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‘But I was always in there. Held in. Held in and held in, swaying and swinging, held in, held in, till there was a creak and I was out and away’    (A cat’s thoughts and feelings about being caged in a basket during a house move from Michael Rosen’s story Moving)

This second kitten drawing is the result of a visualization exercise relevant to creativity and releasing blocks. During this particular visualization today the kitten appeared in the form of a door and as I meditated I re-realised experientially that all our inner doors and walls are fear constructs born during fearful and traumatic events or disappointments. Unprocessed and unchecked traumas and other upsetting events and incidents can become inner doors or walls because they can potentially reinforce childhood or earlier conditioning and traumas. Unprocessed emotions and messages from others can mutate into internal, under our conscious awareness, barriers. That is why it is so important to remain mindfully with our experience and distress in the moment instead of stuffing things down.

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…… Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum / The cat stretching her black body from the pillow

The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture / Then laps the bowl clean

Then wants to go out into the world, / where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn, then sits, perfectly still, in the grass….  (From Morning by Mary Oliver)

I spent most of Sunday (yesterday) on the computer and doing things around the house. Then I felt I should do something relaxing before the day ended and decided to go for a late brisk walk by the sea. When we got back after an hour or two a familiar yet shocking scene awaited us outside our house. One of our kittens had been killed and left outside the gate. How many animal cruelties had I suffered? How many more I gasped? I felt anger and sadness and I cried in the street as I witnessed this irrational suffering inflicted upon innocent creatures. I realised that I should have expected something like that happening, but still there was not much I could have done for cats and kittens come and go as they please. They climb fences and walls and slip under gates and vanish up trees. One minute they’re here and the next they’re gone. As Michael Rosen writes in a short children’s story about a ginger cat, ‘They have me to tickle, I have their laps. Other times I am nowhere and everywhere’. And that’s how it is.’

A couple of weeks prior to this incident I had put a little poster on our letter box saying that we were giving away kittens to anyone interested. A few days later someone left us a very young malnourished kitten. I thought it was bad or sick humor; still I adopted the kitten, called her Orphan, wondering what I would do with all these kitties. And then a few days later someone took the bag of cat sand that was in the garden. I didn’t pay much attention and though I had suffered harassment and pet and amimal cruelty before I did not see this coming. Once I got into the house I wondered about the profile of individuals or groups… that do these kinds of acts and I googled similar stories and scientific articles and research on animal cruelty, psychopathology, relevant disorders and sociopathic behaviours and considered posting a photo of this and the previous kitten we had found amputated and plenty of references to articles. However, as I calmed down I had second thoughts as I considered the strong impact that images leave on us. I eventually decided to stay with my emotions, go to bed and process the incident through drawing the following days and then post that instead. So, this drawing today is the product of this process.

Finally, I will end with two quotes: one from The Dalai Lama’s Cat, by David Michie: “Surely you’re not saying that the life of a human and the life of an animal are of the same value?’ he ventured…. ‘As humans we have much greater potential, of course,’ His Holiness replied. ‘But the way we all want very much to stay alive, the way we cling to our particular experience of consciousness-in this way human and animal are equal.”                    And another from Father Gregory Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, ‘Kindness is the only strength there is’

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‘Colour a power which directly influences the soul’ Wassily Kandinsky

The Begging Bowl: a poem for love by Danielle LaPorte

I want to watch my humiliation turn into medicine.
I want to turn my pain over and over like wood on a lathe
until it’s a bowl that I will serve you edible flowers from.

It’s mercy that makes art of these agonies.
And finally learning that eventually,
we will all beg for love,
proudly.

 

Also, sharing…..

Photos

 

 

 

 

Quotes from Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, the renowned nonprofit program providing social support and job training to former gang members:

“Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin” (Gregory Boyle, from Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship)

“You actually abolish slavery by accompanying the slave. We don’t strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way toward its demise. We stand in solidarity with the slave, and by doing so, we diminish slavery’s ability to stand”

We simply need to change the lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than others. We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love. Turns out this is what we all have in common, we’re just trying to learn how to bear those beams of love.”

An extract from an article written by Kelly Brogan

‘What is an existential crisis?

It is a point of total dissolution. When your entire defense system, your personality, your familiar (though dysfunctional) habits melt into a protoplasmic blob and then you enter a white out blizzard of disorientation. The thing is that this white out blizzard is necessary – it is alchemically required – to cover over the tracks of your old unconscious programming so that you can lay down brand new ones.

These days, if you have moved through this space with consciousness, you are a chosen one (in my humble opinion). Most people that you know and love will have NO idea what you are going through or why because we have been taught, as a collective, to suppress, oppress, and repress these experiences in any way possible. So if you feel separate, alone, and alien…it’s because you are. You are an unusually courageous soul doing hero’s (heroine’s!) work…..

I believe that we have all agreed on this quantum reality – that growth comes through pain. We share a knowing that there is a silver lining to every cloud, even if we don’t know how to consciously live this way, and because of this held belief, it is true! Growth and evolution do come from and through hardship. As Rupert Sheldrake would say, the morphic field of transformation through adversity is very much attracting human experience to itself’.