Collecting My Thoughts

Aaaaaand Bast came and fetched her home. 19.5 years was a very good run. 

Her actual full name was Vespula Beltane, as we got her at 4 weeks, which would have made her birthday around May 1.  So it's fitting that she come in as a witchy kitty & go out seasonally appropriately as well. 

I did my closing ritual with her this morning and put Bast in the West (Athena was like, yeah, not my trip, man, it's cool), and just as I was finishing, the sky lightened, the clouds broke in the west and there was blue sky for a little bit. It went back to grey after a bit, but that was a nice way for her to be welcomed home.

As a physicist somewhere would remind us, her energy is not gone, just less well organized. I will miss that weird little cat glowering at me every night during my bath.  It's so so so quiet tonight without this tiny, deaf, half blind, senile old lady cat who ruled our pride for nearly 20 years yelling about something randomly.  So quiet.

And I am both tremendously relieved that she's gone and miss her tremendously.  It was time, but nearly 20 years is such a time marker.  I look back at pictures of when she was young, and we were so young.  A lot happens in 20 years.  Truly the end of an era.  

Thank you for blessing us, little cat.

The Grand Dame during better times.

Wilderness

This post on Wild Gods has been rattling around my brain-cage since I read it. The last paragraphs resonate so so so strongly. Consider this a placeholder -- I have thoughts that are coagulating and coalescing but nothing structured enough to articulate coherently *quite* yet...

The whole point of wilderness is that it’s a place we don’t know, because we have never been there no matter how many times we enter the forest... wilderness is the way. Not knowing is the way. The act of seeking is the way. The way is not made for us, it simply is, and it is up to us to follow it or not.

Go read the whole article.

The wilderness can be not only 'out there' in the forest and woods and trees and desserts, but also 'welcome to the jungle' GnR style of the craziness of entering the polis like Gilgamesh too -- the place we don't know. I often feel somewhat feral, left too long to my own devices and the inside of my own head. The familiarities and abject dangers of "nature" equally wild as the cognitive dissonance it takes me, too often, to process the jungle of humanity.

Where does your wilderness lie?
Where does your way lie?