Ar Wahan's home office water cooler

I remember telling my daughter a while back about a disturbing dream I had. I was back in Portland, OR (my hometown) on the bike path that runs along the river. It hadn't existed when I lived there, but when I was back last August selling the house I grew up in, a friend loaned me a bike and we took a spin. At one point, the path goes under an elevated freeway for a short bit. (On east side of Willamette.)

In the dream, we were on our bikes there. We ran into someone, a man I think, who somehow told me that a cat I had known before had come back and was at a shelter, waiting for me to find it. I didn't know which cat it could be, but I was desperate to find the shelter before I left town to come back to Massachusetts.

I remember trying and trying to locate the shelter, which was somewhere under this elevated freeway . . . but not having any success. It was actually frightening, strange as that may be. I could feel this cat calling out to me, but I couldn't find it. I also didn't know which cat it could be out of the many that have shared my life.

Then I woke up.

This was long before Fancy disappeared on April 19. I *think* it was after my mammogram March 23, when I was told I needed a biopsy, because I was aware of having a lot of anxiety dreams after that.

My parents had a grayish-black cat named Yankee Doodle Dandy, because he was born on the Fourth of July (you have to know abot George M. Cohen to get the reference). I don't remember much about him, except standing next to him in the kitchen as he was eating, and thinking he was big enough that I could ride him like a pony. (My parents said no.)

When I was four, he disappeared. We had taken a trip to Mount Hood not long before. My mother told me, when I kept asking where Yankee went, that he must have run away to Mount Hood. I remember feeling hurt and betrayed by this -- why would he run away? We used to call him to dinner by ringing a little dinner bell. (Hmm, I should try that with Toby.) If I trudged up the hill to the intersection by my house, I could get a great view of Mount Hood. I remember going up there, day after day, to stand on the corner and ring that little bell.

I found out Toby was brought to the shelter March 29.

We are picking Toby up at the shelter today, as he's been discharged from isolation.

Here is his description on the shelter web site:

"Hard to get a good photo of a cat constantly in motion, as Toby was when I met him. A group of students from Smith College had come to meet the cats and he was showing off in the Cat Room (OK, so he had a little help with a douse of catnip). As you can see, he was quite intent on a catnip mouse and quite the ham for his audience. Toby, despite his kittenish antics, is a 5 yr old male, all black, found as a stray. Toby loves to be around people and is a fun and active cat, called 'a charmer' by one of his admirers. What the photo lacks in clarity it makes up for in action! "

As I wrote earlier, I was pulled toward his picture, and so was the samurai. When we went down to see him a week ago Sunday, he was nowhere to be found. We thought maybe he'd been adopted since I saw him on the web... but it turned out he was in isolation. We were told he' developed an upper respiratory infection, common in shelter cats. An initial round of antibiotics had not cleared it up, so they were going to send him back to the vet for a reevaluation. We looked through the window of the isolation room and saw a big black lunk, head turned away from us, lethargic and depressed. We were told to call back Wednesday for an update.

On Wednesday, Justin, one of the shelter staff, answered the phone. He said they now suspected Toby had feline herpes, which I'd never heard of . . . He likened it to the virus that causes cold sores. Some people get the virus, get sick once, and are never sick again. Others get cold sores when they are exposed to some sort of stress. And it can be contagious. Toby had been sneezing at lot, and had an eye discharge. 

My first thought was worrying about exposing Stella to a virus. Justin noted that 50-80% of cats, esp. strays, are exposed to this virus as kittens, (Stella was a stray; we adopted her at about six months of age from this same shelter.)

Anyway, Jason suggested we call back again later in the week to see what had developed.

When I relayed this to my samurai, I thought she'd back off and want to protect Stella. But she calmly said Toby was still worth considering. I went online to try to find more info about feline herpes.

On Thursday, Justin said they were now "extremely certain" it was feline herpes. They'd ruled out two other conditions and had started him on a lysien (spelling undoubtably wrong by yours truly) supplement. He was still in isolation. (Remember, we still haven't actually "met" this cat.) Justin repeated what he'd said Wednesday -- he really, really wanted to get Toby out of isolation, because the stress of it was surely prolonging this herpes episode, but he had to keep him in there . . . it was a vicious cycle.

I did some more research on feline herpes. Then on Friday, when the samurai came home sick from school, we were sitting on the deck eating lunch and started talking about Toby again. I decided to do a rune casting. I ended up doing two. The first asked about the general consequences if we brought Toby here, and the second about the consequences for Stella. I can't rememver the specifics. I know one was about "ambition satisfied, love fulfiled, and sharing your good fortune with others."Also the rune for Partnership. And in both, different runes each suggested a need now to not be bound by old conditioning and old authority (for me, being ultra-cautious, worrying and analyzing to death), but to trust the Light.  I picked up the phone, Justin was there, and he said Toby was improving, but still in isolation. However, he would bend the rules and let us into the isolation room if we wanted to meet Toby.

By now, the school day was over. Hoping no one from her school would see us, samurai and I went down to the shelter.

