Losing a Beloved Pet

Within the past 24 hours, I've heard of a friend whose beloved pet bird died, and one whose beloved cat died. Both of them are grieving deeply. With each story, I look again at my darling buddy, my 17 year old cat, Puff. Seventeen cat years equals about 100 human years.

When my former cat Frankie died, our aged beagle was devastated. I had to get another cat soon to keep the dog from dying of a broken heart. I went two weeks later to the Humane Society to rescue a needy kitten. There were dozens to choose from that day. Rows of cages contained cute, pretty kittens all sleeping or sitting and watching for a new family.

The last cage on the top row housed a little orange-and-white medium-hair kitten who was wide awake. When she saw me, she started jumping and doing somersaults, trying to entice me to play. A little white paw reached out to flag me down. I approached, and she stopped jumping and started purring loudly, rubbing against the bars. I turned to look at the rest of the kittens. "Mew! Mew!" Her petite little meows objected to my leaving. When I turned back, she purred again, and batted at me. I stayed to play, watching her somersaulting antics. If I looked away toward the other dozing kittens, she became outraged. "MEW! MEW!!!" If I looked back at her: “PURRR!!!” It turns out that I am an obedient slave to adorable balls of fluff.

Puff and the dog bonded instantly. Our new little kitten gave a tongue bath to that smelly, fat, old ecstatic dog that night and every night for the rest of the dog’s life.

Puff has been a bundle of love all along. I offer as proof the orange spot on her back that is in the shape of a perfect heart. Whenever we have people over, she takes turns sitting in each person’s lap, purring. If somebody is sick, she sits on their lap, purring until they get better. The few times I’ve had a devastating case of the flu, she stays with me on the couch for the week or two until I’m well. One time Gary and I had a fight and I felt terrible. She lay on my chest all night, one paw on each side of my face, purring into my heart. That’s the only time she’s slept on me at night.

Her taste in people and hobbies is impeccable. After nursing me through my divorce with plenty of walks together and lots of purring, she accompanied me to Colorado. Eventually I met Gary Immediately she fell in love with him and became Gary’s cat. I call her his other wife. When we married, I got a piano, and Puff took up playing. In the middle of the night, she’d jump up on the keyboard and start walking around. She still does that when things become too boring for her. If I start playing, she will also hop up and share in the music. She loves to sniff flowers too.

These days she is too arthritic to accompany us on walks. Instead, on nice summer evenings Gary and I pack up the dog and cat and drive to the ice cream shop. Puff and Gypsy share a little dish of vanilla ice cream. We all sit in the back of the car with the hatch up, enjoying our peaceful treat time together.

It’s heartbreaking to see her looking so skeletal and ragged. She’s deaf now, always in pain, and gets confused a lot. But she's still purring! It can be harder in some ways to lose a beloved pet, an inter-species friendship, than to lose a person. Animals see the best in you, and love unconditionally. People relationships take work. Pet relationships are a sharing of love and contentment. Losing an animal is losing a being of purity and innocence, one who gave only joy in their life. Something hurts terribly when we lose a person, but something different hurts terribly when we lose an animal friend. I am trying to prepare myself, but I don’t look forward to losing Puff.
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WAVES OF HUMAN DOLPHINS

Last year at this time, we sold our gallery and started churning up the complacency in our lives. The goal was to find a new way to live, a simpler, more sustainable, less toxic, more harmonious way to live. We wanted a way to live as our truest selves, rather than just working as hard as possible to pay our mortgage. Gary quit his job, determined to find a way to do what he loved for a living. I established a professional practice of holistic healing, which was my part-time work already.

During those heady days of determination to beat the system, we met neighbors we'd never seen before. Other like-minded people, individuals and couples, jumped off the merry-go-round at the same time we did. The synchronicity of humans can be startling. What influence suddenly entered the collective consciousness and propelled some of us off the carousel and over the cliff?

We bonded. Groups of us met for breakfast or for lunch or in our backyards, to discuss how to make this work. All summer and fall we turned ourselves into a community within the community. Various ones of us worked for others of us. A friend jumped ship from her bookkeeping job, and we persuaded her to start her own bookkeeping firm. She did my books and I did healing sessions to help her cope with the death of her sister. Barter is wonderful. Then she started gardening part time for my friend who was starting up an organic gardening business. Gary also gardened with that group, to bring in some income while he found a business that suited him. Another neighbor hired the new gardening group, and the neighborhood community grew. Carpenters, gardeners, electricians worked on one anothers' houses all summer.

