—From EF—
I have two cats, brother littermates: Garfunkel (known as Garfy), and Shadow. Garfy is a big burly shorthair who loves to be squeezed and has a purr you could hear in Cotati. Shadow is a smaller longhair with delicate bones, incredibly soft fur, and a purr you can feel but not hear. The vet calls them “smoke black tabbies,” which I think is both accurate and charmingly poetic. Their temperaments are diametrically opposite. Garfy is even-tempered and comfy, Shadow is high-strung and weird. I love them both, and they are both bonded to each other and to me. Shadow’s name came from his cloudy black color, but became literal as he grew to be uniquely attached to me everywhere I went.
However, he periodically demands to be in his special place by himself: the downstairs closet shelves where I store everything from luggage up top to unused blankets and winter clothing items at floor level. He sits in the hallway near the closet door and begins a chorus of a particular meow: “Closet door, please.” So I go and let him in for as long as he wants. Garfy never joins him; he sits in there in the soft semi-dark until he wants to come out.
I myself was terrified of the dark until my early twenties. In my high school senior year I was given the use of our old Chevy station wagon to drive the nine miles to my high school and back, and in the winter months it would be full dark by the time I got home. The cars were garaged in what had been a barn, a goodly distance away from the house. It took many minutes of clenching my muscles and revving myself up to run as fast as I could from the barn to the house, arriving in panic with my heart banging.
Many decades later, I realized after a series of woodland pagan retreats and celebrations that I was not only no longer afraid of the dark, it had become my friend. I reveled in walking the wooded paths without turning my flashlight on—I was barefoot on the still-warm sandy soil and my eyes added to my confidence. I even called it “night-vision,” and recognized it from Suzanne Vega’s song.
Now I find myself drawn to the dark, to my version of Shadow’s closet. My life is ever-more challenging on both the personal and political levels. A genetic heritage of depression asserts itself in blurts, and I can careen from comfortable capability to utter despair on a dime. But I am realizing that I can benefit from Shadow’s retreats to the closet, to a warm soft darkness. I never thought of darkness as a mother—my initial terror probably came from being shut in a dark cabinet by my mother as a punishment—but my pagan woodlands gave me a different response. The dark can mother me.
I don’t need to sit by a door and meow, I need to find safe times and places to let all the guard-rails down and say, “Hold me.”
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