A message from an unlikely source

namely, a cat

The other morning, I took my place in my yellow chair where I go every morning to sip coffee and to read poetry and to try to meditate in the way that I do. I’m not very good at meditating, as I have often confessed. But I am good at settling in for at least a few moments and wiping the slate clean, then letting something occur.

On this morning, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was having trouble dealing with the horrors that seem to never let up these days. What can one offer by way of consolation? A recipe for chicken and wild rice soup? Some thoughts on different kinds of prayer? An idea for a kindness to offer another that would ricochet back to the giver? Nothing seemed like a very good idea.

I did my usual looking around the room and out the windows. I am comfortable in my own home, and I like looking at the books and birds’ nests and the stone dauschund I have placed at the end of a chaise longue, where, Noel Coward-like (or so I imagine) he seems waiting perpetually for a doggy martini. As for the outside, I like witnessing the changes in the season, the way that the trees are skeletal now, revealing an essence that is hidden for most of the year.