Kittenzen: Copycats

Kittens learn what to do and not to do from their mother. Mallory and Jane, Easy's two girls, copy whatever she does. If she drinks water, they drink water. If she doesn't drink it, they won't either. Fortunately, she does like water now since I found the right bowl. When Easy watches birds out the window she crouches and makes a tiny anxious mewing noise, and now Mallory and Jane do the same. Since Easy started ripping paper, the kittens do it too. Hence the phrase, copycat.

Kittenzen: Endogenous Ligands

I have been reading a book called The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert. In the early '70s she discovered the opiate receptor in our bodies. Receptors exist on cells throughout our bodies and they are like keyholes waiting for a key, called a ligand (from the Latin ligare, "to bind"), to open them up and give information to the cell so that the cell can do something, such as get excited or feel pleasure or not feel pain. Not long after her discovery someone else discovered the endogenous (within the body) ligand that attaches to the opiate receptor: endorphin (which means endogenous morphine, or morphine made within the body). So within our own bodies we have a substance that, like morphine, can inhibit pain and cause pleasure. Certain things we do in our lives release these endorphins, and they can and perhaps even should become addictive: things like running, yoga, walking in nature, making & listening to music, deep breathing.

But according to Pert, the single most powerful source of endorphins is genuine connection to others, love. Nothing creates as much pleasure as connection to each other and to our creatures. Petting our cats, listening to their purring, having them on our laps releases endorphins within our bodies, calms us down, makes us feel good. The more of these endogenous ligands our body produces, the healthier it will be, too.

Pert also said in a CD series that I am listening to called The Body is the Subconscious Mind that shared traumatic events can function to bond us closer together. She gave the example of the trauma of being born that releases certain ligands in the mother and the child that bond them.  Recently Jane has been sick with vomiting and diarrhea and I have taken her to the vet a few times now. During this stressful time Jane has become my shadow and is on my lap as often as possible during the day or sleeping next to me at night. What comfort we both derive and the endorphins that are released are, I think, helping her recover.

Mark and I are watching a program online called In Treatment about a therapist (played by Gabriel Byrne) and his sessions with his patients. In one session the therapist recalls something one of his professors said, that in our culture maturity is measured by our ability not to show emotion and not to feel too deeply--no crying, no anger, no grief and even too much joy is suspect. What a travesty, especially when our entire body is made of of cells that are constantly vibrating with emotions (from the Latin movere "to move").

Kittenzen: Living in Our Right Mind Part 2--the pleasure of praise

 "To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more, nothing less" (Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, as quoted in Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts). Voskamp's book awakened me to the power and the pleasure of gratitude and thanksgiving, and, as it turns out, to the power of the eucharist, which means thanksgiving ("and when He broke the bread, he gave thanks"). One Thousand Gifts begins when a friend challenges Voskamp to write down 1000 things for which she is grateful and it changes her life. She finds that gratitude itself, eucharisteo, is the path to enjoying life and drawing near to God. It is a way of living that changes how we experience what happens to us, our circumstances, our relationships.

In his book The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis says, "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." Mark and I laugh at the pleasure it brings us to repeatedly tell our cats how beautiful they are, how grateful we are for them, how much we love them. The cats, just by being, help us to live in our "right minds": to delight in Easy's kama sutra positions, to marvel at the discovery of yet more patterns on Mallory's tortoise shell coat, to give thanks for Janey's saucer eyes. We experience such deep pleasure in praising them and never tire of it because, as the old Doublemint gum commercial says, it "doubles our pleasure." I now know what it means for the psalmist to feel such pleasure in praising the Lord. Psalm 150 has come alive for me: let everything that breathes praise the Lord because it puts us in our "right minds" and just feels so damn good to do it!!

Kittenzen: Living in our Right Mind Part 1--mental telepathy

This summer Mark and I read My Stroke of Insight written by neuroscientist (brain scientist) Jill Bolte Taylor who had a stoke in her left brain. But the book is really about the right brain, which was the only functioning part of her brain during the stroke and for many months and years following as she worked to recover the functions of her left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of the creation and understanding of language as well as where we experience time, memory of the past and projection into the future. With only her right hemisphere functioning, Taylor could not create or understand language but she could feel people's emotions and read their body language. Because she had no memory of the past or thought of the future she could only experience the present, the now. When she was only in her "right mind" the busy chatter of what to do next and the voices of criticism and complaint vanished. She only felt peace and a deep sense of gratitude for and connection with all that was in and around her. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to retrieve the functions of her left brain and its harpy voices and busy-ness. She did, of course, decide it was important for her to come back from this place of peace in order to let the rest of us know that we have a choice to be in our "right minds."

Another book we read was Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien, an owl researcher at Caltech who recounts raising a barn owl from the age of 4 days old until he died at 19. Wesley's beak and talons grew too long and were harming him as he aged but he fought her and injured her when she tried to trim them. Because of his advanced age she didn't want to use anesthesia so she tried imaging to Wesley several times a day for 2 or 3 weeks a picture of her gently filing his beak and trimming his talons, after which time he let her do it with no resistance. It makes so much sense to me that mental telepathy, this imaging, can be used to communicate with animals and with people, just as happened for Jill Bolte Taylor when she discovered that using her right hemisphere she could "read" people's body language and actually feel their emotions when they were near her (some people had to leave the room if their emotions were too negative--it hurt her brain to have them nearby). Another friend recently told me that she has noticed for a while that her dog responds to things that she is thinking before she even says them (she thinks "it is time for your bath" and the dog gets up and slowly and reluctantly walks into the bathroom). Apparently, according to O'Brien, research in such "mental telepathy" with animals is showing that it is happening between certain humans and certain animals.

