Arranging the ongoing now

Convalescence

 

the cat:  Sheba had extensive dental surgery yesterday, five bad teeth removed.  She spent overnight at the  Vet hospital getting hydrated on an IV and perhaps meowing pitifully, or maybe just crouching, aware that there are dogs in the vicinity.  We missed her often, expecting her to be on the kitchen table yowling for breakfast while you make coffee, or on her chair in the study when you check e-mail.  Once she heals her mouth pain should be gone.  We have to give her antibiotics and a syringe of pain medicine twice a day.  Boy, does she not like it!


my transplant:  It will drive you crazy if you let it - waiting for the transplant people to call with a date for surgery. Waiting to see if I go into high gear then, or stay relaxed.  Now hung up waiting for my internist to fax them that I am recovered from pancreatitis.  Where is he? 
     Certain questions lie cloudy in the back of my mind.  How long will convalescence take?  (Oh god, I could wake up with a dialysis catheter in my neck, the transplant having failed.)  What will I be like when I m fully recovered and feel well?  A future no one can predict, though I have my intention:  I will accept this kidney with profound gratitude.  That's the key, that your body/mind not reject it.

But then there are the trivial concerns, like

the spices:  Will I finish alphabetizing them and clean the counter up?
[I did.]

It's a Cat's Life

Do I ask much?  I don't ask much.  Just my chair in the study, an old wicker chair - but do I complain? At least it is softened with a folded brown hand towel, to make my colors Pop!  and Buffy, Mom's oldest, softest stuffed animal as a sort of padding.  A stuffed golden cocker spaniel.  He's been dead so long he doesn't even have bad breath, so I don't care.

Do I ask much?  Just don't leave the new headphones and all that cable on my chair, okay?  I have one chair in every room, and of course the entire king-size bed.  They are not horizontal filing cabinets.  Let's remember that.

Is that too much to ask?  No.  That and a tuna smoothie morning and night.  I can't smoke or open a bottle of wine or eat chocolate, tuna's the best I can do.  And do I have to sit some evenings and yowl monotonously to get Someone to pay attention and give it to me?  Don't even ask.  But I am a good cat.  I have never bitten either one of them.  It's not feminine.  But don't push me.

[image: Sheba putting her paw down on the kitchen table.]

Miracules of healing

It is with great relief and gratitude that I can report today that Sheba is clearly much better.  My gratitude is general, to the universe, that brings forth marvelous forms capable of healing, and particular, for the friends at home and online who understood and made helpful suggestions.

Today Sheba is eating again a select variety of expensive canned catfood, even her dry kidney diet if it is soaked in chicken broth to soften it.  Her digestive system is operating as it should. She has resumed her usual schedule, lying up against my hip while I read in bed. (I knew she was really sick when she stopped doing her rituals.)  It does seem reasonable now to hope that what caused her weight loss was not kidney failure, but pain in her mouth that made it hard to eat. The antibiotic has helped.  Next week she will go to the Vet to be sedated and have her mouth examined. 

She did not entirely heal herself, but was helped along by those two daily doses of liquid amoxicillin.  We have become more skillful in administering that to a cat who does not like to be held in any way, let alone having her pretty little head immobilized for a few seconds.  Maybe she has realized something, for she seems to swallow quicker.  Thanks to my daughter, Cassie, who recommended I look in Sheba's eyes and talk to her, explain why we are doing this.  Cassie said animals may not change their behavior, but they understand. I had a sense that this was true when I did it.

It is thundering.  I just went to the screened porch expecting Sheba would want to come in.  Our last cat, Sherlock, did not like thunder, and went to a special place under the guest bed, way back against the wall.  But Sheba was watching the dimming light and blowing leaves through the screens with interest.  We are all  unique.

Her gains in health caused me to look at her as a remarkable collection of organs and patterns, including immune response.  She is so small, 7.3 pounds, so delicate, so complicated, and able to heal, as all life is.  If I stop for a moment I can see my own body the same way, how my pancreas has been healing by merely following a different diet for a while (and discontinuing the drug responsible for the illness).  No major medical treatments involved, just let the pancreas rest.  It fosters a sort of awe.

I feel that awe often now that I am back on my feet - when I walk across a room barefoot in the morning, or take the short sidewalk to my acupuncturist's office.  It feels miraculous to be up on my feet (with custom insoles in my Asics), after last year's long difficulties.  I am even able now to grocery shop without using an electric cart.  I love a little verse by Thich Nhat Han that goes like this:

Walking on the earth is a miracle!
Each mindful step reveals the wondrous Dharmakaya.

[image:  a portrait of Sheba in morning sun]

Sheba Aging

Sheba's doctor called.  Thyroid normal, creatinine higher.  He wants us to give her subcutaneous therapy for a couple of weeks, I think he said once a week, and continue the antibiotic, then make an appointment later this month so he can sedate her and look at her mouth.  Maybe there's an abcess there, or a badly decayed tooth.  Poor kitty.

