small cat = great destruction

so everything is packed up and shipped out. i won't see my things for a month, but that's ok, so long as i didn't pack something away that i need... but for a month, i'll make do. now, to finish off work with panache, or at least without leaving some major forgotten project undone.

slightly dramatic story with my cats: they were packed up into my dad's car yesterday and went back to brewster with him and kornelya and jalom. when they got home yesterday evening, they let huckleberry out and he immediately ran to the wall and pulled open a panel they kept for getting to the water pipes, and disappeared into the wall.

anyway, i found this out today at lunch time, and, slightly apprehensive, as you can imagine, called kornelya, who said they could get the carpenter to come and pull open the panel further to get him out. slightly assured, i said ok.

by the time i got home from errands tonight, i had a voicemail from dad saying that the cat was still in the wall and to call him immediately. freaked out, i called and dad said they'd pulled apart half the kitchen wall and couldn't find him. he said there was nothing he could do and he didn't think the cat would last very long in the wall. of course i started sobbing and dad kept saying he was sorry and i couldn't help berating the fact that they have this easily accessible hole in the wall when they've had up to three cats living in their household for this potential disaster. then dad said he would try getting a panel open on the other side of the kitchen. i felt bad asking him to take more of the kitchen apart, but on the other hand, i would bulldoze my house if that's what it took to save my cat.

i got off the phone and told the story to courtney, at whose house i'm staying until the end of work. she tried to comfort me by counteracting dad's melodramatic prognostics by saying cats are clever and can survive days without food and can fit in all sorts of small spaces just fine. but of course i was panicked now and afraid i'd arrive back in brewster with my baby dead. so she distracted me with youtube videos of people dancing for oprah, and it kind of worked, and then at that point, dad called back to announce that they were able to get huckleberry out of the wall, and he was cooped up in the bathroom with the window closed.

he informed me that it was stifling in there but he wouldn't open the window in case huck tried to go out the screen. i said, why not open the window an inch or two? he was convinced huck would get through this. i was convinced that after the trauma of being forced into a cat carrier and riding in an un-air conditioned car for six hours with total strangers to an unknown destination and fate, to get stuck in a wall for over twenty-four hours, huck would end by dying of heat stroke in that bathroom with no ventilation.

finally a compromise was reached, in which the window was (slightly) opened, and the bathroom and bedroom doors were left open, with an outer hallway door to act as the actual barrier between that portion and the rest of the house. jack was stuck with huckleberry for companionship, and hopefully that is the end of it.

funny, i had thought the packing up part would be the part to give me a near-heart attack.

the personification of my subtle anatomy

dreams of recent note–

in my most recent dream, i am riding on a train, out of philadelphia maybe, and i'm taxed by the thought of the journey ahead. the train seems to hit delays, or there's something about the ride that makes me uncomfortable. there's other people on the train, but i don't see anyone i know, no friendly faces to make me feel more comfortable about being here.

then i'm lying on one of the seats of the train, and suddenly, there's a train conductor standing beside me and looking down at me, smiling. i look at her and feel a little better, and then all of a sudden there are many women surrounding me, looking down at me, smiling and benevolent, protective. they're beautiful, and robed in greek-looking garments. or maybe they're naked? i'm not sure, but it's like they're angels or something. i just watch them, smiling at me, surrounding me in a tight circle, ethereal and luminous.

waking up and thinking about it, i wondered if they were my chakras, the personification of my Subtle Anatomy, as kundalini yoga teaches. i have been practicing meditation on the chakras lately, and so far it is my favorite yoga position, or asana (i'm trying to learn the language of yoga), next to the position where you just lie on your back with your arms outstretched and drift into a trance-like snooze.

the wide stretches of fiction and reality

"even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it's real."

isn't that a great photo up above? i found this article today speculating on why it is that the imagination is such a pleasure to us. it's the kind of question an adult would ask, after all; children, with a more instinctive wisdom, already know. paul bloom, this article's author, cites his colleague's theory of "aliefs"–or rather, instinctive beliefs that are intrinsically linked to emotional responses over objective, sensory responses to fiction versus reality. or maybe "sensory" is the wrong word, if in this context an alief is triggered by more primitive sensations. seeing a man stumble over a cliff in a scary movie makes us jump, even though we know we're just watching a stunt double hopping against a blue screen.

i wonder what mr. bloom would have to say about dreams, then. are they an extension of the imagination, both real and unreal, full of both beliefs and aliefs? i sometimes wonder. there's no saying how wide are the stretches of the capacity of the human brain, nor how much we think we sense is reality. and if dreams are, on some plane of place and time, real, then why not novels and fiction? we long for stories, but what are we creating in the telling?