“Only in the mirror of other life can we understand our own lives. Only in the eyes of the other can we become ourselves”

 Andreas Weber

I have a cat companion called Edie and I feel fortunate to be learning about myself from our relationship and I think in her own way, she may feel likewise. We engage together in all the usual goo-goo furry pusskins, fur baby stuff of course, and this doesn’t just come from my side; she’s a pro at playing up the corresponding needy pet cat routine. I fuss over her and give her lots of strokes telling her what a beautiful cat she is, when she’s in that sort of mood, and she replies in kind with her meowy, roly-poly thing. That’s all good fun and we both like doing this, but to me, the most interesting times together are subtler. I’m interested in exploring what I could call a cat size portal into reality; a portal into both unity and into the mystery of otherness.

My qigong master says to learn from cats as natural expressions of qigong: the effortless way they move from perfect relaxation to springing into action with grace and elegance; using not even the tiniest extra effort than that which is required. So in practicing qigong, we look to not use even one ounce extra effort than that which is needed. Wu wei – effortless action, or actionless action, is an aim in qigong as well as aligning with the qi, the vital energy which animates each of us and the whole cosmos. Edie, in her teaching demonstration, splays out on the end of the bed or on any other surface, utterly relaxed as she flops down, not a trace of tension; I feel myself relaxing just looking at her; it’s a daily reminder not to carry anything extra.

People think cats are indifferent and aloof, but of course that is a mischaracterisation. You have to approach cats more gently; they are not looking to please you, unlike dogs and they don’t like vigorous stroking or patiing – they’re not labradors. Edie likes company. She follows me around and likes to sit quietly nearby. Generally, given a choice, she will choose company and affection rather than food. As long as she has a bit of grub and a place to snooze and some affection and communion, plus a bit of exploration, she’s simply happy. 

Edie comes to our bedside for the morning wake up call each day. She gets on her hind legs at my side of the bed and looks me right in the eye and gives me a single gentle reminder meow and then settles down by the bedside, purring loudly. The purr is a deep calming sound that reverberates through our bodies, with its inherent healing vibration. I see it as the feline equivalent of OM, the primordial sound of the universe: the purr.

I feel grateful to be close friends and share life with a non-human animal as well as with a human animal partner. Just sitting next to my companion cat regularly stuns me with wonder at the mystery of Life and being; she is so similar to me and yet quite different, her intelligence ‘other’, yet akin. I’ve come to realise that I am more fully myself as a human animal by communion with other beings. It leads me to viscerally feel the interdependence with all life amidst its diverse expressions. 

Edie’s sense of smell is infinitely greater than mine and she sniffs the air at the outside door. She can spend a long time smelling my shoes after I’ve been over to my allotment and the local urban farm.  I can’t begin to fathom the richness of what she is experiencing, though within my human sensory limitations, I am waking up the senses.

Cat and I sit together on the balcony of our flat gazing at the horizon, not  focussed on anything particular.  A bird flying overhead will momentarily capture our attention and we both follow its flight, and then back to simply being, together. I’m just present and I meet her at her level – which could sound patronising of me – but I wish it to be my level too; it is meeting in our shared animate consciousness, a term from Jeremy Lent which I find helpful in describing the vast ground of instinctual and sensuous consciousness in which all living beings dwell. This is the sensuous world of the body through which everything is experienced whether one is a human animal or any other of the multitude of animal forms. It’s also been called core consciousness as distinct from higher order consciousness and it is like the part of the iceberg below the waterline.

We human animals have developed conceptual consciousness to such an elite level with its extraordinary capacity for rationality, discursive thinking and objectification. A large prefrontal cortex is our particular and marvellous specialised development as an animal species, and it has enabled spectacular achievements in modifying the natural world to our ends (for both good and ill). Yet we arrogantly assume this to be the sole indicator of  consciousness and intelligence, and we have become blind and deaf to the sensuous consciousness which we share with all non-human animals. We modern humans are left with an extreme dissociation between the thinking mind and the feeling body, which is ever permeable and in communication with all beings around, whether they be cats, the roses outside or the wind gusting and caressing my skin. Since we privilege thinking over feeling so habitually, it’s an interesting relearning for me to become more aware of feeling. Of course, being alive, we are feeling all the time, but we ignore so much of our experience. It is letting myself feel that is the necessary step in communicating with non-human persons like Edie, in order to listen to her and asking to be heard by her.

As nature educator Barry Patterson says,  “A communication with a tree is first and foremost a feeling in your body.”

