the story of Jack the Yogi Cat

Seventeen years ago I saved him from running down a rain sewer in Texas. We were living outside of Dallas and a neighbor knocked on the door and asked if the gray and white mackerel tabby frolicking in the grass was our cat. We stepped outside and he was running around like crazy the way kittens do and I saw him head toward the long opening of the rain sewer in the gutter. I had seen adult cats jump in and out of that spot but I knew a little kitten probably couldn't jump back out, so just when he was about to dive in I grabbed his tail and put him in my arms.

We already had Sam-Dog, a big black Lab, and Sox (named after the Chicago White Sox), another rescued Texas street cat who lived in a pile of bricks -- a "marmalade" tabby with white socks and orange swirls on his sides. I rescued Jack in July and Sox walked into the house in March, estimated age was 6 months. I could tell you how Sox came into our lives, but this is Jackson Theodore Kat's story.

Not knowing yet if Jack had any diseases that would infect Sox, I put him in the yard with food and water. I knew then he was a cat who was happy just "being." At night he would crawl up on a window ledge and sleep and during the day he would hang out in the yard, he never wanted to leave. I took him to the vet and found out he was loaded the fleas and tapeworms. The vet gave him a shot for the tapeworms and I gave him a fleabath when I got home. I let him stay in the house after he got his shots. The Hubs wanted to name him Smokey but I said everyone names gray cats Smokey, that's boring, besides, he looks like a Jack.

Jack was smaller than Sam-Dog's head and when Sam went up to sniff him, the two pound kitten hissed and the 80 pound Lab turned around and walked away. I knew then he was a fighter, and that fighting spirit helped him through all his physical afflictions.

Sam-Dog, Sox, and Jack all got along and we eventually moved back to Chicago, us and the old Lab and the two rescued street cats. Sox and Jack would always sleep together, they were street brothers.

Jack grew into a big cat, almost 20 pounds. But fat cats are prone to diabetes and fatty liver disease. He developed FLD before he was 10 years old. Just like the link says, he had stopped eating and was losing weight. The vet treated him and when I got him home he still wasn't eating so I had to force-feed him with special food. I'd put him inside a pillow case with just his head sticking out and put a syringe full of special food down his throat. After a few days of this, I think Jack said "enough of this shit" and he started eating on his own. He regained some weight, but was never a fat cat again. He was just happy to be.

I can't remember exactly how he was diagnosed with diabetes but I gave him daily insulin shots for about 10 years. I can't tell you how many all-day glucose tests he's had over the years, and he had been on three different brands of insulin. Just like a human diabetic, he had crashes and I had to rush him to the vet. Once he was being boarded at the vet while we were on vacation and he crashed. To this day I think the vet tech made a mistake and gave him too much insulin because there was another diabetic cat there also named Jack -- I think they almost killed him. In any event, the vet called us and we flew home from New Mexico that day.

When we got to the vet, he told us Jack was recovered but blind. Oh well, I thought, we'll have a blind cat, no big deal. As soon as we got him home, Jack started jumping up on the counters begging for food! I moved my fingers in front of his eyes and watched how his eyes reacted -- he wasn't blind! But at the vet he just stared, unblinking. We're convinced that he faked being blind just to come home! When we got him home it was like he had never been sick at the vet. As it turned out, we could never board him again because he would stop eating, he would go on a hunger strike, and we eventually found someone to come over and take care of the cats if we went away. The reality was that our long vacations dwindled down to none because of Jack. In the last few years, however, I finally found someone who would come and give him his shot, I taught her how to do that.

In the last year, he's needed two insulin shots a day and I saw how diabetes ravaged his body, just like it does a human. He was also arthritic and I gave him shots once a month for that. The Hubs sawed off one side of a litter box so Jack could walk right in, so he did not have to lift his arthritic back legs. We did all that we could and as long as he wasn't showing pain, as long as I could see that he was happy just to be, I let him live his life of eating -- he loved avocados and peas and fresh meat, of course -- and sleeping on his chair. He could not get around too much anymore, his world was the kitchen and the basement. Jackson Theodore Kat was already skin and bones and yesterday he stopped eating, I saw a stagger in his walk. I knew it was time. I think he knew it too because he did not fight getting into his travel case. And he was always a fighter.

The vet sedated him and I kept my hand on his heart. Even with all his ills his heart always pumped strong. As she gave him the death needle I chanted OM MANI PADME HUM. I saw the suffering leave his gray and white face and he looked like a kitten again. Even the vet said she saw his eyes get wide and then he was at peace.

