From Hart to Hearts
Mona the cat (who came to live with us last October) is approaching a year old, and has grown into a very sweet companion to us all. She sleeps in my daughter Claire’s bed with her most nights, and once Claire has been awakened, she’ll seek me out if I’m still in bed. With a meow that sounds like a question, she lightly jumps on my bed and eyes all my visible body parts to see if a hand is available to stroke her. Often whilst I’m working at the computer, she’ll come and do the same thing. She comes in, places her paws against my leg and meows her request for me to move a hand to make a clear path for her to come into my lap. After several minutes of pacing back and forth and being petted, she’ll eventually settle down and sleep while I type, warming my legs and purring softly.
In the mornings, she keeps my husband Peter company while he prepares to go out for his run. Once he’s come back, the two of them do a little dance over going out into the back garden. She’ll complain by the door until he gets up and opens the door to allow her out, at which point she’ll run away back into the house. This happens a few times before she decides to go out, but often stands at the door looking in, wishing to come immediately back inside. Peter becomes her amused servant through the whole thing.
As happens with creatures who share our lives, she has become an important part of the family. Not in the least for the comic relief she offers throughout our days. Claire has taken to calling her a tiger when she gets especially playful. A fabric mouse filled with catnip scented fluff becomes the object of her attention, and she’ll manage to fling it around and then chase it with abandon, occasionally leaping feet off the ground in order to land with special force on . Hiding under Peter’s and my bed, she waits for an unsuspecting prey to walk by. She darts out, claws bared to capture the passing ankles. Some days, I have taken to quickly rolling across the bed to avoid being startled and clawed as I go to my chest of drawers to get a pair of socks. Her most comical moment – at least for me – was to see her head pop out from under our bed on another occasion. She was looking up at me and seemed nearly as surprised as I was. Clearly, she had been pulling herself along the underside of the bed and had come to the end without realising that it was so near.
There’s more to having a cat around than just the companionship and comedy that she brings. Both James Carse and Philip Simmons point toward what we might call the ‘being-ness’ of animals. Here’s how Carse describes it when reflecting upon his cat, Charlie, in his essay ‘A Philosopher Needs a Cat’ (found in Breakfast at the Victory):
[I]t is not the Buddha’s face we recognise in Charlie, but the animal that gazes out through the eyes of the Buddha. It is not accidental that the word for animal comes from the Latin anima, soul. The primitive practice of representing the gods as animals may not be so primitive after all. Soul is not only the ‘still-point of the Tao’ where there is no more separation between ‘this’ and ‘that’, it is also the presence of the unutterable within us.
Mona, like Charlie, seems wordlessly at one with all that is around her. She doesn’t fret about the events of the day, nor worry about her death. She is not caught up in the dramas of human relationships with their tensions and pleasures. She simply is: pure being, fully herself. In her silent stare, I find myself drawn to that centre, that still-point, drawn to my own being-ness that gets lost in all the chaos and clutter of life. I can, for a moment at least, move outside my fret and worry and dramas and simply be.
Simmons echoes this sentiment in his essay ‘Wild Things’ in his book Learning to Fall:
Fact is, animals are neither innocent nor guilty, neither pure nor corrupt, for these are strictly human categories. Indeed, if we’re to envy animals, it’s precisely because they live outside such categories. And here we come to the heart of the matter. For what would it mean to experience our own actions in such a way that the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t apply? It would mean living , like animals, without doubt as to our life’s purpose. It would mean living in such perfect alignment with that purpose that our every act flowed effortlessly from what was highest and truest within us.
None of us can attain that effortless movement of perfect alignment that is the lot of animals lives. We are caught up in the details, dilemmas and delights of our lives. Nor should we wish to lose that which makes human life rich: the beauty of fog drenched spider webs, the pleasure of sun-warmed tomatoes on our tongues, the sweet scent of overripe fruit, and the loves and losses that are an inevitable part of human being and community.
Mona, eyes closing and beginning to doze, sits in my lap, a Buddha presence of silence and being. And for now, this is enough for me, this being-here, the warmth of her furry body, the silence of our companionship, this still-point, this moment. And for now, it is enough.
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