A Little Under the Weather

Hello All, this is my normal posting day, and I was going to tell a story about the last peace-and-justice issue to which I responded. But I find myself today to be a little under the weather. Not quite equal to writing. And so I’ll just say hello today and wish you well.

            I hope to post tomorrow. See you then.

This is Eliza, the cat with whom I spent twenty and a half years. 

She accompanied me to Missouri and died here.

 I'm so grateful on days like today 

that Ellie, Maggie, and Matthew,

 who came to live with me after Eliza's died,

 are my companions.

I need to remember on these Meniere's days 

that my life is greatly blessed.

            Peace, Dee

Always a Choice

Since the early part of January, I’ve recounted stories of how peace and justice issues have impinged on my life. I began on January 12 with “Call Me Stubborn.” In my following posting, I introduced the woman who has most influenced my way of thinking about these issues—my mother: Hellen O’Mara Ready. She gave me “My First Lesson in Respect.” Basically, all I’ve ever tried to do throughout my life is respect others.

Hellen O’Mara Ready in the early 1930s.

           Before I relate the final story of how peace and justice issues have changed my life, I want to introduce you to Yeshua, the man who has most influenced my life. Most of you know him by his Greek name, which came down to us in Latin usage as Jesus. I call him Yeshua because that is what his own Hebrew parents would have called him and that is my way of being respectful of his culture and its names.

            What is there about this man that has influenced my life?

            Early on, when I was a practicing Roman Catholic, I thought of him as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Having departed from the Christian tradition, I no longer believe that. What I do believe is that he is as much a son of God as you and I and all people are. We are all syllables of Oneness. We are all sparks of divinity. He and you and I.

            And yet he differs from me because he realized within himself—all those years ago in first-century Palestine—a fullness, a wholeness, of humanity. Did he live only one life and achieve this wholeness through the grace of the Holy Oneness of All Creation? I don’t know. I know only that his life, his words, and the meaning he found in relationship draw forth from me my deepest admiration. He is, quite simply, the love of my life.

This is the oldest icon of the “Christos.”

It can be viewed in Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.

            It is Yeshua whose actions, like my mother’s, taught me how to respond to others so as to bring peace into our world. How to respond respectfully. Compassionately. Empathically.

            I’ll end this series with a story in which a magazine article used the word outcast. Immediately, I thought of Yeshua. He reached out to the outcasts of his world—those whom his society castigated as unclean. For the people of Palestine in the first century, these would have been thieves, lepers, prostitutes, the sick, the possessed, the crazed. And even women who were menstruating.

            Why were they unclean? The general public believed they had sinned. Sickness was a result of sin—either by the person affected or by the parents of that person. To touch an unclean person was to become unclean. So cast them off, run them out, berate them, ignore them. But always steer clear of them.

            And in every culture throughout history, we have witnessed the deep fissures that can arise between a people when they begin to look at others as unworthy or unclean or "not like us."

            Through words and actions, Yeshua taught that we must cease to separate people into groups of the clean and unclean. We must cease to judge one person more worthy than another. We must cease to look at those around us and see “them” and “us.” We must embrace differences and see these only as varied facets of the single diamond of Oneness.

            Hellen O’Mara Ready and Yeshua are the two people who have taught me that we must seek out those whom others ignore and treat as unclean, unworthy, disreputable. We must choose Oneness.

            In my next posting, I will share with you one final choice.

Afterword: If you have any interest in learning more about how Twelve Habits of Successful Cats and Their Humans came to be, please read my guest posting this past Tuesday on the blog ecwrites.  

Icon from Wikipedia.

Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans

Last Saturday’s posting announced a companion book to A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story, which I’ve been promoting on this blog since December 8 of last year. The first book gave birth to the second. How? Through the wisdom of an editor.

            Way back in April 1991, this prospective editor for A Cat’s Life wrote me she’d be interested in the manuscript but only if I deleted half of the 42,000 words. I did and Crown subsequently published Dulcy’s first book in September 1992.

Drawing by Judy J. King from A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story.

            The remaining words have languished on the computer since that time. I tried to breathe life into them three times, but that same editor found them wanting. Years passed and the editor left Crown before I finally hit upon an idea that worked for me. However, it didn’t work for any editors or agents I queried. None of them even asked to see the manuscript.

            Ultimately, I titled the manuscript Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans by Dulcy and Dee Ready and decided to publish through Wayman, a new press that offered publication. In her second book, Dulcy suggests to fellow cats twelve habits that can make their lives with humans and with one another the nirvana they longed for. Following each habit is a short reflection I’ve written to show how Dulcy’s habit has influenced my life. Twelve habits; twelve stories purred by Dulcy; twelve reflections mulled by me.

