Here’s a portrait of our family cat, Pinnicho. This dear furry creature is such a good boy, we call him a dog-in-a-catsuit, since he follows us around like a dog, and waits for us to come home.
Although he is semi-wild and spends the majority of his time outdoors, *Pinnicho *likes to come in for cuddles, as he is doing now. Frequently, the last set of eyes I see at night are his —- as I am heading to bed, turning off the lights in the house, there he is standing outside the kitchen window, eyes glowing in the dark 👁 👁
Below, is a poem of mine for all animal lovers and those who have ever wondered what happens when their pets fall asleep:
What do animals dream?
Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?
Do they struggle to catch in their slumber
what is too slippery for the fingers of day?
Are there subtle nocturnal intimations
to illuminate their undreaming hours?
Are they haunted by specters of regret
do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?
Or are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?
Do they retrace the outline of their wounds
or dream of transformation, instead?
Do they tug at obstinate knots
inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?
Are there agitations, upheavals or mutinies
against their perceived selves or fate?
Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?
Are they ever neither animal nor human
but creature and Being?
Do they have holy moments of understanding
deep in the seat of their entity?
Do they experience their existence more fully
relieved of the burden of wakefulness?
Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?
Or is it merely a small dying
a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?
©Yahia Lababidi, author of Learning to Pray
Meantime, on a lighter note, here's a home video of Pinnicho saying thank you by gifting me something that he likes: a live rabbit! Mercifully, after setting his catch down and offering it to me, in gratitude, the startled rabbit got away...
Only to be captured, once more, and brought back to me...
Remarkably, when the traumatized rabbit realized I was not going to have him for lunch, he managed to escape, again, this time for good -- by diving into a hole... Phew