Later, Gary helped another neighbor start a business involving natural nontoxic clay paints for interior walls. (shameless plug: www.hallswalls.biz) They created a website and held classes and did samples of their work, but found that there wasn't enough income for two. Meanwhile, they helped Gary remodel our bathrooms, while he made their website. Barter is wonderful. I did healing work for them as needed, in exchange for referrals of new clients. That worked well for all of us.

I held a Company Party for the Self Employed that Christmas. When you work for yourself, there is no company party to get dressed up for at the holidays. So we had our own Company Party. It was a spectacular success! Everyone within this new community got to meet everyone else, if they hadn't already. Business cards were exchanged and new projects were formed.

As winter wore on, the hardship of being self-employed... or "self un-employed" as we fondly called it, became heavier. Savings were running dry for all of us, and the euphoria had worn off. We were becoming worried about medical care and losing our houses. The joyful gatherings of invention turned into serious discussions of how to get something moving quickly.

Just as Gary and I were contemplating emergency measures to ensure our survival, he was offered a better job back at his previous workplace. They missed him there. Gary jumped on the offer, and our sinking ship was reprieved. He determined that he would take a new attitude into the work this time, bringing more of his heart and soul with him, instead of just a work persona.

Right about that same time, I had a remarkable meeting with my monthly women's group. One woman friend, who had done the same things with her life at the same times, had just returned to her former company. She was delighted to return, feeling that she had a brand new view of the job and a real change of heart. Her husband, who had also left his job last May - all of us only met AFTER quitting our jobs simultaneously - had just taken a regular job as well. Another woman in our group had a husband who quit his job last spring too. He had recently decided to stay in his field and return to work, rather than trying to forge a new path. Yet another woman in our group had just taken a job after a year of retreat and contemplation of her life. None of us knew of these developments until our monthly gathering.

And so on, and so on. As abruptly as we all left our usual worlds, we all returned to our former places with new mindsets and new joy.

What causes these mysterious migrations of humans? We have moved through this year with the beautiful synchrony of dolphins leaping in unison. One day, dozens of strangers within a city made a similar move and met the others on this unusual path. We bonded, worked together, invented and planned together. Then one day we scattered back to where we came from.

I think there is a larger social force at work here, some kind of infusion of invisible energy and guidance, to help kickstart society into a new mode. Some of our group took the exciting new energy back to their weary former co-workers. It has had an effect on those folks. Some of our group succeeded in launching a new business over this past year. Our bookkeeping friend is busier than before, loving her freedom. She and another friend have even started a soap-and-lotion-making business for fun. My holistic health practice is booming, and I am writing a book and offering classes. The clay wall paint business is growing slowly but steadily. Many among our group began teaching their favorite topics last year, and have continued doing that. Teaching adds the meaning to their lives that had eluded them previously.

What causes flocks of birds to suddenly turn in midflight? What causes schools of fish to flit as one into a new direction? I think it's the same force that is affecting people like us. We are willing to be moved by the forces of grace and harmony, so therefore we are. We have loosened ourselves out from our tight fit into society. That makes us freer to be be blown by the winds of grace to a spot where we belong. Freedom is a contagion. The more of us who infect the collective human consciousness with thoughts of freedom, the more it spreads. That feels good to me.

(note: if you're new to this blog, read the previously posted stories for the step-by-step walk through this journey. I'm still building this blog, so it's not at all complete yet. Check back in a week or two, and it will be better.)
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I have such a way with babies! Little Ethan is so cute when he cries. 

A peony! 

SEDONA WILDERNESS

October 6, 2004

Sedona Arizona called our number, and we came running. To be more accurate, my brother called from Sedona, and we went driving. It was a treat to be invited to a desert oasis as beautiful as this town.

The drive to Sedona is like none other. Approaching from the East as we did, we drove through hours of desert and Indian Reservations. Hardly an animal was visible for hundreds of miles, then around a bend we’d come upon a herd of dozens of antelope. Their fur is desert-colored, so it would be easy to miss every one of them. I suspect we passed unknowing by more of them than we saw. The music from the Navajo radio stations was pleasant to my ears, rhythmic and harmonious and somewhat hypnotic. Buttes and mesas made a perfect backdrop for the music… or perhaps the music was the perfect soundtrack for the scenery. I loved the massive mesas with smoothly curved rock edges that looked as if gigantic standing people with featureless faces were crowded together to form the pillar on which the flat top rested. I called those mesas the The Ancestors. (I wish I knew how to upload photos to show you what I mean!) The feeling that comes from those rocks is ancient. It’s easy to understand how generations upon generations of people have had mystical experiences at the feet of those mesas.