Our old cat Cato was named for the Japanese houseboy in the Pink Panther series who is expected to attack his master at unexpected times -- and does so at inappropriate times, prompting the cry, "Not now, Cato!" Our Cato was kind of like that.

If Cato was a Karate Kid, Toby is a Sumo Wrestler. He is enormous! Rolls and rolls of fat... he weighs 20 pounds and needs to be put on a diet. He gained two pounds while in isolation because he ate so much (as some depressed humans do). I'm not quite sure how we're going to accomplish this, given we will be feeding two cats. 

Wish me luck.

This is a test of sorts -- not of you, my dear friends, but of me. I'm curious.

Below this cut are two photos. Please compare them and tell me if you see anything unusual. (Except for the ridiculous difference in image size . . .) I will reveal my reasons later on.  Thank you!

EDIT: From the preliminary responses (thank you!!) It seems I'm being a bit too mysterious here. I'm looking for what your third eye, not your two physical ones, might see. Ignore the colors of the physical bodies. Try to see inside.

Herein I resume my August 2, 1983 letter to Dorothy . . . which left off with, "I knew exactly what he was talking about!" 



Back to the present . . . if you read my first "Alleged Past Lives" post and the entry about the young girl in what may have been part of the Persian Empaire (feels like eastern Turkey to me, when I psychometrize a map), you may be wondering where it comes in here. I wrote then that I put that story up because it was referred to in this letter. I was mistaken -- it's not in the letter posted here, but in something else I wrote at that time and will post later.

Also . . . since people have from time to time told me I should write a book about all this, for safety reasons, I am going to add a copyright line once I go out and see how mediyogi does it!

[EDIT: © 2006, Janis S. Gray. All rights reserved. No republication of this material, in any form or medium, is permitted without express permission of the author .]

One of my LJ friends, upon a comment I made in her journal, asked me to describe what happened when I went to Wales to find where I'd supposedly lived before, and realized I had, in my past life regression, translated the name of the home from Welsh into English. (Someone I met in Wales told me the name of the house, and it was quite a shock.)

The problem is, there is so much backstory involved, I am having trouble doing this. (Telling about going "home.") It's ironic that today I was planning to begin, since today I learned I have cancer, and this particular lifetime is threatened more than usual. So I'm going to make a little bit of a start - - by starting with the backstory. I will put this under a cut. 

First, this though: If you go back a few days to when I am totally floored by the results of an aura quiz I got from spiderwoman, you will see I am a cross between a rational "scientist" and a woo-woo. You will see this conflict between the two halves of me often in coming posts, if you choose to follow them. You will find it also in my choice of subject line today ("alleged").  I find it interesting that the aura quiz pinpointed these two halves of me so neatly.

OK, here it begins... So that is the backstory when you read about the life I remember most -- because I mention this one first one briefly in explaining things in my letter to a friend.

In a comment a few days ago (in response to my news about my nephew -- and new dad -- being reposted to Iraq), fairiegodmother wrote, "In an ideal world, all parents of tiny kids would be exempt from deployment. In some countries, they're paid to stay home. Probably why the military doesn't have any such exemption. It could bring about an end to our warfare." I then mentioned that my daughter had made a related comment -- before we even knew about the reposting -- when talking about a past life. Fairie G asked for more... 

I'm not sure I'll convey it correctly, and not sure that it's all that interesting. But at the time, what my daughter said seemed to be a somewhat different take on what I'd read about before. [Disclaimer: I don't know how much of this is true, and how much is a teenage imagination trying to fill in the blanks. And how much I am not understanding or remembering of our conversation. So don't base any Wikipedia articles on this! :) ]

We were having lunch, and she suddenly let out a sardonic laugh. She explained she had just remembered something. When she was in one of her samurai incarnations (there have been several), she was married and had two children. The other samurai she served with were all single, and resented the existence of her wife -- not that they were jealous, but that this somehow reduced her value and integrity as a samurai in their eyes. She had remembered taking some grief for being a family guy. Now, over lunch, she seemed to remember the cause. The samurai culture, she said -- and she differentiated between the army class, which she was in at the time, and the more respected household retainer class -- sought to make a group of samurai an "organism," with each member ready and willing to die for whatever cause was in front of them. They were encouraged to think of their own lives as being of little worth and easily shed (expendable).

Now in the past, I've read of cultures, ancient and modern, which discouraged soldiers from marrying, but the reasons there, if I recall correctly (more disclaimers!!), were that worrying about a wife and child "back home" would be a "distraction" to the male soldiers in the field, that they would be less willing to come out to fight because of wanting to be with them, more likely to go AWOL, etc., etc.

What my daughter said ties into this. But the slight tweak was this: that having a wife she loved gave life worth. It wasn't that she would be reluctant to leave the wife to fight, or be "distracted" by worrying about her . . . but that having something/someone to live for would weaken the samurai "organism" by making this one particular part of it (her) less willing to die for the group or the cause, because life had worth after all.

I'm still not sure I've conveyed this correctly. I may invite her to comment anonymously and correct me if I am wrong.