It is a law of physics that energy can neither be created nor destroyed so it follows that what is never born can never die. As a practicing Buddhist, I know this, that is why I do not fear death. My body will die but "I" will never die. I know that Jack the Yogi Cat has already been reborn as a higher life form.

And if Buddhist cosmology is all wrong, there is still that little bit of Christian left inside me who likes to believe that when we die all our pets will come running over the Rainbow Bridge to greet us.

Either way, we will see each other again, me and Sam-Dog and Jack the Yogi Cat.

Jack the Yogi Cat

I put my cat to sleep last night. I will write more about him later, but for now you can read what I wrote about him in 2007 in my yoga blog:

going with the flow

In the picture in this post he looks healthy. When he died he was skin and bones.

Jack was a street cat. Seventeen years ago I saved him from going down a rain sewer when he was a two pound bundle of fur covered with fleas and filled with tapeworms. Please click the "Feed Shelter Animals" widget in my sidebar, and if you are a regular reader, please click it every time you stop by. I do, and Jack thanks you.

we all need prayers

"Pray For Me, Brother" -- "The AR Rahman Foundation presents a movement to eradicate poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals."



If they can get along in love and peace, why can't we?

Don't ever tell me that animals are "dumb" and don't have feelings. They have it all over us in spades.

poem: "concentric circles"

(photo credit: TomMartinArt)

I can not be as you want me to be
now
as you could not be as I wanted you to be
then.

We have run in concentric circles
all these years
having the same center
but barely touching.

Years and years and years
of being together
but always apart.

Always together at the heart
at the center
but always apart
at the edges
of these concentric circles.

We cheat each other in this dice game
as Shiva cheated Parvati
in his game with her.

One day these concentric circles
will overlap and join
never to be pulled apart
again.

(2008)

"Every animal knows far more than you do." (Nez Perce)

Norbert Rosing's striking images of a polar bear coming upon tethered sled-dogs in the wilds of Canada. The photographer was sure that he was going to see the end of the dogs when the polar bear wandered in, but the bear returned every night that week to play with the dogs.

From About.com: "The location was a kennel outside Churchill, Manitoba owned by dog breeder Brian Ladoon, who kept some 40 Canadian Eskimo sled dogs there when Rosing visited in 1992. A large polar bear showed up one day and took an unexpected interest in one of Ladoon's tethered dogs. The other dogs went crazy as the bear approached, Rosing says, but this one, named Hudson, "calmly stood his ground and began wagging his tail." To Rosing and Ladoon's surprise, the two "put aside their ancestral animus," gently touching noses and apparently trying to make friends."

From Rosing's website: "1988 he started his still ongoing project: The World of the Polar Bear. It covers the entire Canadian Arctic from Churchill/Manitoba to Pond Inlet and Cambridge Bay in Nunavut. He captured in his pictures the life of the Inuit, Muskoxen, Atlantic Walrusses, Whales, Aurora Borealis and of course the life circle of the Lord of the Arctic, the Polar Bear."

Remember that Sarah Palin does not believe that polar bears are endangered, she hunted wolves from a helicopter, and she does not believe that global warming is real.

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mahatma Gandhi








What incredible images!

Sending bear hugs to you all!

(thanks Existentialist Cowboy!)

does religion make us more divine or deranged?

(photo credit: bhakticollective)


Kaustubha Das asks a very good question. no society is immune from religious fundamentalism, just look at our home-grown fundamentalist Christians. all fundamentalists have the same thing in common: devotion to their god and a belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

in Sanskrit that would be bhakti combined with avidya with a good dash of asmita thrown in. devotion combined with ignorance and ego.


FINDING SELFLESSNESS AMIDST MUMBAI'S SORROW

"When we see innocent people running our city streets, scrambling for shelter from acts of violence committed in God’s name, whether in Manhattan or Mumbai, it’s a good time to ask ourselves whether our religion is making us more divine or deranged. On the verge of 2009, it’s become all the more apparent that the first decade of the new millennium will, in many ways, be defined by the impact of religious terrorism on our nations, communities, families and minds. Times like these call for us to examine how our faith affects our reasoning....

The most relevant questions about religion will address how we approach it. Religion, as a method of self-transformation (or yoga), can purify the heart, free us of unworthy instinct and compulsion, and nurture the best in us. A pure heart is fit to receive God’s grace in the form of wisdom, contentment and compassion. Conversely, a superficial approach sees religion as merely a ticket to salvation via membership to a group endowed with the favor of God. It can result in just the opposite, fostering pride, sectarianism and hate. It can become an instrument for the expression of exactly that which we need to be purified of. Which brings us to the real enemy: not Islam, not even extreme fundamentalist Islam...."

