The Case of the Missing Cat



Three weeks ago I agreed to foster-mom a 5 month old orange tomcat for our local cat rescue league. I already have a year old gray female cat named Sassy, and she didn't like the newcomer ONE BIT. I named the newcomer Hugsly because once on my lap, he was a cuddly little lover.



Once he was off my lap, he was so timid he hid in the oddest places...squeezing behind the fireplace, under cupboards and behind the dryer. His nightly skirmishes with Queen Sassy didn't help matters, as she defended her spot on my bed with the ferocity of a tiger.



Now he is just plain invisible. I haven't seen him in a week and I know he didn't skip out the door. I have been telling myself it will just take time for him to feel at home, but where the heck is he??? I know it's really starting to bug me because last night I dreamt I got up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night and he was in the kitchen.

Where is that cat?

Spring is making it's way here with wild winds scrubbing the trees clean of dead branches and blowing away last year's crumbled leaves to reveal green daffodil shoots. Kneeling in the earth and feeling the soil through my fingers is God's chapel for me.

The first day of 2009 was a shocker. I lost my primary job when the business closed without warning. Did I mention they owed me a month's salary?

On January 12th I decided to once again participate in my my life and attempt the presence process. My 4 previous attempts crashed and burned by session 6.

This time I seem to have one thought burned into my forehead..."NO MATTER WHAT, breathe twice a day."

It's been quite unpleasant and quite glorious and I have no idea where I am going if anywhere at all.

Last week my landlord, who has really been patient with my late rent, asked me to pay in full or leave. I recognise that my lack of moolah is an emotional blockage and as these circumstances come up they are brought in love to help me integrate my childhood.

Happy about a possible eviction? Strange, I knew it wasn't to hurt me, but for my highest good. I looked around at all my stuff, walking from room to room, and mentally cleared it all out. Bunches of twitches and tears and aches bubbled up from the depths during my breathing exercises.

This week it turns out my tax return will cover the back rent with just enough left over to pay the accountant and my landlord is graciously willing to wait until it gets here.

I really don't think there are coincidences anymore.

Spring cleaning has a new meaning for me now.

this is the other one...they were written in 2005.

Poisened
Poisened,
I
Scrape the skin
tender skin
Burning, itching skin
(i told everyone it was)
(an allergic reaction)
to an evergreen.
I know better..it was my heart
trying to protect
The
best of filet
inside my arms.
My mind won't protest
So my body does
Producing Disease,
And
Boils rise,
poisened,
from the tree
tree i pruned
keeping you
from me.
Poisened,
I
Weep.
Like my skin
Poisened from
the touch
of you.
Cryptic,
i know
I speak not
of your death mask
your
deadly grin.
As you touch me,
love me,
poisening
my skin.

When my last computer crashed I lost 7,000 words of a novel I was writing and a few dozen poems. I just found these two tucked away and I'm sure it's not an accident that they appeared in week 5 of my journey inside with the Presence Process...

Poetry,
that boring, hateful word,
Endured, dreamed thru,
in required education
Is no more to be feared
Then clouds,
watched on your back,
Dreaming
Just a thought rhytmn,
undulating
as you let go of necessary
and fall into
being.

When I was 6 my youngest sibling, the only boy and aged 2, received a toolbox for Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my dolls and clothes and perhaps an “easy bake” oven but I was obsessed with that toolbox. It had a hammer with a wooden shaft and a bright blue head. There was a little craft table that held cutouts of circles and triangles and squares. The object was to take the color coded blocks and fit them into their proper mates and hammer like hell until they sat perfectly. It was a hands-on jigsaw puzzle for the future male engineers of the world.

In the guise of a good big sister entertaining her baby brother, we played carpenter together.

Valiantly I would hammer a circle into a square with all my heart, twisting and turning the block to make it fit, but even at that young age I real-eyesd you couldn’t fit a circle into a square without bludgeoning it to death. Mine never fit until at least the fourth try, when I finally got the idea to try a circle with a circle, a square with a square.

I had just learned the art of futilely manipulating a person, place or thing, pretending I was helping them in order to get what I secretly wanted.

I guess I’m slow, because it has just come to me that I still have that bright blue hammer and no matter how hard I hit with it, a circle will NOT fit into a square.

You can’t live your today with yesterday’s hammer, no matter how seductively it’s painted.

I woke up this morning with the bare branches of the trees scratching against the skin of the house. The winter wind is strong here, and early mornings are often cushioned in fog. Not this morning though, because the white was falling in glorious snowflakes instead. I sat at my little table by the window, sipping coffee and watching the snow. All was black and white with a touch of green from the holly shrub that peeks above the windowsill. A redbird came to visit...and it was all so perfect and beautiful I thought my heart would burst.

The current took me out so far this time I think I've landed in South Africa or perhaps resting in the South China Sea.

That is the first sentence I've written for my own pleasure in a year, when I stopped writing my newspaper column.

My muse picked up and left, just like Mary Poppins with an English sniff of her aristocratic nose and her umbrella under her arm.

My soul knew I had to stop writing the column, even if my head (and everyone else) thought I was nuts.

Feels good deep inside to write, though this post is just a baby post relearning how to walk.