impermanence

“This body of ours is impermanent, like a feather on a high mountain pass. “

Machig Labdron

Peaseblossom and I on a trip to the Algarve (photo Sam Duarte)

This summer my cat, Peaseblossom, was there, rolling and purring and staring at me balefully for food at 5 a.m. And then one day she just didn't come back. I did everything - shook food bowls, hung out dirty washing and did little rituals with her fur. I asked St. Anthony for help. I did all the practical ‘missing pet’ things too, and I called and looked and looked and called and I kept thinking I could see her flitting around - a tortoiseshell stripe against the light between the trees, under the van.

The last time I saw her she had come running back to me at the new place we were in - all wild-eyed and excited with quivering whiskers, by the sea with the smell of salt in the air. After ten days, I had to leave, without her, and I realised the reality of impermanence. I meditated on it, tears streaming down my face, the soft cat-weighted dent of her memory on the blanket covering my knees.

Peaseblossom sleeping Peaseblossom joins me in Green Tara practice March 2022

Everything is impermanent, changes; every person and every cat, goes - either by leaving or by dying. In 100 years not a single one of us will be here. So, can we relax a little if we remember that our pain is simply the result of clinging to everything as though it won’t change? That it changes even as we think it. Peaseblossom was like a cross between Mary Poppins and Jesus – dancing through my life for three years – looking after me, giving me balm. And then she was gone.

Update: she returned 10 weeks later, having walked 40 kilometres to find me, in a different city from where she got lost.