Night Of The Dancing White Buck

In the hills above Santa Fe, the snow was falling in the silence of the moonlit night. I was sitting outside in my hot tub, watching the flakes fall. Down the hill, in town, Reynaldo lay dying.

Our AIDS support group members had been visiting him, even though he'd been unconscious most of the time and none of us knew him. We were able to do some small things for him. We touched him, so he knew he was not alone. His family was on their way to Santa Fe. He was part Apache, and once, when he regained consciousness, he asked us to have a Medicine Man come to him in the hospital. We found a man with sacred knowledge who came from a nearby Pueblo and performed a ceremony to help ease Reynaldo's spirit for the journey he was undertaking. It felt good, and purifying.

I'd planned to go down once more to the hospital later that night, after relaxing a bit in the hot tub. But soon after I'd gotten in, I had a strong urge to get to the hospital RIGHT AWAY. I was about to get up, when I noticed a movement in the piñon and juniper trees that surrounded the little clearing the hot tub was in.

As I watched in silent amazement, a large white deer stepped out into the clearing, clearly visible in the moonlight, even through the falling snow. He paused, turned his head towards me, and seemed to look directly into my eyes. Then, he began to DANCE. He lept, and twirled, and pranced with obvious joy. And then he vanished, leaving me staring out through the snow to the empty space where he had been.

Mystified, I climbed out of the hot tub, pulled on my clothes, and drove down into town to the hospital. It took me right around 20 minutes to get there. When I arrived, several members of the support team were outside the hospital. They told me Reynaldo had passed over. I asked how long ago he had died, and they told me it was just 20 minutes earlier. Then I understood, and I knew that Reynaldo had found great freedom and exhilaration in his release from human form, and I knew that the vision of the white buck was his parting gift to me.

Mr. Lee's CatCam

I just discovered CatCam, by reading about it over on Curious Cat, a Science and Engineering Blog, and it has made me very happy. If you are a cat nut, you need to check this out for yourself, over on the CatCam page. What is CatCam, you ask? Well, it all begins with a cat named Mr. Lee. His human, Juergen Perthold, became curious about what Mr. Lee was up to when he went off for his outings in the neighborhood. He (the human) came up with the clever idea to hook up a camera to Mr. Lee's collar, programmed to snap a photo every 3 minutes. Now he has set up a website, explaining exactly how he did it. Even better, there are CatCam photos on display. Here is Mr. Lee (who looks a lot like my childhood kitty, Schultzie), wearing his CatCam:

The photos themselves are fascinating! There are numerous other cats that Mr. Lee visits who get photographed. Who are they? What is the nature of their relationship with Mr. Lee? There is an amazing bright blue snake Mr. Lee photographs in the woods. I'm now wondering if I could get any of my cats to wear a CatCam, so I can find out about their secret lives. Kudos to Mr. Lee's human for creating the CatCam, and putting the results online for all of us to enjoy! Again, to see this for yourself, head on over to the CatCam page.

Dangerous (poem)

Dangerous,

the hidden rocks,

lying rough

below the surface.

Still I dive,

deep and deep,

Scraping tender flesh

across the unforgiving rocks.

Blood in the water.

Mine, or yours?

Deep and deep,

whose pain is this?

The poem above was written a few years ago, thinking about a childhood summer spent at a camp on Lake Champlain. We spent a lot of time swimming, and there were large rocks hidden beneath the surface of the water. Until you memorized where they were, you had to swim underwater to see them in advance, and avoid crashing into them. They scared me a bit, although I liked climbing up onto them and being able to sit or stand high up in the middle of deep water.

Remembering these rocks, I thought how they could stand as symbols of the hidden emotional triggers we can crash into within ourselves, especially if that territory is yet unexplored. And those crashes do create the experience of pain. And yet, how often when we feel discomfort or misery, and assume it is ours, is it actually not ours at all, but the pain of another we are tuning into, or the some random suffering floating around in the collective unconscious?

Introducing Miss Gracie!

Gracie is the most recent cat addition to the family. I originally named her Panda Puss, but that didn’t really fit. So she became Gracie. She is a great cat, even though she is still somewhat emotionally scarred from the hard times she experienced before she joined us…

Here is a photo of her the day she arrived:

You can see she does not look well. Her fur is unhealthy looking, she is thin, and her eyes have a haunted look to them. I think she was really still in shock at that point.