Maybe I can learn to do the subcu, motivated by the knowledge that to have a technician do it costs $20.  That's on top of a bag of the liquid that costs, did the girl on the phone say $27? Can that be?  That would be once a week.  84 problems?  85?  I need to drop a couple off the other end.

Sheba looks very fine today, not afraid of us, sitting here beside me on her chair accepting frequent petting. Above is a picture of her sleeping there, trustful and relaxed, at home.  With work, we humans can understand sickness and old age, and learn to accept them as inevitable - accepting death is harder - but animals are only confused and afraid of losing their abilities.  That makes us especially want to comfort Sheba and care for her.

Poor kitty

We took Sheba to the vet today for her annual exam, taking with us concerns about the way her eating habits have changed - she will eat only soft food cut up very small, and often eats only the gravy.  Perhaps connected to this, she looked thinner.

It turned out she has gone from 9 pounds to 7.3, a big loss. 

When Dr. Mark tried to look inside her mouth, she screamed with pain, and hissed, something she never does.  Poor cat.  He could see she is red in there, and could smell on her breath something; it could be uremia from failing kidneys or some problem in her mouth.  He took a blood draw for both kidney function and thyroid level.  We should get results tomorrow.  If her kidneys are too bad to go under anesthetic so they can look at her mouth and perhaps correct a problem, then we will be thinking about this version of dialysis kitties get, subcutaneous hydration.  We’ll get results from him tomorrow.

Poor Sheba.  When we got home we tried to give her an eyedropper full of the pink liquid amoxicillin he wants her on twice a day.  It might help whatever’s going on in her mouth.  Oh, how strong she can be when she is frightened of being held down.!  She got away from us and went under our bed, way in the center.  Cats all seem to know that’s as safe a place as they have in the house.

Later she was asleep in her chair, very relaxed, so we managed to creep up on her and I held her against my body while Tom poked the dropper in her mouth, without trying to hold her mouth open the way you usually do.  Of course she didn’t like it, tried to fight, but did swallow it.  Then ran from us again.

Even later tonight she is still wary of me after all she went through today.  Some cats aren’t like that.  But that’s the kind of cat she is.

The Dr. also confirmed that she seems older than the age given on her chart, 4, which was what was on her chart at Cat Welfare.  The kidney failure usually comes later, and she was borderline kidney when we got her a year ago.

So another problem or two or three has been added to our 83 problems. Maybe that means some of those other problems have dissolved. 

Every day's an interesting day

A day or two ago I spied a book at the bottom of a stack of recently purchased books, called Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das. I read a bit of it before bed. I am thinking of the sacred now, responding to Easter.

The next day, which was yesterday, I recalled the book's invitation to think of many ways you can contact the sacred, and set out with my camera to walk in the ravine. If there is any one thing I feel grateful for most often, it is the ability to walk, for I was off my feet for eight or nine months last year, and then spent months getting used to walking. Now walking meditation is not hard for me - walking is always conscious, a pleasure.

I found to my delight that walking down to the stream was nothing. Easy. I decided to take the left fork and walk on to the little bridge over which I once saw a Great Blue Heron fly - a breath-stopping sight. I turned and walked back, taking the above picture of backlit leaves coming forth like a flame. Spring is very eager around here now, the saucer magnolias getting ready to burst out for Easter. So I got lost, which is hard to do when there are only two roads, and I know them very well. Spring befuddlement. I was gone an hour.

All well and good. But last night I did a poetry reading, and as a result of all that, today I'm tired. Too tired to shower. My initial reaction this morning has been to feel sad, sorry that my energy is so low. Well, I have a little work to do to get beyond that and make my way to a deeper understanding. And I think that way is not only the Buddhist way, but also the way of the Tao, and the way of Christianity, the belief systems I am familiar with. I suspect it is the way of every religion, at heart - the spiritual understanding that things are as they are, that we can have faith in that. In reality, which moves on.

Sick or poor or alone or overburdened or in grief - there are many conditions you can wake up and find yourself in on any given day. I have a calligraphy Tom bought me a while back after I'd been working the koan, "Every day's a good day." A statement to ponder whenever you're displeased with your life. How can that possibly be true - every day's a good day - when ____. Fill in the blank.

I am sure this is not about talking yourself into cheerful, something I hate. It is more about just sitting and being with how you are without putting labels on it. Feeling the feeling, a therapist might say, but it is also discarding your ideas, assumptions as elementary as "High energy is better," and your desires, desires like "I want more energy." Sitting in meditation you actually feel the desire. Then, equally difficult, you let it pass away. If you sit in meditation or prayer for a few moments, you find even an obsessive thought pattern has passed and you are thinking about something else, like folding the towels in the dryer, or the chalk whiteness of the sycamores across the ravine.

To some degree we pass beyond the very words "good" and "bad." After all, evaluation is not the direct experience of reality, but a concept structure that exists only in the mind. If I do discard those words, I seem to experience life more as interesting, and absorbing. Sheba here at my left hand, getting some good petting because I am rereading what I wrote, not typing. She's got this figured out in that tiny brain about the size of a walnut. Simple. Mom sits at the computer every morning, and when I come over, walking carefully between the keyboard and the screen, she turns on the desk lamp for me. And pats me. Every day's a good day.

