sonia | Awareness and silence

Thanks all for the condolences for Lilac.

I'm noticing how many habits of awareness I've developed over twenty-five years of having cats. Whenever I go through a door. Whenever I walk around in the dark. Whenever I leave something on the floor. Regularly, for no reason, reaching out my awareness toward another living being in the house.

It turns out that the silence isn't as bad as I feared. Perhaps partly because I recently read Waking by Matthew Sanford, which talks about silence as presence as well as absence. Partly because a Focusing session helped me connect to my love for her in my heart, and that's still there, unchanged. I will always love her. She will always have loved me.

It turns out that loss without a sense of failure, without gaslighting, without destroying what went before, is much easier than the other kind. It's a clean sadness, not a wrenching messy agony.

Perhaps I'm in shock and the other pain will come later. I'm still cleaning cat paraphernalia and vacuuming up cat hair and making arrangements to donate leftover food.