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."