A couple of years ago, I happened to be away and incommunicado, and my wife Kyrsten was at home alone with Edie the cat. Kyrsten had just been diagnosed with a sizable skin cancer and was feeling distraught and sad and she sat outside on our balcony. Edie came to Kyrsten and sat on her lap and comforted her with her healing presence and purr. Now Edie is a rescue cat and had never once sat on Kyrsten’s lap before nor ever has since, in all the years she has lived with us. But on that day she responded to Kyrsten’s unspoken need – or rather it was a clearly spoken felt need from Edie’s point of view –  just not spoken in human language. (fortunately the cancer was removed and has not returned)

For several years now I have been endeavouring to become more aware of this deeper bodily consciousness, to perceive and experience the world more directly through the senses. I feel like a child learning to walk and experience anew, attuning to the wind, bird song, deeper feelings, the moods of the trees, of fluxing bodies of water. And like all of nature, Edie the cat speaks to me in a language which is both familiar and forgotten, since we are both living bodies, indivisibly part of a feeling world. I’m learning to inhabit animate consciousness, which is largely overlooked and undeveloped in us modern humans, although it always runs like a deep river beneath all my conceptualisations. Our senses participate naturally in the surrounding environment and as David Abram has pointed out, left to their own devices, our bodily senses are inherently animistic and the human animal cannot help but experience the world as animate and alive. It’s just that we modern humans have withdrawn our attention from this level of experience into verbal abstractions.

Having a cat companion is a big boon in this rewilding of myself. I only have to look at her to be reminded of this primordial reality. I remember as a child how I would sniff and smell everything as well as touch whatever I could, which seemed to me, a natural way to experience the world; though it resulted in me getting the nickname ‘sniffy’. I spent so much time climbing my favourite trees and just sitting in my perch high up in the treetops, a place I found most easeful in my suburban childhood. I loved the feel of thick gnarly oak bark and the strength of the tree which embraced me in its ancient arms, affording a view of the horizon above the suburban rooftops. I scrabbled in my local stream, stunned in awe by the tiny galaxies of invertebrate life beneath the surface of the clear water. I dangled my arms in the cool water, transfixed by the spectacle. But in time such childish quirks were ironed out of me by ‘normality.’ Like other children, as I became older I was educated to understand that of course, in reality, animals are dumb and can’t speak, and the world is largley inaminate.

To some people, my cat and nature gossip may all sound way too, well, anthropomorphic. And I make no apologies. When I studied zoology at university, the biggest put down was to be accused of anthropomorphism. The wonder and love of living beings was crushed out of students by the overly reductionist science. Interestingly, it was the great Darwin himself who showed conclusively our evolutionary kinship with all life, though this animistic implication has not been taken on board – no doubt because it would threaten human notions of supremacy and unique specialness.

As Charles Foster says, 

“Anthropomorphism is unpopular. It must be rehabilitated. It’s not only an expression of the vast amount of physiology and evolutionary history we share with nonhumans, but also an acknowledgment that consciousness is everywhere. We should pray for the eyes to see it and the humility to look for it”

I love just being present with my cat friend quietly; neither of us wanting anything, there’s only the quiet ease of sitting together. She doesn’t have that incessant chattering mental background which almost constantly distracts us humans  from simply being present. Meditating with my cat? Why not? We do it every day. She is naturally more in touch on a feeling level and sensitive to my moods; she intuits if we are going away for a day or two before there are any outward signs of packing; animals feel your intentions and I reassure her when we go away and have to have a cat sitter visit to feed her each day. I speak to Edie in English to tell her our plans and she listens attentively. She doesn’t follow the words of course, but she feels and understands the intentions behind them. Cats, like other beings, have a rich language once we get over the insufferable modern human arrogance of thinking that language is confined  merely to our human forms of speech. (of course indigenous peoples never had this conceit and have always seen animals and plants as having personhood and speech).

I begin to feel cat, sense cat, and speak cat. This can help me to feel robin, and feel fox, feel oak tree and feel river. I wake up touch – to feel her warm feline furry body and to learn what sort of rubbing and strokes she would like at a particular moment; not to impose my wishes or stroke mindlessly – she’s very sensitive to such intentions or lack of. I’ve become much more in tune with her moods and feelings.

Many thoughtful people these days are familiar intellectually with the mechanistic view of life which from the 18th century onwards has informed the scientific revolution and has come to underpin our Western worldview and world order. All other beings and nature are essentially seen as objects, divorced from humanity; mere resources and commodities. We can clearly understand how this ingrained worldview continues to be a main driver of ecological destruction. Yet unfortunately this conceptual understanding is usually not sufficient for us to act in defense of our wider kith and kin and home – the living world – which is under assault. Similarly, many people do care about the ecological crisis and although watching nature documentaries may touch us quite deeply, it’s also often unfortunately not enough to motivate us to act.

 It’s very different to viscerally feeling that we are part of nature and being emotionally impacted, as we experience our own body, family and home being ripped up and destroyed. It seems to need that feeling element of inseparable entanglement, of feeling fleshy identity with the more-than-human world with all its myriad subjective experiences. Hence my cat portal can be one way to help open the doors of perception.

I believe we can’t be fully human if we exclude relationships with other animals and the whole more-than-human world, and Edie the cat is helping me in this direction.

“Whenever we become intensely engaged by other styles and shapes of life, when we drop away our concern for ourselves and begin to celebrate and praise other beings and elements that exceed our exclusively human concerns, then—paradoxically—we most realize and epitomize our humanity.”

David Abram