WW: Café cats

(These are two employees of Neko, Bellingham's cat café. In this establishment, one may enjoy a variety of snacks while petting a truly bewildering array of resident cats. I captured this photo on their day off, which they take in the café's basement, where they enjoy access to sidewalk-level window lounges such as this one.

Some of these cats are professionals, but a significant number are there for the purpose of test-driving, after which the driver takes them home. A large display of photos on the wall documents dozens of former staff who thus found alternative employment as house cats. One wonders if it seems anticlimactic to be petted by just a few unchanging people every day, far from the glamour and adulation of show business.

One also wonders if their human coworkers get tired of cat house jokes.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Christmas card sitting

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermits and Hotdogs

In the fifty-odd years I've worked with pets and farm animals, I've learned that anxious and abused ones often fear men – but women, not so much.

Some of this gender-specific apprehension may be down to the fact that we're bigger, louder, and maybe don't smell as nice. But a lot of men also appear to believe the world is an action movie, of which they're the beefcake.

They hurt everything that doesn't meet their approval, usually while shouting. And those guys create dread and disconsolation in many creatures.

Catch enough of that, and any sentient being learns mistrust.

You can accomplish a great deal with their victims by just sitting nearby, not reaching out, speaking quietly or not at all. It takes steady patience, but often eventually works. Perhaps the target simply concludes, based on available data, that we're not really "men". (Or maybe that we're just not failed men, which would be accurate. Brothers barging around hotdogging for the camera snatch the lion's share of attention, which is why we non-gnawers of scenery tend to fade into it.)

I was put in mind of this recently during a night sit in the back yard. First, a coyote stepped into view 30 feet away. He seemed unconcerned, not just with the intense human habitation all around him, but even the intense human right in front of him. I hissed, and he ducked away.

Then not one, but two squirrels almost climbed into my lap, in the course of whatever before-bed routines they were pursuing.

As a Zenner who sits outdoors whenever possible – it's a form in my hermit practice – I've had countless similar experiences with wildlife. I've also used this technique intentionally, with lost or traumatised cats and dogs; nervous horses; and at least one refractory laughing dove.

The grace of these encounters never ceases to thrill. For a brief instant I'm freakin' St. Francis.

Very brief, to be sure. But a flash of kensho all the same.

And a reminder that true warriors are silent and watchful.


(Photo of a true warrior courtesy of Wikipedian Petr Novák and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Camouflaged nap

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Max

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Sitting with demons

(This was a hard photo to bag: a one-handed phone capture from a fixed position in near-total darkness. Rather a hail-Kanzeon shot, what.

What I've documented here is a demonic micro-tiger who stationed herself on my leg during the night sit, for the purpose of distracting me from my enlightenment practice.

In which ambition she succeeded.

So I got a ways to go before I become the Buddha.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Can you explain this?

(Furnace register in cabinet toe kick.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Dinner time

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Disciplinary petting

(I've been taking care of this kitty, and photographing her, for ten years. [First Rusty Ring appearance here.] She's always been headstrong, unwilling to follow rules, primary of which is to stay off the kitchen counter.

So from the beginning, each time she's turned up on the forbidden surface, I've imposed "disciplinary petting", that is, picking her up and cradling her upside down in my arms like a baby while petting and scolding her. Since there's nothing less acceptable to her than confinement, especially with her paws in the air and eyes turned toward the ceiling, being loved and caressed in this fashion amounts to a portable timeout that she instantly resents in the most strenuous terms.

Or she did. Now a decade later she's well into her golden years – so to speak – and as is often the case, has become notably more demonstrative in the affection and physical contact departments. To be precise, she's constantly after me to pick her up and hold her. All day, if she can get it.

If that were all, I could put it down to typical feline old age. Unfortunately, it often develops that simply being held does not in itself suffice. After several minutes in my arms she begins to twist her neck and lay her face flat against my sleeve, as if trying to roll over. This she couldn't actually do without falling, so I've learned to take the hint and turn her over myself.

Like a baby.

So it seems my brilliant disciplinary programme has backfired. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if all these years the whole counter schtick wasn't just a scheme to get punished again.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Siamese friend

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Kitty oryoki

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Bedtime

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

The Perils of Meditation, Case 12

(I have so been there.)

WW: Freshly-made bed

WW: Everybody loves the zafu

(First the cat, now the dog.)

WW: The Incredible Journey

("You guys get out of my hair! Go outside!"
And our story begins.)

WW: Kitty fudo

(This is a funerary fudo I made for a cat friend of mine. [The cord is white, red, and black, the three bardos of death.] She was buried here in the woods a few months ago.)

WW: We have spring. Repeat...

Good Book: Cat Attacks

I didn't want to read this book. And I really didn't want to keep reading after I started. But as I've often said, denial is an unskilful response to danger.

Most of my life has happened in cougar country, much of it in the woods, where I prefer to practice Zen when possible. A few years back I sat 100 Days on the Mountain, an ancient Buddhist ritual, in Washington's coastal jungle.

The cat threat there, of which I was generally aware, comes up several times in my book. (Which is now finished and seeking a publisher.) But if I'd read Cat Attacks: True Stories and Hard Lessons from Cougar Country, I wouldn't have slept once during those more than three months.

Authors Dean Miller and Jo Deurbrouck are careful to point out that human-cougar encounters are extremely rare, and physical contact a tiny blip in that statistic. But they are also conscientious – downright didactic, in fact – in recounting, second by horrific second, exactly what happens in a mountain lion attack.