Sheba and the Great Matter

You might say Sheba is just a cat. Go a little further and say she's a tiger cat. Look closer and she's a calico overlaid with black stripes, and a very detailed face with, for instance, black kohl around her eyes, then white eyeliner, and that's just the eyes. But - you know where this is going - she is much more than just beautiful. She is magic.

Time and again I look at her and think, She looks like a stuffed animal that has miraculously come to life. I really do see that. Eyes that see, that focus and blink. A delicate paw that spreads and retracts, treading a little whenever she feels loved, or whatever that is that she feels when she is petted. She does feel. She is responsive, real and alive, more satisfying than any stuffed animal can be.

My sense of Sheba's aliveness was perhaps sharpened by experiencing the mystery of Sherlock's death. One moment he was alive, lying on the leather couch beside me, and the next minute he was dead. Nothing had happened to mark the moment when the paralytic medicine stopped everything. Not a convulsion or a sound or a relaxing. He was no longer breathing, that's all. I was alarmed. I asked the Vet, "Is that it?"

"Yes," he assured me. "He's dead." How could that difference be so small?

So now I know that what keeps Sheba from being just a stuffed animal is her breath. She breathes in and out, like I do. I don't know why she breathes or when her breathing will stop. This breathing is a mystery; it is life itself. We take in air and other nourishment, but air is the one you need every moment. We use what we can and exhale the rest. In sitting Zen we are sometimes told to focus on exhaling completely. Suzuki says that thus we die every moment.

Sheba is a lady of a certain age, as the British say, meaning on the upper edge of middle age. We know her kidney functions are very bad, and we know intimately what that means, because that is what killed Sherlock. Right now Sheba eats well and drinks water and continues to process it all. She is alive.

I expect to outlive her (in which I may be quite wrong). If so, I may someday be there when she has stopped breathing, and just like that, Sheba will be no longer alive. Like Sherlock, she is here temporarily. So it is natural to cherish her. And I believe it is natural for that appreciation to fan out to my loved ones, my friends, the squirrel in the Zen garden and the chickadee in the back yard, to every living creature and thing, every breath, every breath I myself get to take.

What's wrong with that cat?!

[image: Sheba on her pillar in my study]
Monday morning we were out for about two hours, getting acupuncture. It's unusual for both of us to be out in the morning, but not unheard of. When we came home, we were meant by the loud lament of The Banshee Cat. 'Sup? I wondered, using my latest street vocab, learned from my grandson. Whassup, Sheba? Why do you need ten minutes of petfest and verbal reassurance to calm down?

It came together with many observations of this little old cat we adopted last summer. Her skittishness, her fear of all Others, cat or human. I thought she had what writers call a backstory, and I knew what it was. It was titled "Separation."

Sheba was eight or ten years old when she was left at a veterinarian's by the woman who brought her there. How long was she there in a cage, waiting to be picked up and taken back to her home territory?

But before that, I thought, she had experienced abandonment. I imagined she lived with an older woman who loved the cat dearly - Sheba has a great purr, the softest fur anywhere, loves to be petted. Her dainty, well-trained habits suggest someone worked with her - no scratching on the rug, no trying to run outdoors.

What if that woman got sick and was taken out, and never came back? Maybe Sheba survived for many days until some niece or sister came to the apartment to pick up some things, and there was the little cat, wailing piteously, out of water and food and scared to death by her person's disappearance. Abandoned and likely to die of dehydration or starvation.

We can hardly know what it feels like to be a nine-pound animal that cannot open a door or get water for itself, that is totally dependent on people who don't follow the schedule. One horrible experience with abandonment can train that animal to be forever easily frightened.

It's a good thing, I thought, that we've never gone on vacation since we had her. We did that when we had Sherlock, leaving him in the care of a reliable and attentive neighbor. Nevertheless, when we pulled in the drive coming home he was on the kitchen table letting out sustained, distressed meows, telling us over and over, I missed you, I didn't know if you were ever coming home.

Thing was, Sherlock was a big strong male cat with a lot of resilience and a naturally sociable fearless nature. He got over it, no credit to him I suppose. He didn't do therapy or meditate on it, just plunged forward into the present reality. That's the kind of cat he was. Sheba is another kind of cat altogether.

What made Sheba and Sherlock such different members of the same species really doesn't matter. Why, why we humans ask. Buddhism points out that we are better served by concentrating on the reality of now. Sheba does have something in her personality you could call separation anxiety. Knowing what caused it would not much help me deal with her. Following her attentively to one of her pillars and stroking her, that helps much more. All this, of course, does not apply to our Small-r relationships ™ with humans in our lives, how we might accept them. It's just about cats.

Your own pillars

Thanksgiving passed Sheba by. We were gone a couple of hours during the day, but that's not unusual and didn't upset her. She spent that time on my chair, which she has recently adopted. It does not have a towel on it, but does have a memory-foam cushion covered in imitation sheepskin. Apparently just the thing for a cat.

