The Wanderer

CatScan, or CatScat...body or mind, take your pick. This is about a dual identity, cat man do. Doing=on the web. Being=in the forest...tracking deer. Yesterday, spots of blood on the trail. Damn dogs. Earlier, free of the blood-scent, I was enjoying...simply wandering. Gathering thoughts and inspirations...observing: trees, rocks, snow, old leaves...deer tracks.

I was, at the same time, researching my next article: this one. In which by daily addition, I build up quantity. Is this at the expense of daily edition, quality? Not necessarily. It fits my philosophy: the natural accretion of form, day by day, moment by moment: the universe adding to itself, without care for abstract "perfection": it proceeds from an innate state of perfection, which grows to new states of ongoing perfection in every passing of future to present. This is the Cosmic Jam, in which I you we cat and man do and be whether we like it or know it or not.

To continue: today, inside: at the computer. There will be a return to the forest. If not today, tomorrow. The past is alive in the old leaves creeping out under snow. The wolf-moon sets, bringing day behind.

There is a method in which animal spirits communicate with the living: seeing with our eyes, inhabiting our graceful limbs. When...we remember to breathe.

Setting suns: we call it history. Tomorrow, in the making. There is justice in the length of each line, each breath. Everything is happening in perfect time. Even war, rebellion and chaos? Everything.

Jam upon jam, ever in the making.

Cougar walking, stalking, hanging out among trees. Eyes to the sky, blinking. There is no need to go there. The scent carries memories. There is a way to take the trail at night, in the dark, before dawn, and come back again to rest. This is the nature of animal dreaming: imagining humans.

When we start from here, we can circle back, through animal forms to reinhabit our live and graceful limbs...or we can dream forward into the nature of our successes. What form that will take, on a self-ravaged planet, only the pre-animal forms can imagine. It may come to that.

In the meantime, cougar wanders, foot by foot in the patchy February snow. There is, he senses, someone, something watching. Another of his own kind? No, something other, something akin to a dream he had once, standing on hind legs. Whiskers bristling, blood in the air.

The dawn air stirs downslope...the scent is gone. The spirit remains. Cougar stands on bare rock, regarding sunlight through cloud.

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© Nowick Gray

2 February 1998