My favorite formations were the bigger-than-life red rocks, soaring as high as the equivalent of a fifteen-story building, with three-story-tall, two-city-block-long caves in the front. In several places, Navajo businesspeople had set up stores just outside those caves. I have stopped at such places just so I could be near the mouth of the cave, breathing the breath of the Earth that wafts out.

The visit with my brother, and with my mom who flew out to join us, was a satisfying thing. Family connections are good to reinforce, and also good to keep at a distance. Mom and I both talk too much, so it’s good that we’re not near one another. It would wear us out. We enjoyed a few days of eating and sightseeing and eating and gabbing and eating. My brother rightly called our visit The Eating Club.

A highlight was when a friend took us on a hike through the wilderness outside Sedona. David, who runs www.nhne.com, is a living cornucopia of interesting projects, ideas, people and places. We had no idea what our hike would lead to, but knowing it was an adventure was good enough. As David drove us to the trailhead, we shared our recent dreams. Gary had just dreamed about seeing a rattlesnake, which had no rattles and was not dangerous. Our interpretations of that dream were pretty lame, but we tried. Then we arrived at a park trailhead in what appeared to be a plateau surrounded by massive rock formations. We hiked as swiftly as I have ever hiked for maybe an hour through wild terrain far from the regular path system.

As we approached the foot of one of these red-rock cliffs of The Ancestors, I felt the living essence of the rocks in that area. The aura was thick with a sense of centuries of life. You could say it felt like the presence of The Ancestors whose history was absorbed into those rocks. Before walking up to the rock face, I took a respectful moment to align my thoughts and my presence with that of the area.

I would have sworn I heard the words “Come In” whispered in my ear. Nobody was standing near me, and anyway I didn’t see a way to go “in” to a giant rock. So I shuffled carefully along the narrow trail and peeked around the next edge. To my utter shock, there opened up a cavernous ancient cliff dwelling!

We picked our way past walls through the rubble of ceiling-rocks which fall off in sheets periodically. I was trying to identify the nature of the cave painting ahead of me, when I was startled by the sight of a rattlesnake lying on the clay floor. I’d never seen one outside a zoo before, so I yelled “rattlesnake!” and jumped away. The guys came running, with their cameras. Then I remembered Gary’s dream. This snake lay there without moving, without rattling or coiling. David says he’s never heard of a rattler that didn’t coil and rattle as a warning. Its rattles seemed slightly deformed; they were very small and narrow. We marveled over the way Gary’s dream perfectly mirrored reality. It felt good to be able to interact with a snake in a neighborly way, without snake and humans both running in fear.

The petroglyphs were a wonder to see. This cave was so extremely remote that there was nothing to keep us back from the actual ruins and paintings. Of course, we were as careful as could be. It felt as if we were tiptoeing through somebody’s home, only they weren’t home and it had fallen into disrepair. I wondered if the residents might still be living in another dimension of this place, side by side but unable to perceive us. If time is not linear but holographic and simultaneous (as I suspect it is) then that scenario might well be true. That would explain the profound sense of history being alive. I wondered if their shaman might be having a prickly sense of the presence of someone from another dimension walking through his space unseen. He might be tempted to call out for assistance from the benevolent spirits of the future who were visiting him. We sent love and good wishes out into the cave, just in case. If that old shaman had asked us for a vision of what his future would bring, we’d have been hard pressed to think of a positive way to describe it. Maybe I could have told him that it would involve embracing change and joining with other cultures.

An additional leg of the hike took us another half-hour farther back into the wilderness. David led us to an even more remote and high-up cliff dwelling. It had fewer buildings and rock art, but the view was incomparable. We could see over the top of the desert for miles in all directions but one. Lunch in that cave tasted better for all the effort that went into hiking and scaling the cliff.

Heading back, we got lost for a time. It was actually fun to bushwhack through the scrub and thorns to find our way to the trail again. None of the three of us got worried, I’m happy to say. That would have cut down on the fun quotient. My legs received plenty of cac-u-puncture from the long cactus thorns we passed. At one point I felt something funny in my arm and looked to see two long thorns protruding from my wrist and forearm. It didn’t hurt much. Maybe it cured some ailment within me, as acupuncture might have. A butterfly fluttered around us as we searched for our trail, and followed us all the way back to the car. It was a perfect ending for the day’s expedition.

More southwest adventures will be revealed in the next installment of this story. See you back on the blog in another couple of days!
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CELEBRATION OF COMPLETION

I took a warm bath tonight, and drifted into that semi-sleep state. Drifting peacefully between the worlds, I realized I was seeing 3 beings of light in front of me. They were profoundly familiar, but I couldn’t see them too clearly. Their unusual names were from some other time and/or realm.