When Sheba came into this house she was too scared to get up on my chair. If she had, she would have jumped down and run away, meowing, when I went to sit beside her. Now she sits there in the middle of the cushion as I carefully edge in, encouraging her to move aside a little and make room for me. She is not aggressive about it, but has come into her natural feline dominance. I was here first. What I thought of as "my chair" is one of her pillars now.

Some 40 people were at the church dinner this year. I thought, "all the lonely people," people without any pillars of family to sit on. Then I realized that we are now the generation on top. For an increasing number of us, there is nobody up there, no parents to go home to. Nevertheless, when we came home Tom and I did not have that sense of empty house - we had Sheba, jumping down off The Chair Formerly Known as Mine and squalling to remind me that when I've been gone a long time and come back, treats are due. She was happy with her usual treats, and for her Thanksgiving dinner had Purina liver and bacon supper. She is always happy when things are just the way they have been before, which in her mind is the way they are supposed to be. Predictable. Secure.

Good habits, and breaking them

[image: the stream at the bottom of Walhalla ravine, in autumn]
Forming a new habit - this is such an ordinary, undramatic thing that it hasn't occurred to me to write about it until now. Yet, nothing counts but what you do.

I'm not sure that is true, because I've had experiences of receiving energy, both love and hate, and of connecting through thoughts. But thinking about it, our thoughts and our emotions are actions, too. Thoughts can seem involuntary. I have a friend who surely has been exposed to therapeutic thinking, for once I was worrying about finishing some work, and he said, "Nobody but you is forcing you to do that." It was like having cold water dashed in your face. You blink. The fact is, even privately obsessing is a mental habit. It's yours.

My morning practices. One that I enjoy is splashing my face with cold water while the coffee drips, a Zen habit I read about somewhere in Aitken's work. What makes it Zen is that it is a paradigm for the willingness to wake up, leave dreams behind and be splashed with reality.

The moon is now in the top of an oak on the other side of the ravine, which seems very close, but if you had to walk down that steep incline, or skid and tumble down, and then climb back up, believe me, it would seem very far. Very far when there is no bridge. The October moon is so bright, yet you can look right at it with no fear.

I am muddling here. I don't have to, but I enjoy leaving a form (the essay) behind. My pauses and distractions are part of my truth. I love to watch morning arrive. Morning alive.

When to let a habit drop away? On Friday a blogger named Laura described the joy of sitting the way you want to sit when the zendo is very dark, enjoying dropping the prescribed posture of Zen meditation. That pleasure is keen just because one sits for hours motionless in the prescribed posture, one becomes very aware of the body. And, because you have been following the schedule, like it or not, time to yourself to sit freely and engage with the moon or the dark becomes precious.

My morning service, the string of behaviors I want to become a habit, goes like this. Get up, get robe and slipper socks, shut bedroom door so I don't wake up Tom, walk to kitchen, start coffee (decaf, new habit), take thyroid - don' t forget. Go to bathroom, splash face with cold water (see above), get elastic sleeve which has been drying overnight, follow Sheba's prompts and go through her morning treat sequence (two Magical Floating Cats, one Running Cat, a habit string she never forgets), sit down, put on sleeve and slipper socks and robe. Coffee is done, pour giant mug, come to study. Get computer going. Open journal page, note significant thoughts and dreams. Check incoming mail, read the Tricycle dharma of the day, maybe go to the web site and read a whole dharma talk, check Facebook. Open home page. Back to journal. When I've finished that cup of coffee, it is time to meditate. After that, breakfast (important new habit with my blood sugar playing tricks).

Now this boils down to the bones, the actions not to be skipped:

take thyroid
journal with first cup of coffee
meditate
breakfast

Ah. How refreshing simplicity is. It is true, all the other little actions are important too, and have to be done, but this is the bare form of my morning, the time alone that I have to have. That sets me in place. When I skip it I feel like I never quite catch up with myself.

It sounds easy, this little practice, but it gets into complications because I am a creative person, and writing is both my work and an important part of my spiritual practice. So, when something creative gets going in this morning space - a poem, a fiction, an interesting train of thoughts, writing a post like this - I contemplate the time frame. Today I woke up early and have no morning appointments. It's a spacious morning. So today I am finishing this post, with that always-tempting second cup of coffee. Then I'll meditate.

I know people with well-organized minds, for whom a little sequence like this might seem natural and easy. I imagine they don't read this blog. If they did they would perhaps wonder, what's so hard about it? In the morning you have a cup of coffee, meditate, have breakfast. And remember to take your thyroid first thing.

Of course they're right. (And scrape the litter box, too.) But life is different when you live in the right brain, or even in some space that includes the right brain, which is not linear and organized. I don't have to include a link to information about that; you can look it up. Add to that a long life of bad habits, like skipping breakfast or skipping time with yourself, and you have to work with it. Maybe it isn't inspiring. It's mundane, a word that refers to the world, the everyday. Some people think that's boring, but what else is there?

