In memory of a feral cat
the night before this feral cat disappeared, to make his peace with the world and leave it in cat fashion, I dreamed that there was a burglar in my living room, sitting on a stool. Back lit by the full moon in the window, I could not see his face. He sat there and did not move as I went to the phone. Then I knew that this thief was Time, and I stopped: the police could do nothing.
But Time is not only a thief. There are two aspects to Time:
Time spreads its hands and all things appear: form, sensation, vast universes of galaxies, a ladybug on a leaf, thought, a small but sturdy tabby cat, activity, consciousness. The tabby cat appeared one day, a member of a traveling tribe of feral cats, in the back yard of a friend. Was that seventeen years ago?
Time gave the tabby cat prowess in hunting. He caught mice, young rats, insects and an occasional morning dove. Some of the other cats in his tribe went elsewhere, but the tabby cat stayed. He made the acquaintance of my friend. My friend fed him, the tabby cat kept the mice away from the vegetable patch. Theirs was a respectful partnership, for the tabby cat was in no sense owned.
That is one aspect of time, the unfolding of things. As the wave spills on the beach, bringing up untold riches from the sea, Time sweeps across our consciousness, and both eyes and picked flowers appear.
The second aspect of Time is less to our liking
Time reaches out again, and pulls all things back. Time took from the tabby cat his strength, his ability to run and jump. He became a frail wobbly caricature of a tabby cat. Although he tried to maintain his dignity, the carefully maintained coat became matted and dirty.
We run along the shore, wondering where our sand castles went.
I took the tabby cat to the vet. Several months earlier, I would not have been able to catch the cat, let alone wrestle him into a carrier, but now he was too weak to protest, and too dependent on our good will to want to. The vet thought he had cancer. The vet said to feed him canned food and keep an eye on him. She thought that when he became too weak to eat, we should bring him back to be euthanized. "I wouldn't want him to die alone in a corner of the yard somewhere."
The tabby cat heard her. He decided that his present form was no longer working. He decided to leave at his own pace, in a place to his liking, with smells and sights he recognized, and not a brightly lit strange office filled with strange humans.
And so, a week later, he disappeared.
My friend and I searched for days, but not one sign of the tabby cat could we find.
Zen Master Dogen said: "The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely. Should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish."
Goodby, tabby cat.