Lifeletter #158: How Our Cat Saved The Day

The other morning my partner Jonathan and I were disturbed by some things that occurred.  Although we have both been practicing remaining present to these moments of anxiety and turbulence, it still doesn’t come easy. I was trying to let go into the truth that I am not in charge of the universe, that I have no idea of what should be happening in this moment, that there is a much bigger picture going on than I could ever know about. And I noticed we were still resorting to old patterns in order to manage our fear. Feeling the ancient power of the mind that wants to manage and control anxiety, instead of simply being with it. In fact, the actual situation didn’t warrant the levels of anxiety we were experiencing. We both fell back into some energies from the past, places in ourselves that have yet to be metabolized. It feels a bit like getting caught in an undercurrent.

With all of this going on, we were not able to go into our meditation room and sit down and be quiet. That beautiful little room where we drop down into the body, feel the ground under us, and open to the larger field of life that holds us all. We do this every morning and it’s a very good thing. It’s like taking a stand for our basic sanity, our goodness, our allegiance to life as it is, not as we think it should be.

In the midst of all the commotion, our cat walked into the kitchen. She is a being who knows what she wants and who goes after it without hesitation. She sits every morning on Jonathan’s lap while he meditates. She let it be known that she was missing her morning lap of quietness. And in that moment, Jonathan realized he was missing it too. He went straight into our meditation room and sat down.

I was in the middle of a conversation at that point, and was not able to join him. But I felt him sitting there. The silence, the clarity, the simplicity of that gesture filled our whole space. A lightness blew into my heart. An unclenching happened, a sense of gratitude welled up, out of nowhere.

Our cat walked in out of nowhere, and made a request that Jonathan could not refuse. In any moment, the great nowhere, the ground of our being, offers us something beyond our familiar tendencies, outside of our expectations. It tosses a new possibility in our direction. How lucky we are, that sometimes we are lithe enough, awake enough, or desperate enough to say ‘yes.’

It is a stillness like the heart of the fire
that guides—the voice of some angel of mercy
who has been sending us missives
since our birth. And when we look over
our shoulder – once, twice –
it is the fierce tiger of truth who howls,
You cannot go back, that place is gone now.

Laura Weaver, ‘Passage Through The Center’

with love,

Shayla