Shelter cat

When we chose Sheba over 285 other cats at Cat Welfare, it was our own welfare we had in mind. Though it was true that Sheba played a part in the choice, standing up on her pillar and stretching to look at me through the glass walls of the quiet room every time I came in, just as if to ask, "Are you my woman?" I felt sorry for the little cat who was afraid of other cats, whose previous owner had abandoned her at a veterinary hospital. I wondered what had become of that woman. Maybe she was hit by a car, maybe she died, maybe her mother got sick and she flew home to be with her, and couldn't get her wits about her enough to make arrangements for the cat. Anything could have happened.

Your heart goes out to all the cats in that perennially overcrowded no-kill shelter, the ones who wind about your ankle, the ones who are too tired or discouraged or ill to even look up. There is a certain crowd that seems to enjoy the place, hang out together, run around looking for trouble, just like high school. But, just like high school, everyone else is marking time, looking for a way out.

The only record on Sheba showed that she was brought in five months previous, and had been spayed and had her shots. Someone, one of the volunteers I think, told us she was three years old, but we can't track down any records with her date of birth. We believed she was three until we'd had her at home for a week or two and took her to the vet to get her claws trimmed. (Having front claws had not been in her favor.) The vet did a blood draw and called the next day with the bad news: her kidney function is very low. This is a familiar story to cat people; many cats die of kidney failure. Our Sherlock had. We knew his age, seventeen.

Sheba was also chosen for her looks. Shallow as that may seem, a cat is a thing of beauty, an adornment in a house. Sheba was a sort of clouded black tiger, with an expressively marked face, and shadows of auburn beneath her striping. And she had personality. And furthermore, she seemed to yearn toward me, to want to be adopted by us, even though she could hardly be touched, and certainly not picked up. (We never got to pet her until she'd been home for a while.) Her figure we didn't know about, because we saw her only in the tiny quiet room, where she wove in and out of pillars, but mostly just lay there. When we got her home and she was walking about we could see that she is paunchy, with the low belly of an older cat, and carries an extra pound or two.

So we had another cat who might be close to death. I began saying that this was The Wynding Drive Cat Hospice, a joke of sorts, but there seemed to be something sweet about it, that we could give a helpless animal a good end-of-life.

Sheba began weaving into our daily lives in a very satisfactory way. She has gradually taken in more of this nice, big territory - the screened porch, the basement (carpeted steps!) and the garage. She has learned to eat her special kidney diet, though not without protest. She has learned when treats are given, three times a day, and tested a great many other possibilities. She has developed two tricks, or say, aspects of her performance piece around these treats - Running Cat and Magical Floating Cat. She has dedicated certain venues where she naps at specific times of day. At night, she lies on the bed, at my feet, where the heated mattress pad confers a lovely warmth. Would that we could all end up in a hospice that offers so many creature comforts!

It was not our first priority to generously give an orphan cat a home, though we knew we did want a shelter cat. We did it for ourselves. We wanted a cat in the house, we needed relief from the echoing emptiness after Sherlock died. We have ended up with a cat who will probably not be with us as long as he was - I think she is actually eight or nine years old.

Her happiness here is plain to see. She goes out in the garage and stretches to claw at the doormat. In my study, I am surprised to see her thread her way through the colored pencils on my art table and jump neatly up on the file cabinet to watch from the high window, just like Sherlock did. I'm in the process of clearing a place for her on a really high shelf in the closet; she has indicated that she would like to try that.

It is very hard to do any good in this world, have you noticed? You give someone a carefully chosen gift, and it falls flat. You try to help someone out and it turns out to be impossible. But with an animal there is never any question. Sheba is not as demonstrative as some, but she has an expansive purr, and a chirrup and chuckle that demands serious petfest at odd times. She feels safe enough now to try some questionable things, like jumping up on the kitchen table. Gradually her coat has gotten shinier, and she has less dandruff. She sleeps more soundly, not jumping up alarmed at the smallest sound. So, if we never accomplish anything else in this world, we have made one small animal happier. But in the end, it is impossible to say whether she benefits most or whether we do, who gives, the giver or the grateful recipient.