And what you can’t see in that top photo is that the tip of her tail has been broken off. Yes, something had happened to her that cost her the end of her tail. Was it caught In a door? Did a dog bite it off? I’ll never know. But when I first took her in it still had some dead material attached and the stump was still very painful to her. She didn’t even want me looking at it.

I first met Gracie one night around midnight as I was on my way to work. I was driving down my own street, about 4 houses down the road from where I live, when I saw her eyes reflecting in my car’s headlights. I stopped and called out to her and she came over to me and let me pick her up. She was thin and waif like… a slight wisp of a kitty, mostly fur. As I was talking to her, holding her and trying to decide if she was lost and if I should take her home and give her a meal and a safe place to stay, she suddenly HISSSSED at something behind me! I turned around, and there was the large Siamese cat I call Winston Churchill (I’ve no idea what his actual name is). I’d only seen him once before, but I knew he lived in the little condo complex I was standing in front of. I thought that the thin kitty knew Winston, And so I put her down and went on to work.

The next morning, I went grocery shopping and then headed home again. As I drove down my street I saw some of the neighborhood children were out, and that the little black & white cat from the night before was there with them! I pulled over and Asked the kids if they knew the cat. They Said she had been hanging around for a few days, but that they had never seen her before then, and that she did not seem to have a home. I took out some cooked chicken I’d bought at the grocery store, and tore off some little pieces and offered them to the cat. She gobbled it all up with great glee. Seeing how hungry she was, I decided to go ahead and bring her home with me. I told the kids that if anyone asked about her to send them down to my house. And that is how Gracie first arrived at my house and joined the family as cat number nine.

In a photo taken a month or so after she arrived, you can see Gracie is looking both healthier and more relaxed:

And, in her most recent photo, you can see how she has filled out and fluffed out, and really begun to show her full beauty. She weighs at least twice as much as when she first arrived! And her tail, though obviously shorter than normal, is all healed up now. She likes to lie on top of me when I'm sleeping.

Unexpected Visions of Beauty

OK... there is a long story behind this that I am not going to go into. Suffice it to say that for certain mysterious reasons I was required today to drive out into the mountains and take some photographs, including, oddly enough, pictures of a none too clean porta-potty! I did what I needed to do, and was surprised when looking at the photos later to find a certain beauty in one of the porta-potty photos. Above the stained porta-potty toilet, reflected in the shiny raised plastic seat top, is the reflection of a rather magnificent puffy cloud that must have been looming behind me. Here, see for yourself:


Kinda cool, huh? The message in this, for me anyway, is that you just never know where you will find visions of beauty. Sometimes they will be where you least expect them!

And just so you don't think I have some weird porta-potty fixation, I'll show you another place of beauty I photographed today, capturing a view of the last bit of snow on some New Mexican mountain peaks:

Click on the photo if you'd like to see it bigger...

Attention Cat Servants...

Does YOUR cat have a Yellow Fish yet? If not, you are not being a very good cat servant! I myself was amiss in my duties until this past Friday, when I purchased a Yellow Fish at my local pet store and brought it home for my 9 cats to enjoy.

And boy oh boy did they ever enjoy it!! I didn't even have time to toss it onto the floor before the fun began. Cats were circling the store bag that held the Yellow Fish while it was on the kitchen table. Tobias, one of the more dominant males, was the first to claim the Yellow Fish as his prize. He'd already been licking, drooling, and chewing on the Yellow Fish by the time I thought to grab my camera so you all could see his joy.



Tobias did finally let some of the other cats play with Yellow Fish, and they had such big fun with it that they needed a serious nap afterwards!

To learn more about Yellow Fish, you can visit
the webpage of DuckyWorld Products.
(this is NOT a paid promotion,
just a really great product!)

The Killer Tortoise!

Everyone seems to love this YouTube video clip of a very determined tortoise chasing off a cat. So, if you need to see it again, or if you happen to be one of the 12 people on the planet who hasn't seen it yet, here ya go:

Dealing With Humans Can Be Challenging...