            Today, I’d like to give you a sample of Dulcy’s writing and also of mine. She titles her eighth habit “Accept the Inevitable.” To illustrate her contention that a great gulf exists between the inevitable and the merely intolerable, she inserted a poem detailing her response to my attempt to convert the two cats with whom I lived to vegetarianism.

            Dulcy rebelled. Becoming a feline vegetarian was not inevitable, only intolerable. She purred her disgruntlement in the following poem:

Where is my food?

My giblets with gravy?

My liver with sauce?

My tuna with oil?

My beef with its broth?

I won’t taste these pellets.

These are not good hors d’oeuvres—

not toothsome

not tasty

not luscious

not pleasing—

To one whose fine palate

Knows real haute cuisine.

So give me my food,

My gravy, my beef.

I won’t eat these nuggets.

I won’t stoop to bawl,

But give me delectables,

Or give nothing at all.

Dulcy incorporats this poem into her text for the habit. I follow her text with my own. Here’s my take on Habit 8.

How can we recognize the inevitable as opposed to the intolerable? Dulcy seems so sure of the difference. She saw Bartleby and the love I felt for him as inevitable. But when I brought a third cat into our household, she found this intolerable and disappeared into the pantry for an entire year. Daily she crouched on a shelf there. She left it only to go outside.

For one year she did not talk to me or lie on my lap or lick my fingers. Her message was clear: “Living with Tybalt is intolerable.” And so I gave him to a farmer who later called and said that Tyb was a great mouser.

I have not always been so sure of the difference between inevitable and intolerable. Twice I almost had a nervous breakdown because I accepted as inevitable the conditions under which I was living and working.

But when I let silence surround me and listened to the stirrings of my heart, to the instinct I had for survival, I realized that staying in these situations was not inevitable. The work was merely intolerable. I could leave; I could change the furniture of my life.

What is inevitable? What must happen? Children growing up? Yes. Our bodies slowing down? Yes. Aging? Yes. Death? Yes. Time takes its toll on bodies. They break down, rust out, die. All that is inevitable. And perhaps one other thing is inevitable—love, freely given, abounds in possibilities.

Love can have all the life-giving force of a rain shower. It can help us grow and blossom into all we were meant to be. It can help us flower. The result of a love that is given freely and unconditionally is growth in the spirit.

That growth is inevitable. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Dulcy believes that the great god of cats calls us to fields of love. That, too, is inevitable.

There you have it—a sample from Dulcy’s companion book Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans and a sample also of Dulcy’s wit with regard to her life experience and the philosophy flowing from my own.

Purr and peace to you.

A Cat's Life: Dulcy's Story

In a posting last June, I described my relationship to a cat who, when we first met, gifted me with her name. She was Dulcy, the sweet one. After her death, she purred the story of our life together in a book channeled through me.

        A later December posting detailed how I came to have 670 trade paperback copies of that book—A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story. At that time, readers could purchase it through PayPal. Now Amazon sells it, as well as the e-book edition. All this gladdens me.

        Why recall this to you today? Because next Tuesday, a second book Dulcy created will become available. It is entitled Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans by Dulcy and Dee Ready. In my next posting, I'll explain how this companion book came to be. Today, I’d like to share with you the story of how I realized that I needed Dulcy in my life.

        I’ve already related the story of my return to Dayton in 1971 upon the completion of grad school. I could find no work because of having an FBI file. However, a warehouse manager hired me. Unfortunately, the warehouse sat outside the city limits, and without a car, I had no way to get there. Luckily for me, a fellow employee offered to pick me up at the home of a mutual friend. I’d ride my bike there each weekday morning and hitch a ride.

        One November afternoon, I pedaled happily away from the friend's house, turned left, and traveled a few blocks down a neighborhood street. All was as usual until I heard a car approaching behind me. Slowly, ever so slowly and deliberately, the car edged me closer and closer to the curbing. I kept pedaling, staring ahead, not wanting to look to the left side for fear of eye contact.

        Long moments passed. Pedaling became difficult in the narrow passage between the side of the car and the curb. Unexpectedly, a hand reached out the car window to grab and twist my wrist. It shoved me sideways so that the bike and I tumbled to the ground. My body fell awkwardly, my feet still held captive by the pedal guard.

        As the car sped away, I could see the heads of two men.

