Kinship

Yesterday evening I started reading a book.

For some reason in this time, recovering from a back injury, I haven't read that much. Seems like it would be an ideal time to read. But, generally I have a lot of anxiety about missing work as a 1st grade teacher-also anxiety about my back, being ill. All of that works against blogging, reading, writing in various ways. For one thing I decided to take a look at this back as a life message. And that has been about self search.

I'm 50, what does it say to me to get into this much pain and to lose your feeling of feet and legs, what do I need to understand? It's certainly been a lonely time of thinking, and I'm not sure anyone would want to journey into that too by reading a blog post on the internet.
Several things keep speaking to me. I am very upset by mandated, test based, poor curricular changes in my work.And the complete collapse of character in the participants. I'm engaged in many levels internally about what "school is", I've tired of many of the givens/limits in that world. Also I'm 50, there are things I need to do personally, there are compromises that I've made that bother me. It broke my back, actually, and I have to think about some things in general and get beyond it.

Anyway I was taking a bath for my back and I read a book called Kinship With Animals last night.
It's perfect for me because I can do what I've always preferred, read it out of order, even backwards, skip, dog ear, and move around within it my way. I don't sustain reading very long now. This is facilitated because it is a series of animal related short stories. I haven't finished it and I haven't read the preface, so I can't exactly say I'm an expert on this book. I can however share from connections it made with me last night that moved me during this introspective and deeply personal time.
I really appreciated this.

I spun inside the stories to one marked by a picture of the cutest snowy barn owl you ever saw. It was written by a woman that did her schooling in biology at Cal Tech. Since my daughter is there, and just dang great at biology I was pulled in. (talking to her today to recommend this she said her current prof headed the owl research there- so she is very current on everything to do with what we know about owls-just an amazing coincidence- as I turned mid book to this particular story) I love owls, it's beautifully written, short, lifting right into your being. Razors edge writing. She went on to write a book I see too.
This animal observer came to adopt this tiny, hurt, abandoned owlet. And through time she tells about how they became mated. She stayed with the owl 19 years. Her descriptions of the relationship are fascinating. She rescued the owl, that would go on to rescue her.
Her name is Stacey O'Brien. She became very ill after 15 years with a brain cancer. This comes at the end of the short story. Rather plainly. She wanted to end her life she says because being in her thirties and a burden to family and to their pockets was something she felt- along with paralyzing excruciating pain. I related to those few sentences. On a lot of personal levels. But she saw through more time to see Wesley, the owl, to his end. Because that mattered to her.

Reading of that, it was very moving.

When I was a girl I had many animal connections. I'd have more now except really a spouse that lacks this need for animals in our home resents it so badly -there is no ground to enjoy it together. So I feel the resentment as anger or shaming. Negative energies. I didn't know that "going in". Don't know that we can ever communicate through it. It takes two and a lot of reaching to understand something about another.

I had a cat Bootsie as a child. Bootsie came free of many cat like qualities. He loved you, wrapped you with his being, sat on my drawing, my lap, and liked to sleep on the heating vent. He was a beautiful orange and white Persian from a litter I raised(from another cat I loved deeply), that missed feline leukemia shots arrival by a few months. He died of it, a horrible death, after I put him through chemo and so much trying to save him. I earned and spent about a thousand on him when I had no money at all to survive. And that was greatly discounted. And largely only able to buy me a few months. I'd have given anything to save him and his vet Brian who lived down below my house in my neighborhood was the kindest Dr. I ever knew. He was "there for me." In a time I had no one that understood me or loved me quite like he did, had little hope, great personal struggles- Bootsie was I suppose... like my child. Or my partner. Or a part of my being. The kitty lifted up any and everyday. I've suffered many losses, as life requires, but this beautiful ball of fluff and kindness accepted me unconditionally, and that loss taught me something about the value of finding love where is it. And acting on it.
I related to this time through the story.

Because really this story was about this bond. The book is about how in relationship to the animal world we are better able to find who we are, what humanness means, locate our compassion. It is about the things I value. At the very end Bootsie was burning up with fever and went and threw himself in the toilet. It was such an act of desperation. Then wrapped in a towel he died. My mom had to hold him beside me at that moment- I was convulsing. Bootsie was always cold in his life. Bootsie was always so tuned to me. He'd lay over my lap as I drew. He would lay around my neck like a scarf. If I slept he thought of my chest as his pillow. Often I thought he had no bones. But something in her writing of Wesley reminded me of that relationship. In a time life had great hurdles, this being was so important to my surviving.

When I teach I try to have animals be there. I try to teach about observing them, understanding them. I know they matter to the development of a child, but this book has many inspiring essays to explicate this.


Last night I sat in the tub and thought about that.
Without the cats of my childhood I might not have made it.

So the story made me face something. Because it does matter. To me.