Small talk

It strikes me that those of us who write about daily life don't, really. We pick one thing and write our thoughts about it, our reactions, what it seems to mean to us. So here are a few bits from my day so far.
❍
slept late, very relaxed
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up, dressed quickly and out for acupuncture at 10:00
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mind too full of fiction, thinking about this novel I've been reading
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on acupuncture table I imagine making a fiber hanging that would demonstrate how lives are intertwined, influenced, separated. Many thoughts about whether to take a fiber arts course (no), do we have a board I could use, would pushpins do . . . it would be a muted red fiber, between yarn and twine.
❍
I play with the idea of "my work," of being useful in this world. I think about how when people say that, they really want to matter. To be Someone. I think, the right question is, how can I relieve suffering a little? This gets me thinking about printing a nice photo I took of Tom for my mother-in-law. He had been working outside, and had a holly berry caught in the hinge of his glasses.
● ●
I get very hungry and plan to eat a peach as soon as we get home. They are ripe in the refrigerator and we have to make a plan. I plan to eat two of them today, can't eat five because of the potassium. I want to pick up local corn for dinner, there's at least two servings. I think a whole lot about getting my long hair cut really short. I love my hair, but it mostly annoys me.
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Acupuncturist asks how Sheba is. I tell him her blood draw showed she has kidney disease. We talk about how it is he hasn't got a cat yet. He says they saw one they liked, so they asked their daughter whether she was sure she would take care of it, the box and everything. She said no. So they didn't get a cat. He tells me, "We say, You can do it or not do it, that's okay. But if you say you will take care of it, then you must." I think that's a really good motto for child-rearing. Maybe for your life.
✚
after breakfast Tom and I talk about getting a locking medicine cabinet for all our prescription drugs. Workmen come in here, and our grandson, who is almost ten. Tom is going to unearth an old medic's tool chest he has with a red cross on it that can be padlocked, and would fit in the linen closet. Good, we agree, not spending money, not having to wrestle with installation, not bringing more stuff into the house.
❍
we talk about whether we would take extraordinary measures to prolong little Sheba's life if she goes into terminal kidney failure before we die. Syringe feeding yes, hydration no. We are not as attached to the idea of "having" her as we were Sherlock. We would hope to make her end of life more comfortable.
~~~~~~~
Enough. It's past noon. I used to have a card on my desk with the saying, "How you spend your days is how you spend your life." It's not usually big and important. On the other hand, it all is.

Approaching Sheba

Here is Sheba sleeping trustfully on her chair beside my computer. When I noticed she liked this chair, I put down a folded hand towel for her. During her five-month stay in Cat Welfare, her territory consisted of a low sort of pillar made for a cat to stay under or on, on top of which was a piece of chenille - one of those things it was once fashionable to put on the lid of your toilet, just the right size for the pillar. So now she likes the territories around the house marked by her very own square of towel.

I have no idea what Sheba was like before she got to this sort of Ellis Island for poor homeless cats. I do know she stayed in what the volunteers call "the old ladies' room," a glass-walled room about 4 x 8 feet with a sign on the door, Staff Only! There were four or five other cats who stayed in there, each curled on its own spot - the cats who just didn't like other cats, or maybe just wanted to sleep peacefully. Sheba was premiere among them, genuinely afraid when a strange cat came in the door after me. I suspect that in all her months there she never willingly left that room to join the great central room where a hundred cats mill around, watching DVDs of birds, spatting, climbing up to sit on the cages and look out high windows. Those cats include some who will never leave this place, like the one who is erratic about his litterbox, as well as many young cats able to adapt to all this company.

Sheba had not adapted. She was only three, but the forced inactivity of the little room had plumped her out a bit - we didn't really know that until we got her home, because we had hardly been able to observe her standing or walking. The center of the room was filled by a tray with catfood and water on it. To the side, a litterbox, always kept clean. Whenever I came in the outside door and looked over, she was straining to look at me. She seemed to ask silently, Are you my woman? Are you going to take me home? When that happens, you might as well give up. You have been chosen.

Our beloved companion Sherlock died just about two months ago, having woven his way through our lives for thirteen years. I thought it would be many months, maybe years before I was "ready" for another cat. Certainly I'm not "over" losing him.

But it was just because I missed him so much that I went to Cat Welfare, initially just to pet cats, to be around them, and I found it made me feel better. I went back, Tom with me. We asked about foster cats. Well, they don't really do that, except sometimes when there are kittens that need socialized for a couple of weeks. We knew we are too unsteady on our feet to have kittens around.

We went back again. We started to consider various cats. But my attention kept being drawn to Sheba on her lonely pillar. She was a nervous cat. When I went in (closing the door behind me) she stood and strained toward me, eager to bump her head against my hand, but then frightened and withdrawing. Yet, that eagerness was there, that head bump and that silent question.

Years ago I read a children's book about death called Missing May. It tells how a parentless child is taken in by two kind elderly people who see that she is hungry in her foster home. They give her an abundance of food and love. It's a book everyone should read. It helped me understand real grief, as feeling people experience it. I had lost family members over the years, but in an alcoholic family, grief is avoided, as all pain is avoided. And the loss of difficult people is very complicated, different from the loss of an animal companion. Their love is so straightforward and authentic. And I certainly have felt real grief since Sherlock died, and still do. He was not, as I often told him, "just a cat."