        I lay shaking on the grassy verge for a few moments, fearful that they’d come back. Glancing at my aching wrist, I realized that the intrusive hand had twisted off my watch. I’d treasured it for seventeen years because my aunt had given it to me when I graduated from high school. It was now gone, but were the two men?

       Clumsily, I mounted the bike and pedaled furiously toward home. On the way, I sang “I Whistle a Happy Tune” as loudly as I could. 

        

Then, as I’d feared, the car drew alongside me again. The two young men inside greeted me cheerily.

        Ignoring them, I concentrated on pedaling. Finally, perhaps annoyed with my off-key singing, they sped away. I was relieved because I'd feared they’d follow me to where I lived.

        A few days later, the warehouse manager fired me and I got a job teaching at a dropout center. Then in March 1972, a friend, worried because I had no one to go home to for comfort, encouraged me to pick out a kitten from the litter in her upstairs closet. Thus, Dulcy came into my life.

        For the next seventeen and a half years, she became my ally. Not only was she the sweet one. She was solicitous about my welfare, always greeting me with a purr and a rub of my ankles. She became, I say this with deep gratitude, my companion.

   

Choosing a Definition

In August 1973, a Minnesota friend invited me to work on a reading curriculum. I lived in Stillwater while completing the project.

The St. Croix river flows past Stillwater, Minnesota,

a town of 11,000 when I moved there in 1973.

            Steeped in lumberjack lore, the oldest town in Minnesota sits contentedly next to the St. Croix. This river town has a charm I’d never met before, and it became my home for the next thirty-six years. Early on—in September 1981—I became a vegetarian. My reasoning, once again, was based on what I considered peace and justice issues. Here’s the story of how that happened.

            A convent friend visited, bearing a gift. The cover of Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition proclaimed that it was “America’s first complete guide to cooking delicious natural foods.” Annette knew that I gardened and enjoyed trying new recipes. “The gift seems perfect for you,” she said.

My battered copy of Laurel’s Kitchen sits before me.

            She was right. Together, the two of us sat next to the river—she meditating on its lazy flow and I devouring the book’s introductory section: “Giving the Gift of Life.” Her gift lies open now on my computer desk so I can easily find the passage that changed my life. I began the paperback not knowing that the words printed on page 39 would touch some part of myself that had awaited definition.

As of mid-1975, world famine has intensified to the point that fifteen thousand human beings, most of them children, are dying of malnutrition each day. For the first time in its twenty-seven-year history UNICEF has declared an emergency situation. Meanwhile, for all our own anxieties over economic recession, the major health problems in the United States continue to be those related to overconsumption. Our consumption patterns are hurting us, and they are now jeopardizing life the world over.

            Our meat-based diet is perhaps the most obvious example. We now consume about twice the protein our bodies need, and beef is our hands-down favorite way of doing it. As Frances Moore Lappé has shown us, every pound of beef on our table represents sixteen pounds of grain and legumes removed from the total available to a hungry world. What we do not all realize is that this high-protein feed is administered to a steer during the last few weeks of its existence. The sole function of most of the soybeans and other feed crops we raise is to turn lean range-fed beef into the marbled fat beef that our doctors warn us against.

            The relationship between meat consumption and available grain is therefore more sensitive than we might think. If demand for meat goes down, the steer’s last-minute cram session does not take place. In 1974,when the market for meat did fall, the grain that was so unexpectedly released actually did find its way to poorer countries. (The italicized word is in the original.)  

            I responded wholeheartedly to these paragraphs. Here’s how my thinking ran: If my eating less beef would help the hungry of the world, then eating no beef would help even more. By doing this, I would be silently affirming my belief in the holiness of all life. Moreover, less consumption meant fewer steers raised and that meant fewer of these sentient creatures would die.

            The final statement of course had to be that I would also cease to consume chicken and fish. They, too, were sentient creatures, and chickens especially were being raised in abysmal conditions.

            “I’m a vegetarian now,” I announced to Annette.

             “What prompted this?” she asked.

            I read her the three paragraphs. She refrained from citing the counter arguments about one person being able to do little to feed the whole world. Knowing me well, she knew that for me life is holy. Sacred. And becoming a vegetarian would be a way of living that belief.

            We drove home. I emptied the freezer of chicken, beef, and fish; gave the trove to a friend; and settled down to learn how to cook as a vegetarian and what to order at restaurants. I’ve never regretted this decision.

            As Lao-tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” Out of the stillness of my commitment arises the transformation.