dan's typical duck and weave?

so...the kitten is gone----off to a hopefully good home with a local teacher/collector of various canines and felines.

so...i wonder about a moot point for myself, an intellectual notion frozen out of life's organic flow: should i have kept it? was my not keeping it a sensible, pragmatic move or a typical, selfish duck and weave of responsibility?

however, i'm starting to know for myself that responsibility=life...and that i want to embrace life rather than evade it. i want to anchor myself in. not only the tangible, but the sticky, living networks which comprise the stuff of life, without which, i'm concluding, we are withered appendages, unfed, unwatered, atrophied----deprived of aqua vitae.

involvement, in a word....involvement in something at least larger than one's self...i wonder about what it is within me and my society that makes this process so elusive...

sudden bout of interspecies mothering cont'd

somehow the universe is making me feel universal motherhood [is this an experience i need?]: sudden responsibility for a new life and the resultant worry, joy and instant identity of it all----as well as sleep deprivation.

this morning at 3:30 am i was jolted awake by sudden, extreme white noise...or white water to be more exact. half asleep, i assumed i was dreaming it, but i wasn't! the water filter hooked into the main pipe cracked; so, all the considerable pressure was unleashed against the wall, furiosly bouncing against the hollow door of the closet containing the pipes----all of which was 2 ft away from my sleepy head! without that door i most likely would've drowned, inhaling a river of water in my sleep. my room in the basement is out of order---under water---for the second time in 3 months...hint, hint?

 for the third night in a row, my baby kitten slept in the window well. lifting him out, i am mother! this morning was no different...i suppose i keep expecting his real feline mother to take him back....i suppose he thinks the same thing....he was never so happy as when i appeared with actual feline milk [in a can from the pet store]. his whole demeanor changed after ingesting it---frisky and energetic! i tried to capture the friskiness in this series of photos...

someone is supposed to take him on monday---i wonder how i'll [we'll both] feel about that after all of this bonding?

mammalian mother surrogate

at first, i thought i was hallucinating auditorially, but yes, it was true----a slight, fearful meow was indeed peeping from the side of my house. a shivering kitten stared up at me with whatever nascent eyesight it could muster at so young an age...a week or two at the most...from the basement window well. scared, dependent and hungry...seems like the way we all enter the world...an inborn spur to reach out into the world....imagine if we didn't have to...weren't forced to!

it took about 5 minutes for the kitten to warm to me. i was no feline mother, certainly...and apologized for my built-in shortcomings. but i then submitted to the situation and asked the great Whatever, 'what the hell does one do in this situation?' to my surprise, out of the nothingness, i received a silent reply, 'be its mother...' i put my head down, offering some snuggle fur. i asked my dad for a dish of milk. i imitated the kitten's peeping. that really won him over! i must have said just the right thing in cat-speak---a bit of home for the weary tourist.  he searched for the nipple on my perplexingly non-feline physiognomy...

yeow! i immedaitely empathized with breast feeding mothers throughout mammalian history as he sank his needle teeth into my fingertip! see illustration above.

the year that was still is

another birthday comes and goes....whizzzzzzzzzzzz.......

on the day itself, i worked...it rained....some calls from those who still remember and care----a rarefied bunch whose preciousness increases in inverse proportion to their number...

the best gift, i think, for my 39th year, has been the realization that i don't have to [and cannot, at any rate] change my parents in order for me to be an independent, autonomous being...this message courtesy of my friend james...my grandmother gave me underwear...

i feel love burgeoning and flowing through me in an inner, subterranean way...wanted to record it here, since throughout my life i've experienced love, mostly not as an attachment to an object [though that's certainly happened] but rather as a state of mind/being that pre-exists the 'beloved' and is catalyzed by them and projected outwards towards them. let's see what time and space have in store...though sooner or later, odds are that love will happen, no?

my 'reverse walden' experiment [venturing back home rather than away and alone] is bearing fruit----i'm very glad to be living with my family and am trying to recapture the groundedness, honor, respect and love [filial piety] that gets lost in our culture which places 'individuality' and striking-out-on-one's-own above all else----i have done that, however and deem it overrated. i'm interested in reclaiming what gets trampled in that mad rush to ones self. right now i feel that it is deep, ancient and quite quiet about itself...it whispers hidden in plain sight...

currently on page 510 of the exceptional 'john adams' book by david mccollough. interesting to note that our country was born of nasty partisan politics and press in lockstep with each other...and much of what adams wrote at the time could be equally applied to today without modification. i suppose that this is the crux of the entire enterprise of writing history----a cyclical saga of common life with our ancestors...an aspect of the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same of time...

note to someone: write a book with exactly this premise---finding historical parallels for now, almost proving its not-newness...an 'anatomy of melancholy' for history....anatomy of history...could one person ever do this?