On the Zen of cats:

My wife and I currently live with two outdoor cats, a mother and daughter. Fairly frequently when I glimpse them through the glass doors to our back deck, they’re doing that wonderful Zen cat thing by sitting like little sphinxes in feline meditation mode, just resting in the moment with eyes half-closed and attention equally divided between inner and outer.

This always calls to mind something a former boss told me. Harold Klein was the director of the video department at The Grand Palace in Branson, Missouri, in the early 1990s when I was on the camera crew there. We did live video for all kinds of shows, from Billy Ray Cyrus and Reba McEntire to Sawyer Brown, Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, Barbara Mandrell, and many more. Harold had previously been Kris Kristofferson’s lighting director for many years, and he was tight with many music industry legends. Needless to say, I was fascinated by him. As it happened, he was a child of the sixties and seventies who possessed that era’s spiritual and artistic sensibility, and he ended up being someone who introduced me to many things that would prove important and impactful in later years, such as the I Ching, which he taught me how to consult. He was, in short, a formative influence on my early twenties self. (He, or at least his physical presence, also served as the template for the character of Herbert in my short story “The Basement Theater,” published in both Divinations of the Deep and To Rouse Leviathan.)

Harold lived alone in a condo in Branson on the shores of Lake Taneycomo. Or rather, he lived with two cats. And I have always remembered what he once told me after he had been absent from the theater for a few days because he had contracted a serious case of the flu. He said he had been so sick that he just sat there under a blanket in his condo, alone with his cat friends, and shivered with his fever. And he took a clue from those cats by truly just sitting there. As he put it to me, “Cats are smarter than we are. Whenever I notice them, I realize they’re invariably doing something cooler than whatever I’m doing. I’ll be puttering around the place, doing this and that, worrying about things, and then I’ll come across the cats and find them just sitting there looking out the window at the lake.”

He told me that he got through that illness by following the example of those wise cats and just sitting there, just being present with it instead of distracting himself with television or something else.

As I said, I have always remembered Harold’s words about his cat companions: “Whenever I notice them, I realize they’re invariably doing something cooler than whatever I’m doing.” I think of it when I see my own cat friends doing their sphinxy Zen master thing.

In fact, this brief note was inspired by the fact that I saw them doing it through the window a few minutes ago. I just checked again. They’re still doing it now. Which is cooler than what I’m doing.