Then I sat back and thought about this owl named Wesley that was described. Here's a piece:

" Wesley had made me his mate. He was completely loyal and devoted to me. He tried to force mice into my mouth out of concern that I wasn't eating. The only way to satisfy his worries was to pretend to eat the mice, making yum-yum sounds and then hiding them so he'd think they were eaten. He wasn't easily fooled. He would cry out for me in his mating call whenever he heard my voice. When I was napping, he would wait for me to wake up and stand patiently staring into my eyes until I opened them. Sometimes if I didn't, I could feel him watching me. Then he would very carefully take hold of my eyelashes and gently try to open my eyelids when he was impatient for me to wake up. That action took trust on my part. His beak was formidable. For years, Wesley was my companion and friend through everything. Of course, I continuedto be fascinated with wild owls in the area whom I seemed to attract and found them to possess their own ideas, egos, personalities, and opinions."

It's such a good story. I hope she survives. I see she wrote her book. Look here.

The next story I read bumbling around in the text was different. It was written by a performance artist about her relationship over 2 1/2 years with a rat. She had a remarkable closeness to this animal. And she is provocative, clearly an artist, a writer. Inside of the piece I was watching with a kind of rapt attention that you might find looking upon something you don't necessarily understand, but find yourself compelled to hear or really look at.
It wasn't so much for me about her descriptions of the animal as it was her insights into herself, and into how this animal accepted her, made her look at herself, see and explore some of the things that wounded her and kept her bound.
It was compelling.

An excerpt is hard to select because most all of that story I want to share, it was written by Rachel Rosenthal, and her rat friend was called Tatti Wattles.

"Many people profess to love their companion animals, but how many respect them as completely as they would an equal of their own species? It takes fully accepting one's humanity to be able to bridge the considerable gap that separates us from other-than-human animals. People who achieve this know the full meaning of love-a love that doesn't own or grab, that isn't a projection of our personal needs or neuroses; a love that leaves the other free, that respects and accepts the other's life in it's entirety rather than selectively encouraging only traits and behaviors that are convenient or remind us of ourselves.
Above all, such a person has a sense of the sacred. As a beautiful and wondrous as is love and total communication between two human beings, love and total communication between individuals of two different species is something that goes beyond-into the numinous and the transcendental.

It would seem that human beings ( with a few exception) have lost the capacity, wonder and magic of inter-species communication. Yet animals continue to fascinate us in myths and folktales where they embody spiritual and supernatural powers. They haunt our dreams and symbolize those deepest parts of nature from which we have severed ourselves.

Animals, or rather the idea of animals, are a potent force. We fear animals we almost never come in contact with: bats, snakes, leopards, wolves, rats. These responses are deeply buried in our unconscious where they were imprinted as far back as from our hominid ancestors whose survival depended on cunning. We were a part of the food chain then, not the top predator we have since become. We ate and were eaten. We feared, respected, emulated, or shunned other animals. We were constantly on the alert for a dangerous predator or for an animal whose sting or bite could kill. We cannot remember or even imagine what it was like to be in such close symbiosis with such powerful and strange beings. But our unconscious memories remember.

Our children grow up on a diet of fairy-tale beasts: Beatrix Potter's mice, the Big Bad Wolf, the Frog Prince, Br'er rabbit, and the Roadrunner. But how many of these children are taught to bring a live animal to be dissected in a precocious physiology class that teaches all the wrong life lessons: that it's OK to kill out of curiosity that to understand life, one must kill it; that a dead frog is more educational than a live frog observed in the wild; that love and respect do not go with science and technology, ergo with civilized society? Happy and lucky are those children whose enlightened parents or teachers instruct them in patience and empathy needed to really know an animal who is alive and to use this knowledge creatively in the preservation of life.

Death comes. Death is a part of the business. I learn about my own death with every animal I know whose death I witness. And I've learned that death, under certain circumstances, can be ecstatic. With this understanding comes acceptance, and with acceptance, peace."

It's funny I'd say she overstates, but I recall a science fair from my first year teaching at Cheat Lake School. I was suddenly one day without warning required to attend it that evening. One area was jammed. Like at a carnival. The place with the tattooed lady. The attraction was a dead, dissected cat. caught, dissected, spread out, and served up to desensitize that entire school. Kids were acting insane running in and out to it. That thrilled my boss. Proudly displayed by the Principal Mr. Walls. As "real science." He thought this was great.
Bootsie was dying at that time. I was spooning in liver baby food into his mouth to keep him alive.
While an 11 year old gutted a cat to do his science fair display.

There were many things with her piece that talked to me. She looked for her spirit guide finding it to be the rat. I can never quite get to that place though I went into a several hour attempt at getting to that place resting in my bath-seeking a guide. Trying to connect to that guide. I did come to knowing I could not tell the difference between my arm and the surroundings. I'd kind of lost feeling.
But the story was deeply affecting.
And I'll try to share more as I read more.