Earth Day 2011
“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” – Rachel Carson
YouTube Video via Greenpeace
A Blessing For Absence
May you know that absence is full of tender presence
and that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which holds
the presences that have left your life.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore of your grief turn into a well of seamless presence.
May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear
from and may you have the courage to speak out for the
excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.
May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight
are one and may your longing inhabit its deepest dreams
within the shelter of the Great Belonging.
-John O’Donohue
Eternal Echoes
via Whiskey River
Saturday, when we returned from several days away, it was clearly apparent that both cats were extremely ill. Dart had a palpable lump on his hip and an obvious wound on one paw. Both cats were extemely lethargic and not eating. A short walk with Dodge demonstrated weakness in her hind quarters, she was unable to jump up to her normal perches. Both cats slept and hid under the beds emerging from their dens only long enough to drink water and whine plaintiffly at me. Dodge, in particular, has never been a very vocal cat.
Although, Dart had some symptoms of lethargy before we left, Dodge had barely started demonstrating a low appetite. She’d been out hunting in the sunshine and seemed fine. I thought perhaps she’d eaten a mouse that was moving through her system slowly. Dart had been lethargic (for him), but he was jumping up on the bed with ease and showed no points of pain. His robust purr was in good working order whenever I handled him. I noted the lump and decided I’d take him to the vet when we returned. Neither cat seemed critical enough to warrant a pre-trip vet visit. Their feral natures have always made vet visits very stressful.
Fortunately, Pet Emergency Center in Mount Vernon, Washington, is open 24/7 including Sundays. So adding insult to the cat’s miseries, I got them into carriers and off we went. I knew matters were serious just by how little they fought being placed in the carriers.
Blood work demonstratead immediately that Dodge was in advanced renal failure. Dr. Jane Reynolds was frank. “If this were my cat, I wouldn’t treat. The values are extreme. In attempting to get the blood test, it was apparent that her veins are breaking down.” Euthanasia was the only option. I spent quite a few minutes with Dodge, soothing her and holding her. It was obvious she was ready. She passed very peacefully with her head in my hands. We’ll never know for sure why she declined so rapidly at the age of 13. When you allow your cats the freedom of the great outdoors, there are always risks of exposure to many unknowns – some of them toxic.
Dart could not be effectively examined without sedation. The presumption was that the lump was an abscess. His white count was extremely high. Dr. Reynolds suggested we go home and she would call post-surgically. Unfortunately, the surgery demonstrated the lump was the tip of an extremely large tumor. With Dart’s white count as high as it was, Dr. Reynolds doubted if he would survive the invasive surgery that would have been necessary to remove the tumor. Unfortunately, we had no opportunity to say goodbye. There was no point it bringing him out of anesthetic before euthanizing him as well. I always worried about Dart’s love of traversing the railroad ties that support our ivy. Even though most of the creosote was weathered off the tops, I can’t help but wonder if exposure to those toxins played a role in the development of the tumor. We won’t get more cats until we have an opportunity to replace the ties. Cats are notorious for going where they want to go, not where you want them to go.
There are now two piles of rocks under a large cedar which I can see out the kitchen window. My wonderful friends now lie in repose where they once frolicked and lived life fully. My heart is broken, but I’m doing okay. Part of pet ownership always includes taking the responsibility of not allowing them to suffer. Losing both in one day is almost too much for the emotions to grasp. The house is quiet. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday, clearing cat dishes, bedding, toys and other reminders from the house. It’ll be some time before we’re ready to start again. In the meantime, it seems easiest to not be looking at the memories daily.
I am not religious but I have strong non-religious spiritual beliefs. Loss gets no easier, but my confidence in some variety of continuity grows stronger with each passing year. There may be no guarantees about what happens after death, but certainly suffering is relieved and profound love continues to comfort those of us who must grieve. I like to think death is the beginning of new adventures, I have strong confidence in the benevolence of that grand and final uncertainty.
Dart
Goodbye, my freinds. Thank you for enriching my life. May your new adventures bring you as much joy as you brought to me during our brief time together.
Dodge
“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!” CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND (1847-1918)
quotation via The Solitary Walker
“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
- Wendell Berry
via Whiskey River
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.But if it takes effort to understand:
three.Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.-Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
solar eclipse
“Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise, is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet . . . as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.”
- Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart
Quote via Whiskey River
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“There can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection.”
- Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance
