World's Cleanest Cat!

The world's cleanest cat was found today to be residing in Boulder, CO. When asked how he had attained such a supreme level of cleanliness, Mr. Timothy Ming of West Pearl in Boulder, CO replied, "It is all due to the weather. For the past three days it has been just too cold to go outside. My companion, Dhyan, has very kindly opened the door each morning to allow me to inspect the weather for myself and each time I have opted to turn and go back inside. Since I really have nothing to do indoors except eat, sleep, bother Dhyan when she is at the computer, let her know when it is time to feed me again, look out the window, change sleeping locations, and play with ping pong balls... I have to do something with my time. I choose to wash. My specialty is 'between the toes' and 'behind the back legs.'"

Tim the Cat is certainly sparklingly white these days on his white parts and very soft and silky on his gray parts. But as he reminds us, "The first sunny day, you know, I will alternate my methods and take a dust bath. Then, of course, I will be more light brown on gray instead of white on gray."

Stay tuned.

An Old Friend

It's after midnight and I was up before dawn this morning. A long day... but I got the 9th section of my "12 Week Business Intensive" workbook done tonight. That is a good thing. Tomorrow I have on the agenda to finish the 10th and then it is practically all downhill until I have finished the 11th and 12th (the last.) This ninth one was the hardest as it is my attempt to condense into one learn-able process all the things I have learned about sales over the past 10 years. Sales is probably the hardest part of having your own business for most people.

You are probably wondering what Chatty Cathy has to do with all this. Actually, she has nothing to do with it! I just took her picture this morning and now here she is in my blog at the end of the day. She is an old friend of mine and I have had her out since Christmas. Just the other day I put her into this pink dress and she has been smiling away on the back of the couch ever since. Have you noticed that dolls from the era of my childhood (1950s and 60s) were all smiling and modern dolls often aren't? WHAT can doll makers be thinking? If you can't count on your DOLL smiling at you who CAN you count on? I wonder! : )

In any case, getting back to sales, I have been thinking all day about the 1000s of people who are about to get laid off at Caterpillar, Home Depot, Starbucks, Microsoft, and etc. They read the list on MSNBC tonight. I just feel for all these people, and for myself because business was so hard last year, and for my clients who have also been feeling the pinch. I am thinking tomorrow of writing an article for the internet about the pros and cons of starting your own business because I know some of those people who have just been laid off, or are about to be laid off, will be considering this option.

As for me, right now, I better get to bed. It is late, late, late and I have been trying to get up to enjoy that first light in the morning. Who knows... maybe I will see neighbor fox again if I get up early enough!

Friday Night Nonsense

Many Thanks to my friend Pattie Whitehouse in Canada for sending me the link to this wonderful YouTube Video: "There's No One As Irish as Barack O'Bama"

Here's a taste of the lyrics:

O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara
There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama

You don't believe me, I hear you say
But Barack's as Irish, as was JFK
His granddaddy's daddy came from Moneygall
A small Irish village, well known to you all

Toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a lama
There's no one as Irish As Barack O'Bama [and more!]

It's a fraction of itself without the music so here is the link so you can enjoy it for yourself.
http://www.oneeyedparrot.org/obama.html

Oh yes! Change has come! Isn't nice to be able to laugh again!

A Fox Morning

Perhaps because I have slept through it for nearly a year I am suddenly in love again with early morning. This morning I was reading a bit from "Everyday Zen," a book by the contemporary zen master, Charlotte Joko Beck, and was contemplating this sentence: "No matter what your life is, I encourage you to make it your practice" when I glanced over my shoulder and saw the Show of Light was on again in the east. I went for my camera and over the next 30 minutes took the pictures you see above. However the one that would have been the best didn't get taken.

I was sitting in the padded lawn chair with my feet tucked into the hem of my robe, meditating, when who should come trotting around the front of the house but the fox. He or she skirted the stone wall that borders my downstairs neighbor's driveway, turned, and came trotting straight up the stairs. Not to startle him with my unexpected presence, I politely said "hello" as he started up my walk. He was not in the least deterred. In fact he came straight on up the sidewalk until he was standing at the foot of the porch stairs just a few feet from my knee.

The fox stopped and looked me in the eyes. Despite the fact that I didn't have my glasses on, I could see how pointed and sharp were his whiskers, jet black against the delicate golden red of his muzzle and the golden loveliness of his intelligent eyes. We must have looked eye-to-eye for a few moments and I felt that wondrous sense again that neither was he afraid, nor was I. Then he decided to go up over my porch rather than come any closer to me by going around. Up and over he went, as silent on his paws as a cat, and disappeared into the backyard.

I consider foxes to be a totem of mine. Perhaps it is coincidental and self-confirmatory on my part, but when a fox appears out-of-the-blue, unafraid, and comes so close to me (or even when I spot one of these allusive creatures trotting along in the distance) I consider myself blessed, my day blessed, my contemplations affirmed. THIS morning I was doing the child eyes meditation when he appeared. Glasses off, I was looking at the world as if for the first (or last) time. I had already been struck by the wonder of naked branches against lightening sky, noticing how each and every tree in my neighborhood has a unique way of putting its twigs and limbs out into the world - like fingerprints. I had stopped thinking, for a moment, as my gaze suddenly widened and I began taking in the world, just as it was. And then the fox appeared and came right up to my knee to look me in the face.

It was beautiful at dawn again this morning. Now, with the Light Show over for the day, the morning looks a little "plain" - but I have had a reminder that you only have to use your child eyes in any moment to find the wonder of life again. And certainly I feel my day has been blessed by the direct gaze of a fox.

Inauguration Celebration!

I took most of the day off yesterday to watch the inauguration on television. I have waited for this day, hardly daring to believe it was really going to come and I couldn't take my eyes off it happening. The inauguration brought tears to my eyes! I cried over 2 million people being there; shouting, cheering, dancing, standing with tears running down their faces. I cried over the inaugural address, soaking in its message of change and hope. I laughed through tears over the Rev. Lowery's benediction. The sense of relief and hope lifted a weight from my heart I had been carrying so long I didn't know, until I put it down, just how heavy it was.

For the past four years especially I have watched as my small business and the business of my clients got harder and harder, making ends meet financially got tougher and tougher, and knew we were not even part of the statistics the government was keeping. I cringed over the violations of human rights being done on Guantanimo in the name of "national security." I was outraged that we were dragged into an exhausting and expensive war because we were told "weapons of mass destruction" were an immediate danger. There never WERE any weapons of mass destruction. Not one was ever found - just like the United Nations investigation said. We never got an apology from President Bush for his mistakes, to the end he left office declaring that "I always did what I thought was right." That times have become hard comes as no surprise to those of us who have been living at the grass roots during eight years of his administration. I'm just glad that if the stock market had to inevitably crash and foreclosures become an epidemic these things happened on the watch of the president who was responsible for them. I don't know which part of America he actually "cared about" but it wasn't the part I live in.

So I turn to this change with hope. I embrace the idea that we can solve our problems if we work hard and work together. I embrace we can have the audacity to hope that things can get better. I wanted a president who would care about global warming issues and our relationship with the rest of the world as well as about affordable health care for all and good education for our children. I'm glad he announced, with his predecessor sitting just a few feet from the podium, that America would no longer sacrifice our values in the name of national security and that torture being done by our government will end. I can start holding up my head again amongst my international friends and stop being ashamed of American policy.

Let this be a beginning for all of us! If you haven't done it yet, you might want to go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ and see the ways in which our new president has already started making his administration "transparent" to us all. I'm looking forward to the weekly videos Pres. Obama will do on Saturday mornings and the blog updates that will keep me informed of what our new government is doing day to day. I am going to make a point of taking Pres. Obama up on his offer to review all legislation that crosses his desk before he signs it and sending in my opinion of it. I am going to look for ways to do my part - and one of these ways will be to donate a percentage of my work time to helping business owners who currently can't afford my kind of consulting but badly need it. I look forward to joining with others in my community to do volunteer work.

I DO believe we can create a different and better American life together. I am profoundly grateful to have witnessed this change.

Yes we can!

My Dad's Visit

My father came to visit me in Boulder... first time since my mother's death in September and, actually, the first time in a long time since my mother needed pretty constant care these past few years. They moved to Dallas in 2000 and my father said he missed snow. Obligingly, we had a really pretty snowstorm on Monday morning and this picture comes from the walk we took along Boulder creek the next day. "This snow is just right for making snowmen," he commented picking up a handful of snow and packing it lightly into a big snowball. Moments later it went flying into the creek where we watched it dissolve in the cold, cold water and float away in chunks.

Happy Day!

After days of protecting myself from the cold seeping in through the glass of the seven big picture windows in my house I woke up this morning to warm sun pouring through the windows. It is so warm out that I went out in my bare feet to put a handful of raw peanuts into the feeder for the squirrels. (And they call this winter!)

After days of not wanting to go outside, Tim is out cat-ing around in the sunlight. ("To Cat Around" - yes, it is a proper verb: I cat around, You cat around, He/She/It cats around, we cat around, etc. ... Now you can use it too!)

Yesterday I saw no fewer than five squirrels chasing around the trees and jockeying for position at the feeder.