We have had Sheba three weeks now, and she is settling in nicely. It's a pleasure to see her trustfully arranged on the chair beside me, sound asleep. She loves to be petted, it turns out, though she remains terrified of being picked up, and struggles so much she cannot be held.

Tom remarked the day our warranty expired, as he put it. Cat Welfare will take a cat back, and give you back your adoption fee, within a ten-day period. That fact had reassured us, uncertain as this thing seemed. Moreover, this place - and there are many, many such shelters trying to alleviate the suffering of at least a few animals - this place will take a cat back anytime, so none of the cats they have made a commitment to should ever have to end up as strays.

Our commitment to Sheba has deepened gradually. It has gone to another level now that we scheduled her for a vet visit Tuesday. She will have a baseline exam, and perhaps be told to lose a pound. She is still not used to not having food available all the time. We will discuss those front claws, which present a problem in a cat that won't hold still for trimming. She is still jumpy from an attempt a couple of days ago. It was a battle she won. Well, that's the kind of cat she is.

Life has taught me that you can't pick out a cat like you do a car. It just doesn't work to go to the animal shelter and announce, "I have to have a lap cat." Actually, that was one reason I brought Sherlock home all those years ago - the volunteers said he was a great lap cat. It turned out that once he got home and had the run of a two-story house, lots of plants to knock over and windows to guard, people to meet, he became uninterested in sitting in laps.

When you take a cat home, you don't know the back story, whether this cat flinches because someone hit her or it's just her temperament, things like that. And you certainly don't know what that cat is going to be like in this new environment and relationship. In that regard, it's a lot like getting married - be prepared to be surprised. If you look at it the right way, that's what makes life interesting.

Getting in touch with nature, or Sheba among the orchids

It's not a great picture of either Sheba or the orchids. The big orchid is still a graceful arch of perfect bloom, larger than the picture shows. The little one has lost its blooms, so I have moved it to an auspicious place where its sad, naked stem is not prominently in view. You have to love that about potted plants - the fact that you are in charge. Compare that to the ivy in the back yard, firmly situated on seven of the oaks, and trying for number eight. Nature is like that. You can't turn your back for a minute.

Sheba would like to be a phenomenon of the Great Natural World beyond the screened porch. But that's because she doesn't know any better. She doesn't realize she is a very small domestic animal, prey to large dogs that slip their electric fences, diligent hawks, speeding cars, and the naturally scraggly coyote that now graces our ravine. There are also out door cats, and she doesn't like others of her species. Another good reason to stay on the porch.

Then too, out in the natural world Sheba would be sure to be found by fleas, which would ride in to inhabit our civilized world, to leap onto the sofa and the bed Sheba shares with us at night. We like having her there with us. We dislike fleas, which would require us to impose still more civilization in the form of flea poison for her, anti-itch creams for our own tender skins, antihistamines, fogging the bedroom, and so on. Nature leads to complications like that. In fact, it is the very point of civilization - to keep complications out of our houses so we can watch TV in peace.

No, Sheba, like me, does not belong in a world devoid of wireless internet, cellphone towers, yoga pants, and Just Pies. She is an artifact of civilization, bred to diet not on God's beautiful little rosy finches, but on Fancy Feast, which is probably made in part from God's less attractive chickens.

Even now she is on her chair next to me behaving in a thoroughly civilized way, doing a thorough grooming, though she was clean to begin with. There is, in theory, a reason cats do this, but she never studied philosophy. She just does it instinctively, the same way when I was about her age, except in human years, I examined myself closely in the mirror. All these years later that's the one civilized activity I can safely say I'd just as soon avoid.

Wandering off the path

[photo: Sheba sleeping in my study. Note orange spot on top of head.]
Somewhere in the box of old-fashioned photos and slides in my study closet is a picture of nothing, taken when I visited San Francisco years ago. Actually, it is a picture of a path. A simple path, wide enough for one person, scuffed in the dirt and surrounded by tufts of tall grass. Often I couldn't explain why I took the stupid pictures I took, pictures that didn't even have people in them. Now I wish I could get my hands on that one. Hardly a day goes by when I don't think of getting into that box and having at least some of my pictures (that's what we used to call "pix") digitized. Seems lower priority than cleaning up some other areas, what I'd like to call "disorganized areas," or "my filing," but actually think of as messes. In fact, getting out that box would be sure to create another such . . . area.

This morning I am thinking about how I have wandered off my chosen path. That is, right now I am choosing to do this rather than study dharma and meditate. Earlier this morning I chose to sit and talk with Tom over first coffee. We have our best talks this time of day. Inbetween I petted Sheba, who asks for frequent doses of serious petting. I dressed. I sat down here and checked e-mail to see if anything important had come to me in the night.

Indeed, it had. An e-mail from a friend who has been in the hospital with her very sick daughter for many weeks now, coming home briefly now and then to shower and talk with her other kids, then back to keep vigil. Her life has been interrupted - she is thrown off her usual path. I think of another friend, who is grieving her husband of over fifty years. She has grown very thin.

As for me, I woke up depressed, feeling flank pain, which makes me think my kidneys are still infected. I'd gotten used to these infections, but now I'm scared, because we think the episode of arrythmia I had over the weekend was caused by the miracle drug I was taking. The usual drugs for these infections are fluoroquinolins like Levaquin and Cipro; but they can cause arrythmia. What if I can't take them? A kidney infection can kill you. So can irregular heart rhythm. What will the doctor say this afternoon?

