I appreciate the earth, the multitude of smells in one scrape of the dirt, the blameless taste of baby moles, peeing on warm car tires parked on hot asphalt, the dampness of the morning grass when I stalk an ample robin...
These are worldly things.
But my favorite thing is to look up at the impossible sky, at the birds flying silently overhead and to imagine how rare they must taste, wishing I could bite the breeze that so indifferently stirs my whiskers, recognizing smells from far away and wondering how metaphors can travel so far.
The sky is full of blissful things that can’t be experienced.
At least that's what I thought until something strange happened recently…
My furless, hunting-challenged friends and I were lying on the bed one night and they put the iPad in front of me.
When I scratch at bugs in the cat game, they think it’s hilarious, so I play along.
But this game had a blue screen on it.
They said it was a fish swimming in blue water; to me it looked like the blue sky.
When I looked down at this blue sky that had always been above me, I was overcome with vertigo.
I couldn’t control my urge to fix it, to make the sky be above me as it should be.
So I flipped over and lay on my back, looking up at this blue sky, reaching my arms out, soaring through the air.
As I was leaping through my heaven, I thought about the poem “On Leaping Over the Moon,” by Thomas Traherne (1637-1674).
The brother jumps over a stream of water that is reflecting the sky and moon. If he had fallen into the reflection in the water, it would be wondrous high, / Not from, but from above, the sky.
That’s how I felt.
Like I might have dropped through that thin element
Into a fathomless descent; / Unto the nether sky /That did beneath [me] lie.
Like the brother in the poem--How happy he o'erleapt the moon--
I was delighted to fly through this iPad sky, finally being granted this mysterious buoyancy I knew existed.
A warm euphoria seeped through my body and it wasn't the usual catnip high.
I had a feeling that everything was heavenly--the dirt outside that I crap in, the carpet I claw, these humans laughing as we lay on the bed together during an everyday evening in our commonplace life.
Thus did [the iPad] yield me in the shady night
A wondrous and instructive light,
Which taught me that under our feet there is,
As o'er our heads, a place of bliss.