They said they were there to celebrate with me. “Celebrate what?” I asked. They said that as of today, my journey from the day I was born was complete. All debts were paid, all tasks were accomplished. Interesting! They said we should have a party. I asked if they had chocolate there, and they laughingly said yes, but didn’t offer me any, I’m sorry to say. Instead, they lined up before me and said they had gifts. They all spoke telepathically, with one joint thought speaking into my mind.

The first man held out a box for me. It was a mirrored box with a fluttering white butterfly for a lid! Its wings glowed pure white, and I was struck with its sense of purity. Reaching for the lid, I saw that the butterfly was real and living! It telepathically told me that this gift was also from Nature, thanking me for my work on its behalf. The butterfly said “I give you my children.” The box opened, and inside was a pair of earrings. Each was a tiny glowing white butterfly, living as an earring hanging from the silver hook. I reached through the mist that barely separated my world from theirs, and felt my hand going into a slightly different dimension. I put the earrings in my ears, and was suffused with such a sense of the purity of the shining butterflies that my eyes teared up.The middle one of the beings of light handed me his box. It contained a large, thick, leather-bound book with gemstones on the cover: a big sapphire, a big ruby, emerald and diamond. I felt them, but my vision was too unclear to determine their pattern. He said “This is your Book of Life. It is yours now.” I flipped the edges of the pages to riffle through the whole book, and saw quick colorful images of endless faces, places, thoughts and events. There seemed to be summaries of lessons learned too. I was overwhelmed that I had earned the right to read my Book of Life.

The third man held out a huge bouquet of roses, my favorite flower. I was unable to focus on the entire bouquet at once, it was so expansive. One at a time, I looked at each flower and smelled its fragrance. Every single rose was unique in color, form and fragrance. The being said “These are your students.” The bouquet was, I realized, infinite. He handed it to me, and I held it against my chest. Gradually all the roses sunk into my heart, leaving my hands empty but my heart full.
I was nearly speechless. Some part of me realized I was lying in my tub still, but most of me was invested in this vision. They asked me if I had anything to say, and I joked about being naked in the tub when they called this party, so how could I give a speech. Then I sobered my attitude, in view of what they had just done for me. I thanked them and declared that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my days to inspiring people and increasing the love and light in the world. As a final decree, I told them that I was absolutely refusing to do things the hard way any more. I have paid my dues and then some, so I refuse to be given any more difficult assignments. They smiled and agreed.

They left, and I returned to my awareness of the cold bath water. I pondered the ramifications of this ceremony. Could I be nuts? Was it my subconscious? Could it have been real? Was it “just” a dream? Would anyone else on earth believe me if I told them about it? Gary would, and so would my friends who know me well.

I am choosing to write about this on the blog. No matter how the various readers decide to interpret my experience, I am feeling blissful and serene. My hope is that one person may read this and feel their horizons expand somewhat. Life is huge and hopeful, ever spiraling upward and balancing itself out. If we think we know a lot of facts about how life is, we blind ourselves to the unexpected, that we could never dream up. I KNOW I don’t know much at all about the nature of reality. That may be why I experience so much that is beyond the edges of most peoples’ understanding.

Maybe it was just a pleasant dream, but heck, maybe I’m done! All debts paid, all tasks accomplished.
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CHOICES

September 20, 2004

Talking on the couch with Gary recently, our dilemma resolved into clarity. We were going over our zillion life options, when suddenly we felt visited by wisdom. We began discussing the fact that, if left to our own devices, we knew exactly what we wanted to do. Both of us did. Our problem was that logic and social normalcy didn’t apply to our preferred options. In every other way, the options we would choose fit our skills and choices and tastes perfectly.

We prefer to choose to build a small home on the land in the mountains, and live there half the year. Winter in the mountains isn’t too comfy. The other half of the year we can spend in New Zealand, as our hearts cry to do. There’s no explanation for our obsession with New Zealand, except that we both have it, so why ignore it.

So many pieces fell into place when we realized how deeply we’ve already made our choices. The ways and means seem to be there, to make both happen.

Now the last 6 months makes sense, that we’ve spent combing through every motive and desire in our entire beings. It’s been a necessary time of introspection and sifting. No stone has been left unturned, in our self-analyses. Now it all makes sense. We needed to know our options, and our real priorities. To choose a life of that unusual nature, we had to be crystal clear about what we want to do and why.

I feel brave and clean and clear. I’ve studied everything about myself that I could find, mind, emotions and soul, and can now make decisions based on true self-knowledge. It’s a form of maturity that has developed. Soul maturity, maybe.

So stand back, everybody, and watch us make it happen!
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