Meanwhile, Sheba sleeps beside me on a chair with a hand towel on it. I have discovered that she feels secure on a towel. There are now three towels folded on various chairs in the house. She goes right to them. During her long months at Cat Welfare, she sat on a bit of chenille on a little pillar in the quiet room - that was the limit of her territory. How we envy and love animals for this simplicity. Sheba is happy now, ranging this much larger territory of this house, and having people to pet her frequently. She does not need to be told her path - she knows it. What security is, when she should be fed, when to sleep, what her instincts tell her to do (run from window to window to keep out the Mu's when they stroll our garden paths).

I am less certain of my path. How can I say that? At this moment, being here doing this is the right thing for me. So it must be some idea of my path that troubles me. Tom said an interesting thing about that this morning - as soon as we get on a path, we stop seeing all the options. We tend to keep our eyes down on that path. For me, the path was meditation. I undertook it in 1997 when I was diagnosed with cancer, believing that healing visualization was the only thing I could do for my health. I was wrong about that. There are a lot of other things you can do. Since then I have benefitted from drawing and painting, working with beads, being with friends. Writing poetry. Sitting here in the morning looking at the woods and sky.

One of my friends began keeping a gratitude journal every night when her daughter was dying. She also bought herself a photograph full of comforting blues and white, and put it up opposite her recliner. She has had a daily tai chi practice for many years. The friend who is in mourning keeps a journal listing things she can do for herself, and also sits and lies in her back yard, surrounded by trees and stars. She meditates every day, too, though she is quick to say she's "not a Buddhist" - she follows her own path. She has been writing poetry.

Another friend loves to go walking in the morning before work. When she has to choose between that and sitting in meditation, she chooses walking. She is a healthy, active person who loves to be outside. "Walking on the earth is a miracle" Thich Nhat Hanh says. She sings in a choir, too. These things nourish her spiritually.

So what is our path about? Who knows our path? I suppose that one of the things that has always attracted me to Zen is its focus on meditation, its conviction that this individual practice will lead us to the wisdom and compassion that are basic to the larger Buddhist way of life. Zen also offered me a history of eccentrics. Poets, hermits, people who journeyed around trying this and that until they found it on their own - in fact, that's the Buddha's story or myth, if you prefer. It's a story that emphasizes sitting under a tree and looking at the stars.

For most of the years since I began meditating, I was rigorous about doing it every day. Yet, I always had the policy that if my daughter called when I was meditating, which she often did at one time, on her way to work, I answered the phone. To call this "juggling priorities" is to trivialize the nature of the choices. We are talking about our spiritual nourishment, our commitments, about love. I think it is in this context that we need to contemplate our own path of this moment.

Why they call it work

Nothing is much weirder than thinking that Being a Poet is your work. Or actually, Work, with a capital W. For one thing, as I have often noted before, you don't get paid for it, unless by a sort of accident you win a grant or contest. But I am pretty sure there is no salaried job whose description of duties is --
1. write poetry.
If there were, I am afraid the job description would go on --
2. get it published.
Aye, there's the rub. That's where the work (with a small w) comes in. To get published you have to write well enough - that's years and years of studying good poetry, writing and revising, learning to throw stuff out, or at least move it to a file titled "unpublishable." And transcending rejections to submit your work time and again.

Yesterday we had an excellent visit with the kidney doctor. He pronounced himself as happy as we are with my latest labs, which actually show some improvement in kidney function, perhaps because my anemia has been fixed. I don't have to go back for two months. Released!

Furthermore, the Fourth of July is the date set by my orthopedic doctor when I can leave off my air cast and ankle support and walk around like a regular person. I am already walking more, trying to get muscles toned up after five months of being almost chairbound. My ankles do not hurt!

All that, and I passed the neurological exam of my aging mind. So you can imagine that I feel frisky. You know what that means - if you feel good, it's time to get back to work.

I have been writing during all this; writing is what I do to find myself and express myself. But I haven't made much effort to finish stuff and send it out. Even the blog seemed to take too much energy during this storm of illness. My time is still eaten up with tedious, frustrating phone calls regarding insurance and prescription delivery, and with the ordinary demands of life, like deadheading and watering the Wave petunias in the hanging basket, which have turned out to be demanding Divas. Everything takes minutes, and then the hours are gone.

But I am back to work today, and have been devoting myself to exploring contests where I can submit a certain long, narrative poem. This is work of the tedious, ordinary sort, not as pleasing as tending my potted plants. And it will be more work when I move on to the task of revision, trying to perfect the poem, line by line, word by word, does that comma need to be there? Writing a poem you are pleased with feels like a miracle in which you got to participate. But revising it takes a sharp, clear mind and a sort of ruthless detachment. It's the hardest mental work I know.

At one retreat I wrote a question for the Teacher, "How do I make myself write the book I need to write." (At the time, I thought I knew what that book was.) He read the question aloud and sort of laughed, and said, "Your work is your work," with a shrug. And went on to say that he, too, found aspects of working on his books tedious. Work is not always inspired or inspiring, and it is not always a pleasure.

My daughter, whose consulting business requires a lot of tedious travel, also shrugged when I talked to her about this. "It's not fun," she said matter-of-factly. "That's why they call it work."

Since I am, after all, a writer, these words led me to months of exploring the words work and play. I haven't got very far with it. It's cool when you love what you're doing, and it feels like play, but we all know that not every morning is like that. Some days you remember the First Noble Truth, which people translate various ways, but it goes like this: Sometimes life is hard. Unsatisfactory. Unpleasant. Or at least boring.
[image: our new cat, Sheba, questioning everything I said.]