A Healing Miracle…..

 

Last night I received an email from a lovely gentleman who reads this blog.  He mentioned a ‘healing miracle’ he had experienced years ago.  Last night we experienced something of our own healing miracle.

We have a 15 year old cat, Rose (amongst others….) beloved by us and especially my husband.  Rose is his ‘little girl’ and climbs into his lap whenever he sits down.  They are inseparable, watching TV together and both purring up a storm.

Yesterday evening we gave Rose a flea bath and a few hours later found her panting heavily on the slate hearth.  She moved to the wooden floor beneath a ceiling fan and it seemed she was dying.  She was breathing hard, cold in the ears and feet and things didn’t look at all good.  I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for her survival then.  She was almost comatose, unresponsive.

I took a pillow and lay down besides her, trying to comfort her.  I have a horror of an animal dying alone and have gone through this many times, even on a sidewalk with a dying stray animal, and Rose seemed to be on this list.

My husband and I decided to dig a grave in the best front flower garden and he went out and did this.  Rose seemed to quiet down and I thought she was at the end stage of dying.  She closed her mouth and I was sure we were at the end.  Husband came in, said goodbye to Rose and went back to the football game.  We didn’t know if she had a stroke, a heart attack or was suffering the effects of the chemicals in the flea bath, but she seemed near gone.

When we are faced with death, we bargain.  I don’t know what cat-goddess, Buddha, Lord Jizo or Jesus Christ was holding the reins of Rose’s life, but suddenly she stood up and pointed herself towards her daddy.  I yelled for him to come and see this, and he scooped her up in his arms and went with her back to the football game.  Within an hour she was ‘normal’ and eating the fish I couldn’t for dinner.

We were shaking our heads in amazement, laughing together, relieved that Rose had pulled out another cat-life.  She slept on my chest trying to smother me, or moved to the curve of my sling, trying me mightily.  I got maybe 2 hours of sleep, but this morning Rose is up to her old tricks.  She is fine.  She is better than fine.

Last winter we nursed her through pneumonia for a month, waking during the night to comfort her in her racking coughs.  We have a traveling vet and she wasn’t optimistic about her chances. She was 15 after all.  But she pulled through.

Lying next to her on the floor, I cajoled her about other cats that had lived to almost 20. She had at least 5 more years with us, our beautiful, Cleopatra-eyed Rose.   As I said, I was bargaining with all the tools of persuasion I had.

This morning I went outside to look at the grave.  It was deep, a double decker you could bury two cats in.  I asked my husband why so deep? He had picked out a potted rose, a beautiful salmon colored, beautifully fragrant rose to plant over her. 

We are still shaking our heads, looking at each other in awe and wonder.  The life force is powerful, and Rose was sticking around.  There will be no more flea baths for her, as I found out that this can be very dangerous for elderly cats.  It will be a flea comb from now on.

Rose is sleeping in her favorite window right now, purring up a storm.  She dodged a bullet, pulled out another cat-life to move on, but we are shaken.

This was a perfect example of a ‘healing miracle’.  Thank you, Spiros.  And thank you friends who got an email last night begging for your healing thoughts.

 

Lady Nyo

 

“Ode to a Coopers Hawk”

Young RedTail Hawk, Jane Kohut-Bartels, watercolor

 

Ode to a Coopers Hawk

 

Come to me.

Come to me,

Winged celestial beauty.

Come to me with your notched

Mermaid tail,

Your silken roll of feathers.

Fly down into my hollowed-out soul,

Fill me with your sun-warmed glory

Nestle in my arms

And bring the curve of the horizon

Embraced in your outstretched wings.

 

I need no white bearded prophet,

No mumbled prayer, no gospel song

No hard church bench, no fast or

Festival to feel close to the Divine.

 

 

The glory of the universe,

Is embodied in your flight

As you tumble through heavens,

Ride the invisible thermals

Screech with joy at freedom

Fill your lungs with thin air

And play bumper car with an Eagle.

 

I, earthbound,

No hollowed bones to launch me,

Just tired soul to weigh down,

No soft plumage to feel the course

Of wind through glossy feathers

No hunting call to herald my presence.

 

Still my soul takes flight

The breeze lifts my spirit,

My eyes follow you,

And we will find that glory

Transcend a sullen earth,

Transcend a mean humanity

And soar together into the blue eye of God.

 

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2011, 2012

Sorrow and Love

What is it that makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other?  Is it no more than chance and meeting?  no more than being alive together in the world at the same time?  Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking?  Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond chance and fortune?  Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we would have loved, who would have loved us?  Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others–among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world’s end to world’s end–who must love us or die?  And whom we must love, in turn–whom we must seek all our lives long–headlong and homesick–until the end?

These are the words of  Robert Nathan, from his classic novel, “Portrait of Jennie”, 1940.

