tailed cat before. The tails are so much more noticeable to me when they fluff out and even more striking when there are a number of them, so this gesture has come into my awareness.

I admit I did try to find something out about the tails up gesture in a book given to me about cats and secrets, but I stumbled over a page that said research shows that cats don’t like to be petted. Or maybe it said it’s not natural to be petted. To my mind, this is the sort of gross analysis that gives human thinking way too much authority about what this universe is up to.

I don’t know if cats naturally like human hands on them or not, but I’ve certainly known a number who seek out petting. Within this group, most don’t. Most of them spend a lot of time next to each other, which I take to mean they like contact. There are a few, like Trixie, who seem to prefer solitude. Oh-Oh likes to be petted by me and by my neighbor, but shies from other humans and doesn’t like to snuggle with cousins. TangaRoo and I make “Roo time” each day in which I sit on a stuffed chair and she half crawls onto my lap. I pet with my hand, she pets with her tongue. If I’ve missed doing it, she comes looking for me in the evening.

Puffer Vasu has never been a snuggle cat, but she certainly likes to get on my lap and purr and have some petting. Her choice, though. None of this picking-up-lovey-dovey stuff, thank you. Nor does she have her tail up much these days. The body is aging and not so comfortable. But as a young cat, it was a prelude to play.

Whatever the meaning, to cats or others, tails up seems a happy gesture, an expression of joy in life. The petting I leave up to them. Monkey Gurl taught me that we don’t need to touch physically when we touch so intimately on the inside. I’ve taken that lesson to heart because I find it softens the edges of separation quite nicely.

Again and again, I offer full prostrations of gratitude to these gorgeous four-legged and tailed beings for their generosity and patience in teaching this particular human to just relax and enjoy life in all its not-knowingness.