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Several weeks after my cat had been hit by a car and killed, I began to notice another cat, apparently a stray, roaming about the neighborhood.  I started putting food out for him and, over a period of days, began to win his trust; eventually I took him in as a permanent resident of my home.  Though fully grown, he's quite a small cat, and as yet unneutered.  A few days after taking him in I noticed that he had developed an abscess from a puncture wound to his leg.  This quickly became serious and required a trip to the vet's for treatment.  He's fine now, but it's curious to think that, had my other cat not died, I probably would either have not noticed this cat or, lacking sufficient room, been unable to take him in.  Without food, and with the wound on his leg leaking poisons into his bloodstream, his chances for survival would, I imagine, have been slim.

And so it is that I feel as if, once again, life has accorded me a specific response to my need.  My grief over the loss of my other cat was intense – so intense in fact that I was beginning to doubt my ability to recover from it.  The knowledge that that cat's life had been shortened by at least ten years from what it should have been; the wastefulness exemplified by the manner in which he died; the fact that, for me, the manner of his death acted as a symbol and personification of the wasteful deaths of so many other animals; the fact too that his death, and the manner of his death, seemed to symbolize the cul-de-sac my own life decisions have brought me to – all these factors, combined with my own personal grief at the loss of a companion whose friendship I had valued on a daily basis, and had counted on enjoying for many years to come, had brought me to a crisis point.  And though this new cat's presence in no way erases or nullifies the grief I felt, and continue to feel, for the loss of the other, still, I feel as if life has so arranged itself so as to bring me a message:  Don't give up, Simon!  Not yet, anyhow; not yet . . .  I don't wish to be taken as a solipsist, and yet I feel certain that there is a causality to these events that lies deeper than that of mere chance.  If I'm honest I would have to say that, because of my exploration into the relationship which exists between self, reality, and dreams (by which I mean, the imagistic way in which reality unfolds to reveal the intercausality existing between "self" and "other"), I believe I've begun to avail myself, or to expose myself, to a reality far more permeable than that which I had previously known to exist . . .

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