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(8)
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 . . .
fragment
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. . . there,
at the center of all,
lies your heart.
So let your heart be
at the center of all:
let it swell your breast
with passion;
let it guide you
with the wisdom born
of both pride and empathy . . . |
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