Kitty Claws and a Journey Towards an Open Heart in Everyday Ramblings

Diego is looking rather serious here. He is standing on my laptop case and expressing concern that I might be taking it some place. He is generally such a happy cheerful little guy but the last few days I haven’t played with him enough for his liking. That is when the mechanical pencils go missing. He loves my pencils. I cannot leave them out on a flat surface. It is okay if they are upright in a container like a plastic soft drink cup, although I don’t think it will be long before he figures out how to snag one and pull it out. He does know he can knock the cup over and get to them that way but only does that when he “really” wants attention.

At this point, after four months with me, I don’t think there is anywhere he hasn’t been in here except maybe in the cabinet under the kitchen sink and on the top shelf of the big closet by the front door.

I need to figure out a way to get his claws clipped. He is a two person claw clipping job and even with my cat sitter’s help a few month’s back we didn’t get them all. I think the key is getting him to settle down with me in a chair or on the bed is the answer and to do that I will probably need to exhaust him with play. And when he gets tired like any two year old he gets bratty and over-stimulated and starts bapping his ever so patient ever-hungry brother.

A couple of days ago I got distracted and left the lid off the big glass bowl full of dry food I keep on the kitchen counter that I dole out to them in small increments throughout the day. For some strange reason later in the day they didn’t seem as hungry as normal… :) And then the next morning Carlo threw up. He is all guy, all about his stomach.

“Look inside an ordinary moment and realize what that ordinary moment contains…”

I am listening to an audio course in some pretty esoteric yoga practices in the Tantra tradition. The quote above is from that.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off and went and saw a counselor, someone I used to see a long time ago. I stopped seeing him about eleven years ago. He not only has a PhD in psychology and is very active in the local area therapeutic community but is also a Zen Buddhist teacher (he was a Zen monk for 10 years) with a Zendo tied to his practice.

When I saw him regularly it was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The attention and focus was intoxicating. He was very interested in my poetry and my relationship with Mr. Finch and Mr. Finch was interested in him and I actually took the bird guy to the Zendo at one point.

Then things between us all got blurry and uncomfortable and confusing as all get out and in the end I stopped seeing him but left the lines open. A few years later I had a very unusual experience in a yoga class that I didn’t understand of something deeply beyond myself. I went back to see him just to talk about that and he was helpful in terms of finding perspective and accepting the mysterious aspects of this profound connection with something deeply “other”.

My sense is that the healing work I am engaged in now in terms of grieving my sister and accepting the transition in my family with her gone is work that is spiritual in nature. And I don’t actually have a spiritual teacher; my relationship with my yoga teachers is not exactly based on any sort of traditional model. Like me, it is unique.

Anyway, seeing him yesterday was helpful again. I was able to be fully myself, the spiritual self, my artistic self, as well as the everyday self, someone I don’t get to be very often these days. He expressed his wish that around the sadness and grief and sense of loss that I am experiencing that I engage in some practices to open my heart.

That weirdly counter intuitive thing one does when one wants to heal.

The journey has just gotten much much more interesting.

But in the meantime I need to get some work done so I can afford to fill that tempting bowl full of dry food on the counter. :)

Last updated March 27, 2015