And though it's apparently impossible to escape a gruesome death if you're alone when the stats turn against you, your chances of avoiding that actuarial convergence drop to zero if you've no hard data on your predator's habits and methods.

Some of which, thanks to Miller and Deurbrouck, I now know:

•    Cougars prefer silent, lightning ambush from behind and above, after extensive, close stalking. When in the woods, turn and look behind you, thoroughly and often.

•    Your predator's single-minded intent is to kill and eat you. This makes your bear-mollifying skills guaranteed death. Instead, if one atypically shows itself before lunging, go big, mean, and criminally insane. This may convince the cougar to go back to just stalking you for now. If on the other hand you make yourself quiet and small and avoid eye contact, you've green-lit a kill.

•    The charge, when it comes, is supernaturally fast; witnesses uniformly report a "brown blur". And its dump-truck impact is instantaneous. So even if you see a lion crouching to strike (which they take great pains to conceal) you have no time to raise or aim, much less draw, a firearm.

•    Though they'll attack groups, particularly children in the midst of one, as readily as they'll strike a loner, cougars rarely turn on rescuers. (It's bizarre, un-prey behaviour that evolution has not prepared them to answer.) So if a companion is hit, come in hot and hostile and fight hard at close quarters, with feet and fists if necessary. Once engaged, a lion may cling stubbornly to its quarry, but they seldom or never accept third-party combat. So keep on hammering until you completely weird it out and it withdraws.

•    Solitary humans have no chance of survival.

This is just a smattering of the practical, unromantic intelligence Cat Attacks contains. The authors' steely pragmatism, while traumatic, gives the work great strength. Particularly valuable is their bullheaded refusal to get sucked into either of the silly postures – "kill 'em all" or "poor persecuted kitties" – one usually encounters when the topic is raised.

To counteract the first, they illuminate in equal detail the harsh reality of a cougar's life, which is astonishingly brutal and getting crueller by the day, thanks to overweaning human arrogance.

As for the second, well… in the same instant a cougar touches you it rips your face off. This allows it to begin eating you without waiting for you to die.

That image brings me keenly in mind of Meditation in the Wild, wherein Charles S. Fisher points out that early Buddhist monks – originally all, and then most, of whom were hermits – had a tendency to enter Asia's primordial jungles and never be seen again. Tigers are even bigger than cougars, and not one whit more sentimental.

These are the conditions that forged our nihilistic Zen world view.

So if you live or travel in the northern and/or western half of North America, read Cat Attacks. Get schooled. Be prudently terrified.

Because when I think of all the times I've been afoot in the rough at dusk – including every day of ango – I break into a cold sweat. One unmoderated by the knowledge that cats also attack people in broad daylight. (Even housecats creep me out now.)

So be safe out there, brothers and sisters.

As safe as this existence allows.

(Note: a slightly updated release of this book came out in 2007 under the title Stalked by a Mountain Lion: Fear, Fact, And The Uncertain Future Of Cougars In America.)

UPDATE, 31 MAY 2018. Coverage of a local fatal attack, with further information on staying safe in the forest, is available here.

An Education

Asleep on my lap in bed.

Three days ago I had the sad duty of accompanying my mother's cat out of this life. A cherished family member, he's figured many times in these pages, most recently only weeks ago.

Since I was a child I've seen many pets die. It's been educational, in some ways more than human deaths. There's so little drama when an animal goes, so little desperation. Our pets seem to die as they live: with acceptance, if a little apprehension. When they become too sick to sleep well, you see this come into their eyes.

He was just ten years old, but probably had liver cancer for some time before it became debilitating, and therefore noticeable to us. Suddenly he became lethargic, lost his appetite, and started holing up in dark places. Most alarming, he refused to purr, no matter how much affection was lavished upon him. By the time we could get to the vet, I was fairly sure what I was going to hear.

That same day, before our appointment, he began crying, loudly and urgently. Mostly from fear of abandonment, it seemed. Therefore I stayed close to him, except when he was in the lab. At last the attendant brought him into the examination room, laid him on an old pink towel, and left us alone for a few minutes. He lay on his side, his breathing shallow, a dull, half-open expression in his eyes, as if in meditation. I stroked his soft, thick fur and struggled to tell him what a good kitty he was, how much I loved him, and to thank him for taking care of Mom these last years.

At last the doctor came. I fondled the kitty's ears as she searched for a vein. Her calm competence at the end of a long workday helped keep me from crying, as long as I breathed mindfully and remained silent. I did my best to remain present, and not confuse the observer (me) with the events.

It came fast when it came, with so little disturbance the vet had to tell me he was gone. I stopped petting and stepped back from the table, and she swept him up in the towel. The last I saw of him was his head and ears, disappearing through the swinging door.

You and I will be lucky to go so softly.

One of the great strengths of Buddhism is its recognition of the universality of life. I've known too many animals to believe there is some qualitative difference between sentient beings. Cats are born; they live, to the best of their ability; and they die. Scientists warn us not to be anthropomorphic about this, but I warn them back not to ignore the evidence. If it's true we can't know what's going on in an animal's head, it's also true we can't know what's going on in each other's heads, either. Yet decent people don't assume that we can't fathom the feelings of a crying stranger, just because when we do it, we're sad, scared, or in pain.

That would be stupid. And as I've often said, nothing stupid is Buddhist.

Animals may love differently from humans, but they love. And anything that loves is worthy of love.

Also: life – all life – is brief and unrenewable. So love now.

Because sooner than later, we all pass through that swinging door.

We called him Sherlock, by the way. We'll never know what his real name was.