This picture is for my friend, Annie, who tells me there are no squirrels in Australia. I wouldn't trade them for a kangaroo! : )

And, oh yes, I almost forgot - I finished my new website last night (at midnight!) Go take a look! http://www.thefiveessentialskills.com/ Another good reason to be happy this morning.

The Advantages of Living With A Human

"The main difference between cats and humans is that we, very sensibly, have paws, and they have these finger-things sticking off the end of their front legs. They are very clever with these fingers but their best use, in my opinion, is for the scratching of cats. Dhyan, over the years, has found the right places to apply these fingers (helped along by ample clues from myself such as purring loudly when she gets to the right spot.) She has become very good at scratching the places under my collar which are difficult to reach on my own and I have to admit that a good skritch up and down the back of the neck, around the ears, across the top of the head and under the chin is just about as good as you can get in life. I intend to keep her. Any cats reading this need not apply for a position in this house."

Timothy Ming
Owner and Companion of Dhyan

A Snowy Day and Meeting Cary

Early morning, looking West from my porch: I take this picture over and over ... every morning it looks like this I just feel compelled to grab my camera and take it again.

Walking home from Church I ran into my friend, Cary Sarlo, who used to live next door to me in my old neighborhood. He bought me a cup of coffee at Spruce Confections where we caught up on neighborhood gossip and our lives in general. He told me all about the area around Taos and Santa Fe in case my father would like to go home that route when he comes to visit me next week.

What a charming smile Cary has!

CARY AND THE RAT - A good story!

We laughed all over again at a shared experience: Once upon a time I was on the phone in my old house and looking out into my backyard when suddenly A RAT came skipping out from under the half fence between my yard and Cary's. I gasped aloud! A RAT! in my backyard. It went straight over to the pan of sunflower seeds on the ground at the base of the tree which I kept out for the squirrels and helped himself without fear or apology. I thought, "He doesn't know he is a RAT! He doesn't know he is considered vermin!" Here was a pan of seed left out free-to-all and he was happily helping himself.

Cary and I didn't know what to do about this rat who had probably come up from the creek that ran through our neighborhood looking for someplace out of the cold who stumbled on this shangrala of an opportunity... from a rat's perspective. He gnawed a hole in Cary's house and started living between the walls and in the crawl space above our townhouses. One night I heard him gnawing on the rafters above my bedroom. Clearly he had to go. But he was such a happy rat! I hated to do anything that would harm him.

Then one day Cary happened to be looking out into his back yard and saw the rat leave his hole and slip under the fence to go into my yard. Quick as a flash, he got out the board, hammer, and nails he had ready and blocked the entrance to the rat hole. From my side, I saw the rat eating at the feeder and then go the long way, around the end of the fence instead of under it, to go back to Cary's. He rounded the fence just as Cary started around it from the other side and they met face-to-face. The rat froze! Cary froze! And then the rat ran for its life back to the creek. We never saw him again!

I am afraid I have to confess that I teased Cary unmercifully... for a long time... about having a "face that would scare a rat!" : ) and yet, good-natured person that he is, HE was the one that brought the story up again today.

Remembering My Mother

My gentle friends remind me "Grief takes a long time and you will encounter pockets of it long after you think your grieving is over." There were many deaths this past year: my friend Jan Scarbrough, my mother, my little cat Katie, Larry, the nice manager at Lolita's who I considered my friend. My friends who have walked this path before tell me, "For the first year you will grieve at all the 'firsts': my first birthday without my mother, our first Christmas without her, New Year's Eve. My father told me last night, "We always kissed at midnight. This year she isn't here."

People don't generally like to read about grief, I think, so I will keep this short - but I also want to say that I am learning things from all these passings and so much loss in one year. I have been blessed up to this year by not having lost very many people I love to death, but a deep wondering has awakened inside me over the past few months about where that spark of life goes when it leaves its earthly body. Or does it simply go out... like a candle flame snuffed into darkness? Either way, the fact that we walk around in our bodies doing all these amazing things (seeing with our eyes; feeling with our hearts; hearing with our ears; connecting with our sensitive hands; thinking, planning, experiencing, forming ideas, judging, dreaming, imagining, creating with our minds, ... a million combinations of sensation and awareness every day which we so casually experience and forget... it all seems so amazingly wonderful at the moment and my heart fills with appreciation because I know, now, in a different way than I did before, that one day it will all be gone.

Time to take the Christmas Tree Down

After many years on the tree, the ornaments have become old friends. I pack them away carefully, each one wrapped in its own tissue paper or box, until the Day-After-Thanksgiving next year, when they will come out again. This holiday season passed very quickly and quietly.

For those of you who love ornaments, here is a web album of some of my favorites from my tree:

http://picasaweb.google.com/BoulderDhyan/ChristmasTreePictures#