Mish Mash

When a wounded, bleeding cat was presented to me in a dream I took him in with open arms and nursed him to health. Soon he was running around the house freely, in good health, just being a much loved happy cat. When he tried to follow me outdoors I blocked his exit and said No, you can't have THAT kind of freedom. So I began wondering how this related to my current life. Cats are fiercely independent creatures, with minds of their own, free spirits--yet they are very dependent upon the care of humans. Like any living thing, they can be hurt, wounded, abused, mistreated. They can lose their power. Their damaged bodies die and the spirit moves on.

Our sense of freedom can suddenly be shattered by life events that are unexpected, from small shatterings that are momentary to life-changing events. Adding on a new responsiblility can be both rewarding and feel like a restriction to one's freedom. But there is always choice. Choosing freedom when it's offered, choosing to heal when that's available to us, chosing carefully when to set up boundaries (as opposed to barriers), and choosing to love and care for oneself and others. Sometimes, with the very best of intentions, we give our power away by acquiescing to things when our gut says no, I really don't want to do that, or no, that doesn't work for me. We allow ourselves to do things when something inside keeps telling us it just doesn't fit. Clarity can be elusive, decision-making can require deep introspection, and then we just have to trust. Self-acceptance can be a powerful tool.

It rained this past week and the burn pile was really big, so I doused it with a modest amount of diesel and set it afire. Because it was damp, it burned slow and created swirls of dense white smoke and steam. The rain poured down in light to heavy pulsations, but fire is hard to contain. I love fires, but I don't like being out in the rain. But something primitive inside stirred and I stayed with it. I peeled my clothes off and felt the rain drops all around me. I stepped near to the fire with rake in hand and played with trying to get more leaves and wood to burn. The wind constantly shifted and I was forever finding myself engulfed in smoke. There was a meeting of the elements I rarely witness up close--the dance of fire interacting with a dousing of rain, then fed and renewed by a gush of wind, the organic, dying limbs and leaves and roots of plants transforming into ash. A dove landed on a nearby line and cooed and watched and had a hard time balancing on the wire.

Sometimes it's hard to balance our lives. We find we are doing too much and feel we have no freedom, that we have lost touch with the natural world. We take on more and feel strangled. We let go of some things and sometimes that works, sometimes we find we have too much free time and we don't know how to deal with it. We grow bored. We feel guilty that we are not being productive, or doing our part to save the world, to save the planet.

The smoke from the fire permeated my skin, my hair and I smelled like soot. My eyes watered. Stepping too close to the heat made me look like a blushing beet. I watched a confused cricket race towards the fire only to turn around to get away, circle around and come back into the fire from another angle. He was burned alive.

Sometimes when we get burned it's because we are running around in circles and not noticing that we are moving too close too danger, or we are moving too far from safety. We douse ourselves with water and feel cold and drenched. When we bleed like a wounded cat we feel we have lost our power, given away some freedom, and we want it back. We seek healing. We find freedom. But when we begin to rest comfortably into that sense of safety and permanence, it can quickly be taken away,
go up in smoke, bleed out onto the ground, we fall off the tightrope we've been walking on. We mourn like a dove. But we fly on.

I ran over a squirrel on the highway. It was a hard hit. I turned around and parked. He was partially crushed yet frantically hanging on for life, gasping for breath. I covered him with a rag and put him in a cloth grocery bag. I put him on the ground and he was bleeding and crushed beyond hope. I hated to see him suffering. I was at friend's house so I borrowed his father's shot gun and blasted the little squirrel into little fleshy, bloody bits and pieces. I felt horrible, not so much for putting him down, but for running him over in the first place, for being involved in his death. Stay with it.

When we get in too much of a hurry and we are not watching where we are going life can run us over and lickety-split we are smashed and broken and lay there bleeding. Maybe we survive, maybe not, sometimes a little part of us dies. All the things we have squirrelled away for the winters of our life we must some day leave behind, and that could be tomorrow. But always there is rebirth.

I can't seem to totally wash away the smell of soot. I stink in a way that has a slight appeal to my senses. Maybe it's in my lungs, or hangin on to hair in my nostrils. A squirrel ran out in front of my car today but I stopped just in time for him to make his escape. My cats grow fat and lazy and are afraid to go outside when I accidentally leave the door open behind me. It's a kind of freedom they've never known, so they don't want it.

The birdsong has been especially loud of late, or maybe I'm simply noticing it more. The doves gather around the birdfeeders and find it hard to balance, so mostly they eat seed that has fallen to the ground. They compete with the squirrels. Feral cats lurk in the bushes waiting for just the right moment to pounce on their prey. Buzzards were pecking out the eyes of a deer carcass on the side of the highway this morning. It truly gave me the creeps, but it is the law of the jungle, even the sometimes chaotic urban jungle in which most of us live. But always, there is harmony to be found, and always, we are challenged to learn, to try and find that often very small place of balance where we can rest.