They are ‘over the top’ for some now, but perhaps those who have known love, a sustained love, they speak to a depth others don’t feel, nor could ever feel.  Perhaps they are not universal of sentiment, but I think  in the very best way….they are.  They are born of our deepest need and desire.  Need to throw ourselves completely into the cauldron of love and commitment.  That essential ‘belonging to each other’.

My husband came home from our son’s Naval graduation very sick. Something to do with male plumbing, of the greatest mystery to me, and he has been in great pain.  He’s recovering slowly, and recent events have made me think on so much  I have taken for granted.

The death of L.’s husband, Mike…gunned down February 15 by a bastard who just didn’t want to go back to jail on another DUI, a senseless and pointless death amongst so many senseless and pointless deaths in our society, has propelled me to think deeply about what I have in my life.

We can fill our lives with stupid stuff.  We can surround or come across or stumble upon people who have no reason to be in our lives: we can forget we are made for better things, because in an important way, we  hold that ability to be so.  We can also forget  we are part of the warp and weave of another life and in being so, we impact upon the quality and brilliance and hope of that other life. We owe it to that life opposite us, tied to us with bonds of love and commitment, to handle them gently and with reverence.

Last night I stretched my hand across the couch to my husband, bundled up from the cold and in pain, and he held my hand.  His beautiful hands, so well formed and with such lovely skin for a man!  soft and clear on the  top, and a palm calloused with work and his devotion to his family.  I love his hands, and his monkey toes, long toes that look like they could have gone on forever, and a face that is strong, beautiful to my eyes (and the eyes of other women, too! LOL!) but a sweet and strong disposition not faltering in constancy faced with the changes of life.

I can do this, but L. can’t ever do this again with Mike.  Perhaps sometimes we are reminded of our fortunate state in love when we are shocked out of our complacency by tragedy.   I think though I love my husband of 25 years fiercely, what just happened has made me realize  life can come to a crashing end at any time.

So perhaps the message is this:  Love fiercely and with total devotion, for tomorrow life and circumstance can change drastically, and those chances you have of showing the depth of your love and devotion can never be fulfilled except in longing for what could have,  should have…been.

Lady Nyo

Love Poems.

—-

I lean on my elbow

and look at him asleep,

his bosom rising and falling.

It is enough to feed eternity

—–

Clouds sweep the moon.

causing its light to dapple.

My love! You waver before me

like a ghost under water.

—–

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2010

D/s and stats… Yesterday 106 people visited this blog.

Lovely to read the stats. The poetry, “Forgiveness and Unconditional Love” along with the Malkinius interview were well read. I am very thankful to all the visitors/readers because one never knows IF what is written here resonates in others. And that is the point of it all to me. It must resonate or you are writing too narrowly.

People here, some of them my friends, know  I have had an interest in D/s for almost two years. I am married, in a long marriage, and my husband showed no interest at all, preferring to ‘wait it out’ until this interest passed on with me.

It didn’t. I did go to numerous sources to ‘discover’ my submission, and sometimes there were rather painful issues. I was hitting blindly and things just weren’t working for me. My husband continued to wait to see if his wife would ‘finally come back to what he knew.’ Things grew to a crisis, one of the few in our long and loving marriage.  We both had bad patterns and it was making me miserable.  He just thought his wife had gone daft.  All these years had set those patterns and it was ‘comfortable’ to him.  It wasn’t to me. I got a view of something else, something that resonated deeply in my  soul.  I wanted my husband to feel some of those same things I was finding out.  I wanted to share this and to have him, not another, by my side in this adventure.  He just thought he could ignore it and it would disappear.

On this D/s issue you can’t fly with one wing. Either your mate joins you in this sometimes confusing quest or you leave if the issue is something you find you really can’t put down. Yesterday, it came to a head. It was very much an issue of either he get cracking, or I find some other way to address this D/s issue in my life without him. He thought he would just be able to waltz into this D/s partnership and ‘be my Master’.

It doesn’t work that way. He needed to do something to understand the underlying issues of his dominance. I was already struggling with issues of submission, I had enough on my plate, and either he take up his side or I would reach beyond him.

He finally ‘heard’ me and went to a site to read, the only Dominant he really knew of, though he had the web at his fingers. I wasn’t going to split hairs here, and tell him that there were sites “I rather him read”. I shut my mouth. At least he was starting to read after over a year of my pleading with him to join me in something of this issue. He went to another few sites recommended by that original site and ended up at “Taken In Hand”. He read it for a couple of hours, and kept calling me into his office to read different articles over his shoulder.

This was the very first time he took an active interest in this issue. I am very, very glad because we had a great time of it. He seems to have finally grasped that this stuff ‘might not be too bad for us.’

Well, hell yeah. It’s not Gorean and it seems a little bdsm-lite, but it’s a start.

Maybe now we can keep going on the issues and both of us find our place, naturally, in the marriage. He has a natural dominance and I have a natural submission. It just has been covered over by years of shit.

The love and devotion is clearly there, we just need to get out the shovels.

Lady Nyo