Our attempts to practice mental telepathy with our cats have so far proved unsuccessful (or they just don't care what we think). But they are certainly helping to keep us in our "right minds."

Kittenzen: Stuff

My nephew Scott gave us a book Everything Here is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior which has been invaluable in understanding how we are now to think about our "stuff." That includes, among many other things, our favorite chairs (now occupied by cats), our plants (most of them gone since most aren't good for cats), and Mark's homework (yes, the cat ate it).

I was asked to give the sermon at church last week as my brother (the Pastor) was going to be away. The topic was the first commandment "you shall have no other gods" and Luther's commentary on the commandment from The Large Catechism. Turns out Luther has pretty much the same idea as the cat book: none of this stuff is ours! It is all God's and we are merely channels through which God's stuff and God's goodness and God's money flow to others. We are to operate solely as stewards do: we are managers of another's property. This avoids that all too frequent cause of friction between us when we either think somebody else has taken our stuff or that somebody doesn't appreciate the stuff we have given them. It relieves us from having to protect our stuff. It gives us freedom from dependence on the false security stuff promises. It frees us for the adventure God wants for us in our living here on earth: we are pilgrims who are only using the stuff we are given along the way. We are only stewards who get to dole it out sometimes, and that according to God's purpose.

So once again, the cats have been teaching us the Way: this isn't our stuff and they, the cats, certainly don't belong to us either! As one cat magazine writer put it, we do not own cats. We are only their guardians. We are to take very good care of them, as good stewards, and we are to take good care of the stuff in our lives, but always, as the cats know, to remember that it is only stuff and we are only channels to use it to bless the cats. Oh, and others.

Kittenzen: Lost and Found

Mark came home the other day from his morning run and showed me a well-worn glitter ball (sans glitter) that had found its way into his running shoe. He said that he kept thinking as he was running that he had put the wrong insole into his shoes because it didn't feel quite right. When he got home and took off his shoe, he discovered the yellow smooshed glitter ball. The kittens seem to love hiding and then finding their toys in shoes. He found one of the kittens' spring toys in one of his boots yesterday and we watched one of them put it in his slipper a few minutes later. We then took a look in his other boots for a long lost green mouse that they love and voila! there it was scrunched into the toe of the boot. It has probably been there the last couple of times he wore them.

So they put a beloved toy in one of our shoes, effectively losing it, and then try with all their might to get it back out again. What kind of game is this? Why does it give them such pleasure to hide the toy and then (sometimes) find it again? Like little babies they really like the game of peekaboo, too, and hide and seek--I hide somewhere in the house and they come looking for me.

Now, we don't have nearly as much fun playing this game! Lost keys, hidden wallets, single socks, missing tools, AWOL this and that....We get out of sorts and irritated with each other. We have taken to praying about that which is lost, though, alleviating some of the irritation and distracting us for at least 90 seconds, the time it apparently takes for adrenalin to level off once it is activated. Not that we think God spends his time taking our things and hiding them for us to find or, indeed, finding them for us. But whenever life's circumstances begin to overwhelm us, be they large or small, we are reminded by the writers of the Bible that we are to turn to God with our anxieties, with our cares, with our raised levels of adrenalin. So we have decided to take these odd little opportunities to work on developing this habit.

Kittenzen: Root causes

Our girl kittens Mallory and Jane are a little over 7 months now and are at times displaying some mildly aggravating behavior that we might attribute to being in heat. I am really not sure at all if they are in heat or just being kittens but I just made the appointment to have them spayed next week.

So yesterday Mallory, our tortoiseshell, was in our basket of bird books and clawing at the books and biting them which, once again, I attributed to annoying behavior caused by overactive hormones. I usually try to distract them from what I don't want them to do by moving them somewhere else or giving them something appropriate to bite on like a cat treat. But this time if I moved Mallory she beelined back to the basket and was not at all interested in any treats. My tactics had failed and I was at a loss. But Mark suggested there might be something in the basket she was after. Eureka! We pulled out all of the books and there at the bottom of the basket was the little gray mouse toy that is a perennial favorite of our cats. Mallory pounced on it, got it between her teeth and proudly pranced away. I had tears in my eyes because Mark recognized that her intention was not to annoy us or to destroy our books but to get something she had lost and that brought her great satisfaction. I had misread why she was doing what she was doing.

My sister Louisa who is an animal behavior specialist (particularly behavior of cats and dogs) taught me that animals generally have pretty good reasons for the "bad" behaviors they exhibit and it is our job as their "guardians" to understand why they do what they do. Only then can we address the behaviors. Just punishing them may work on the short term but doesn't address the root cause of the behavior and a repressed desire will resurface, as Freud would say, with a vengeance. You can't ask an animal why it is doing something and so you really need to believe that it has a reason--that puts you in an entirely different framework than you have if you simply think its purpose is to aggravate you by doing something you don't like. Believing that there is a logic to what the animal is doing turns the situation into a game of figuring out why the behavior is occurring and then your analytical skills are freed up to help you uncover the root cause.

I think we do this kind of misreading constantly with people around us. They may occasionally be doing something just to annoy us, perhaps, but generally annoying or even hurtful behavior is done for reasons other than we first think. It may be as simple as an attempt to get something that they need. And asking a person or child why they are doing what they are doing is always a good first step, but sometimes they don't know. Instead of giving up on them and just being angry or annoyed, think of it as a game of parsing out the underlying reason for or cause of their behavior: what is their mouse beneath the books?