Law of Attraction #5 - Letting Go

Today is my day off and I am spending it in the company of Peabody and Sherman for the first time in awhile.  To me, it is like they are constantly fussing with each other.  Play fighting.  Or fight playing.  As I sit here at the computer, I can hear them rolling about until eventually someone growls or hisses.  And I intervene.  Just a moment ago I segregated them.  Had a heart to heart with Peabody and heard myself saying:

"Is this how the two of you behave while I'm at work?"

Hey wait a minute.

I opened the door to the bedroom.  Sure enough Sherman was waiting on the other side looking quizzical as to why he had been shut out in the first place.  Even if I could tell him, in a way he could understand, "I was separating you to protect you."  If he didn't give me the "what is wrong with girls' look, he would give me the "poor silly humans" look.  (At least in my imagination.)  Because the truth is, he and Peabody are friends.  They probably play like that EVERY day.  It is probably the reason I find them both passed out asleep on my bed when I come home.  

It is interesting having a three-legged cat.  It is changing my perceptions. 

Fairly early on, my house fell into a flea problem.  It is an enormous story.  Full of Law of Attraction moments and significance, but to get to where we need to be, I will need to fast forward.  I have acquired medicine and put it on his neck.  My awkwardness and newness at holding him in my arms has positioned it a little too far back on his shoulder blades and he is fussing with it.  He is in constant motion.  Kicking, scratching and biting at fleas.  Worse than before the medicine went on.  Amazingly, I can see fleas dropping off him.  I have never seen that before with the other cats.  He arches his head around and successfully licks the poisonous spot!  Immediately the wetness at the surface of his mouth becomes foamy.

Shit!

I wet a towel and blot at his mouth.  Then I clean off the poison spot with the wet towel and wait and watch.  He seems better.  Still itchy, but in less distress.  I think of the fleas dropping off him.  I remember I have seen that before.  Years ago when I had my cat Bocce who was the only cat I bathed regularly.  He was also the only cat who, when I bathed him, had brown water run off him.  Brown water and occasionally fleas.  I can't find my flea comb to selectively drown them, but if I give Sherman a bath, that will drown them.  

I fill the bathtub with about an inch or two of lukewarm water and gently set Sherman down into it.  He is calm and allows me, not only to stand him in there, but to gently massage water into his dry fur.    He is shockingly calm in the water.  He is much less so during the drying.  Eventually I find myself cornering him in my bathroom with a towel.  It is an action I would take with any of my cats without thinking, but brusquely rubbing his fur to dry it, I realize I have assumed he knows I am trying to help him and not hurt him.  I have seen things so completely from my own point of view, I have been in danger of forgetting that I am working with a kitty who has had some stuff happen to him.  Trust needs to be built.  I dry him off as thoroughly and diplomatically as I can.  When it is safe to "flea him" again, I give him a slightly lighter dose than his body weight and leave for the day.  I stop micromanaging him and he is thriving.  I can witness the trust building.  

Our inner viewpoint has no peripheral vision.  Once in awhile it can include the misty vantage point of truths we know because we "used to be" that way, but otherwise we are locked into our viewpoint and our viewpoint only.  That is precisely part of why letting go in life is so essential.  Our viewpoint is a narrow column and there are all sorts of wonderful things that lay just to the right or left of it.  When we resist and try to force everything into our narrow round column of vision, it is like those wonderful possibilities get chopped off shoving a rectangle into that circle.  We narrow our field of possible outcomes.  

Law of Attraction #3 - A Three Legged Cat Named Sherman

My goal is to be as happy as I can every moment of the rest of my life.  Even if it weren't my distillation of how I see the teachings of Abraham-Hicks, it would be a worthy goal.  There is a big difference between wanting to be happy and not wanting to be unhappy.  I once saw a Simpson's Halloween episode where one of Maggie's dolls had a Good and Evil switch.  The doll hadn't really wanted to kill Homer.  Her switch was simply toggled to evil.  That's what happiness turned out to be for me.  A metaphorical switch in point of view that needed to be flipped.

Even knowing that, it can be difficult to maintain 24/7.  I have had my heart broken a couple of times in my life.  Mostly over the loss of pets.  My goal with a pet is to build a relationship and when one of them passes, I have lost a friend.  One who stood by during the troubling moments of the previous 20 years, give or take a few.  It was with a wary eye at the advancing age of my pets that I whispered into the wind, "When I'm ready for a new pet, the right new friend will arrive."  The idea is not to replace the aging pet, but to introduce new love into my life to dull the sting of loss a little.

Unbeknownst by me, across town a woman named Renee was admiring her downstairs neighbor's kitten.  She noticed when he broke his leg in two places.  She noticed when his owners removed his collar and removed themselves from a place of responsibility for him.  She put herself out on a limb to rescue him and get him some help.

Meanwhile, in my world everyone was getting kittens.  Not "a" kitten, people were suddenly getting them in pairs.  I began to like the idea myself.  They could entertain each other and possibly impact my older kitties less.  Besides, from what I was seeing, two kittens are hilarious!!

I mentioned my plan to a friend, Judy, whose sister is a close friend of Renee's.  By this time, "Mr. Sherbet" had had his leg amputated and would be available for adoption as soon as he had healed enough to do so.  His life seemed to work in one month spans at that point.  A month to rescue him.  A month for him to heal.  It didn't take another month for him to find a home.  The first day he was available for adoption, I signed the papers and brought my newly named "Sherman" home.

Abraham-Hicks talks about "the next logical thing" and that was exactly how Sherman's adoption unfolded.  I whispered what I wanted to the universe and trusted the right thing would happen.  When it did happen, I just took the path it directed.  In the car ride home, I had my first moment of uncertainty.  Sherman tried to chew his way out of the cardboard crate the Human Society provides.  I can remember sitting in the backseat of Judy's car and saying urgently, "Judy, we need to get there soon.  I can see his entire head!"

It's so funny.  My focus had been how to protect the poor three-legged cat from my full grown, big bruiser Peabody.  Suddenly I realized more completely what Sherman had been through.  In two months time, that cat had broken a leg in two places, had it amputated and was going to a new home. This was no shrinking violet cat.  I realized I might have it a bit wrong about who would need protection.

Another month has passed and no one needs any protection from anyone else.  Peabody has accepted Sherman.  Most of the time they even seem to be friends.  Sometimes they even seem like Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman or like Peabody is satisfied "schooling" the youngster.  When I adopted Sherman, the papers said he was a year and six months old, but he looked and acted too much like a kitten for that to be accurate.  I asked Renee, who knew him the best, and she said the vet told her he was about ten months.

Ten months and two of them were spent having a leg amputated and recovering from the same.

I never doubted the right cat would stroll into my life somehow.  Just as I never doubted that, if I followed the signs and continued taking the next logical step, the best thing would happen.  And it did.

My new friend Sherman limps a little at times, but other times you would barely notice his missing leg.  He doesn't let it stop him from climbing the highest shelves in my house.  He has lost none of his kitten-ish curiosity about his new world.  If life is learning to be happy unconditionally, Sherman is a daily example of taking what life gave you and still finding it sweet.  He definitely enjoys it to the fullest.

I would like to publicly thank Renee and her husband, my friend Judy, the Napa Humane Society and Dr. Randy Lung and California Pet Hospital.  Thank you for saving Mr. Sherbet.  Thank you for bringing me my Sherman and giving me this chance to save him a little too.