To understand human nature I don't have to read modern western psychology books...all I need to do is look to yoga philosophy and Buddhism. Buddha was the first neuroscientist and psychologist and after his enlightenment he taught how to relieve our suffering, nothing more, nothing less. in fact his teachings were so simple that he almost decided not to teach what he discovered under the bodhi tree because he thought people would not believe him. after his enlightenment he was asked what he was and he merely said "awake." that is all the word "buddha" means.

As Das explains and also asks: "Yogic literature speaks of six enemies (Ari-shad-vargas) which bind the soul: kama, (lust); krodha, (anger); lobha, (greed); mada, (madness); moha, (illusion); and matsarya, (hate and envy). True religion aims at uprooting these terrorists. The sincerity of ones purpose in their approach to religious practice weighs heavily in determining ones success. Will the soul be purified or putrefied?"

Are you your own terrorist or will you choose to awaken?

the heroes of Mumbai

(photo credit: New York Times)

For Heroes of Mumbai, Terror Was Call to Action

"On any ordinary day, Vishnu Datta Ram Zende used the public-address system at Mumbai’s largest railway station to direct busy hordes of travelers to their trains.

But last Wednesday just before 10 p.m., when he heard a loud explosion and saw people running across the platform, he gripped his microphone and calmly directed a panicked crowd toward the safest exit. The station, Victoria Terminus, it turned out, was suddenly under attack, the beginning of a three-day siege by a handful of young, heavily armed gunmen.

“Walk to the back and leave the station through Gate No. 1,” he chanted alternately in Hindi and Marathi, barely stopping to take a breath until the platform was cleared. No sooner, gunmen located his announcement booth and fired, puncturing one of the windows. Mr. Zende was not hurt.

Overnight, Mr. Zende became one of Mumbai’s new heroes, their humanity all the more striking in the face of the inhumanity of the gunmen....

Not far from the train station, as the same network of gunmen stormed the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, a sous chef named Nitin Minocha and his co-workers shepherded more than 200 restaurant diners into a warren of private club rooms called The Chambers.

For the rest of the night they prepared snacks, served soda, fetched cigarettes and then, when told it was safe, tried to escort the diners out through the back. They wanted to make sure their guests, many of them Mumbai’s super-elite, were as comfortable as possible.

“The only thing was to protect the guests,” said the executive chef, Hemant Oberoi. “I think my team did a wonderful job in doing that. We lost some lives in doing that.”

During the attacks, six employees from the kitchen staff were slain.

Even after an aborted evacuation bid, hotel workers helped get water for their guests and held up bedsheets to create makeshift urinals....

Mr. Zende joined the railways at the age of 19, when his father, a railway guard, died. With a 10th-grade education, Mr. Zende began at the bottom of the ladder, working himself up to the announcement booth. Now, he commutes an hour and a half each way from a working-class corner on the city’s northern edges, naturally on the railways. He makes little more than $300 a month."

India has lived with terrorism for years, yet it only becomes front page news when the white faces are killed.

I fell in love with India on my first trip. I was 51, alone, and I had never been overseas in my life, but as soon as my foot hit Indian soil I knew I had come home. when I returned to my American home a month later, I was changed. I experienced reverse culture shock that lasted for many months. I did not want to be here at all, it made me depressed. tired of my constant talk about India, my husband asked me, annoyed, "why do you love India so much?" I said without hesitation, "the people", and I started to cry.

I've spent my time with slum children who use garbage for toys and with Brahmins, the highest caste. I've spent time at a shelter with women who were rescued from the streets. There I talked with a former Bollywood star who told me, when I started crying because these women reminded me of the battered women to whom I teach yoga, "don't cry, madam, we like it here." I was hugged by a woman who could speak no English but she touched my hair and then touched hers and started talking to me in Tamil...the translator told me that she said we were the same because we both had the same thick, curly, dark hair. I've sat on the concrete floor of my auto rickshaw driver's two room apartment that doesn't have a bathroom, eating lunch with my hands in the south Indian way, sharing a communal meal with him and his wife and three daughters. they sleep on straw mats on the concrete floor.

I was the guest of honor at a school in the slums of Madurai where I told the children that they were all Gandhis. a teacher told the kids how it was their privilege for the American yoga teacher to visit their school today. I said, no, it was MY privilege to be treated with such graciousness, a total stranger. the principal took my hand and said I was a gift from God for them...and that's when I started to cry.

I've met people who have nothing according to white bread suburban standards and yet they have everything. there has not been one day since 2005 that I do not think about Ma India. she cracks open my heart and makes me count the days until I can run back into her arms and lose myself all over again.

India's 9/11

(BBC photo)

The tragedy in Mumbai is India's 9/11. Unlike America before 9/11, India has always known terrorism, but never of the scale that has been experienced in Mumbai.

Those of you who know me know that India is my second home, however, I have never been north, I've always stayed south in my beloved Tamil Nadu. a Tamil friend in India emailed me this morning to tell me how sad she is that westerners were singled out by the terrorists. my friends here have emailed me telling me that they will worry about me even more now during my future trips to India (I have two planned.) I appreciate their concern, but I think it is misplaced because I can die within the hour or next week or 30 years from now. I am not afraid to die, not anymore. I do not live my life in fear, although I know I will die in India. don't ask me how I know, I just know.

I've heard from various news sources that the authorities think the terrorists have ties to Pakistan but also to Kashimiri separatist groups. For those of you who don't know India's history, Pakistan was created out of the Partition. There are some who think that it was one of the greatest tragedies in human history. this was a brutal time in India's history with atrocities committed on both sides. many westerners look up to Mahatma Gandhi, but I can tell you that some Indians hate him for his role in the Partition. I had a long conversation on a long Indian train trip with a man who told me that many Indians hate Gandhi just like Americans hate George Bush. it was an eye-opening conversation.

Terror and suffering in this world are created when we believe we are separate from one another, when we do not see ourself in the other person.

My heart cries for Mother India, my India.

poetry: even yoga teachers get the blues

I used to write poetry -- even won a few awards -- and one of my favorite poets of all time is Leonard Cohen....Avalanche is one of his songs from his Songs of Love and Hate album released in 1971.

Cohen's recurring themes in his poetry were love and sex, religion, and psychological depression...all totally interrelated as far as I'm concerned....funny how I was so attracted to those themes as a dark, young, hippie chick in high school...I wanted to run away and live with Cohen on those Greek isles he wrote about....

"Well I stepped into an avalanche,
it covered up my soul;
when I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn, learn to serve me well.
You strike my side by accident
as you go down for your gold.
The cripple here that you clothe and feed
is neither starved nor cold;
he does not ask for your company,
not at the centre, the centre of the world.

When I am on a pedestal,
you did not raise me there.
Your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare.
I myself am the pedestal
for this ugly hump at which you stare.

You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn what makes me kind;
the crumbs of love that you offer me,
they're the crumbs I've left behind.
Your pain is no credential here,
it's just the shadow, shadow of my wound.

I have begun to long for you,
I who have no greed;
I have begun to ask for you,
I who have no need.
You say you've gone away from me,
but I can feel you when you breathe.

Do not dress in those rags for me,
I know you are not poor;
you don't love me quite so fiercely now
when you know that you are not sure,
it is your turn, beloved,
it is your flesh that I wear."


I'm dealing with some life-changing shit lately and one of my friends suggested a Rumi poem to me:

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

my mother died today

not today actually, but three years ago, august 6, 2005 to be exact. it's just that I found out today doing a google search of her name and I read the Social Security death records. hey, lin, your mom died and she was 89. at least I know I have some genes for longevity because my father died when he was 86.

my mother and I were seriously estranged, physically estranged for about 20 years since I neither saw her nor talked to her in all that time. but emotionally estranged for much longer than that. I figured she started getting even wackier when I was about 10 or 11 when she was in her early 50s, so around my age now. back in the mid-1950s when I was born, I think it was unusual for a woman over 40 to have a child. my father was almost 50. my mother liked to tell everyone that I was a "change of life baby." I don't think she liked me very much for that. but she waited until I was in my 20s to tell me that I should have been an abortion. thanks, mom. thanks for telling me that at an age where I could handle the craziness of that statement relatively well and not when I was 5 or 10 or 16. thank god for small miracles.

I am a survivor of more than a few things, and abuse at the hands of a parent is one of them. I won't go into specifics as I am not as brave as Utah Savage in writing about it. I feel that some things should be kept private in this age of in-your-face reality shows and tell-all confessions, but that's me. I have always kept my pain private and personal, but again, that's me. those of you who feel the need to scream your pain from your rooftop, more power to ya. despite everything I've lived through at the hands of others, I think I survived damn well and made it through my private hells relatively unscathed. better than a lot of other people I know, that's for sure. some are no longer alive.

when I think back about how my mother acted when I was growing up, I'm pretty sure she would be classified now as bi-polar. she had manic phases of high energy, doing yard work or cleaning the house from top to bottom, and then one day stay in bed all day in her darkened bedroom, never saying a word. there were times when she would not talk for days. when I was in college she told she was seeing a counselor, someone at a public mental health clinic, but she stopped because the person told her there was nothing wrong with her. she was very proud of that statement. I called the clinic to ask if my mother was seen there -- I said that I knew they could not tell me anything, I just wanted to know if a woman with my mother's name had ever been there. they said no. I never told her I did that.

growing up in the '60s and '70s, as a young feminist I came to realize that my mother was totally frustrated in her gender role. I remember her getting part-time jobs of one type or another and they would never last. I never knew the reasons why she quit them. my mother was very intelligent for a person who had never even gone to high school, she was a voracious reader, and was very proud of me that I always was one of the best students in school. of course she always said that my intelligence came from her. but I also remember that she never had anything good to say about her parents or her upbringing. she said her parents were ignorant Polacks. I never knew my grandparents from either side.

the bottom line was that my mother was nuts. I ran away (I had no idea where I was going, I just needed to get out) when I was about 15 and tried to kill myself when I was 16. I remember that the next day my mother was worried about what people would say if they found out.

you might ask where my father was during this time. he owned a little grocery store and meat market, he was a German butcher who came for the American Dream in 1927, so he worked 16 hours or more a day. I can't blame him because all my mother did was bitch about one thing or another. or scream at the top of her lungs. or lock him out of the house for days and weeks at a time. let's just say I did not grow up in the most positive and uplifting of households.

it was very obvious to me that my mother hated being married, and looking back, I don't think she liked men very much at all. so I guess it's because of that I was Daddy's Little Girl, there was nothing he would not do for me. when he could. my happiest memories are those of spending time with my father, not with my mother. it was never father-daughter abuse, it was mother-daughter abuse, but I guess he would be called negligent. negligent for working all the time. besides, he could never stand up to my mother. nobody could. she always liked to say that she'd kick the Devil himself in the ass. a tough broad. like mother like daughter.

you also might ask if I had any siblings. yup, one sister who is 19 years older than me and she left the house when I was 4 when she got married. she never looked back. I also have neither seen nor heard from her in 20 some years. so I guess you can say she abandoned me. once a tarot card reader told me that I've always been betrayed by women, never men. got that right, sister. now is there any reason I've never had lots of women friends, only a few close ones? I hate being with a group of women. I'd rather run with the boys any day. maybe that's why I feel so outside the box in the yoga world -- most yoga teachers are women.

I moved out when I was 18 and got my own apartment and I tried to have some semblance of a relationship with my mother, but it was not to be. in my 20s I realized to save myself, to save my own sanity, I had to sever all emotional ties with a toxic woman. there are many women who are not meant to be mothers.

when I got married for the second time at 35, before we moved to Texas for a corporate relocation, I wrote my mother a long letter telling her exactly why I can never see her again, with no return address. I had written my mother a similar letter once before, journaling all her actions in my life and my reactions, but that I forgave her. she told me I was a liar.

all these years I wondered how my mother was, whether she was dead or alive. I wondered if she ever thought of her long-lost daughter. there were times when I wanted to see her, to tell her in person that I forgave her, to try to get a mother's love that I so desperately wanted and needed when I was a girl. during the 18 years I lived with my parents my mother never once told me she loved me or hugged me. she always said the fact that I had food and a roof over my head was good enough. when I was about 15 she grabbed all the clothes in my closet and threw them down the basement stairs -- she said it was time I did my own washing and ironing. and I did.

I tried to convince myself growing up that I was adopted because I thought no one would treat their natural born child with such disdain.

I cried a bit today when it hit me that my mother was dead, that I finally knew for sure after all these years. in reality I cried for the way things should have been. I thought that I should have tried harder to find her, that I should have reached out. but when it came right down to it, the truth was that I was afraid of being rejected, again, and even at this stage in my life, I knew I could not stand that. maybe some people will call me a bad daughter for not having anything to do with her all these years. after all, "she's your mother, you should have been there for her." yes, like my mother was there for me all those times back in the day when I tried to kill my pain with booze or drugs or men. or when I used to hide in a closet when I was a little girl and talk to my invisible friend. I still have the teddy bear I used to hug. I can never look at pictures of myself as a little girl, they upset me too much because I am reminded of a lost childhood, but I can not let go of that teddy bear.

I forgave my mother a long time ago for the things she did to me. I make no excuses for her. we are all responsible for our actions, but in a way, she could not help herself. as a Buddhist, I have compassion for her, for how she grew up, for whatever or whoever made her the way she was, because something did. but more importantly, I have compassion and love for myself. I am a survivor. and I am glad her suffering is over.

rest in peace, mom. I wish for you the peace that you never had when you were alive. I wish happiness for you in your next life because you never had it in this one.

that is all I can do.