Temple of the ancients

I've wanted to post about my friend Raina for months since I last visited her. (Yesterday was a beautiful day but I forgot my camera, so these photos are from our November visit.) I've composed this in my head quite a few times and gotten stuck because the right words are difficult to find. I visited Raina (and her minions Pat and Skye) again yesterday, and I am still lost for words. Raina is a Burmese cat of more than twenty years on this earth. The phrase 'old soul,' while woefully overused, is at least one that most people understand. Raina is not an old soul. She is the most ancient soul I have encountered in a living being.

A few months ago Pat and I were talking about this and the not-quite-right word I had in mind was 'timeless,' when Pat said "There is something rather eternal about her." That's it. Raina is a being who would make me believe in the reincarnation of energy upon the earth in many forms, because of the sense she conveys that she may have always been here, continuously. How would I know that on only spending such a short time with her? When I first met Raina and Skye and their cat companion Dandy (now Bridgeside) a few years ago, it was like a circuit connection being completed. Raina has a tremendous impact.

Pat is cheerfully unselfish and gracious in indulging my contacts with Raina, when I have felt it somewhat presumptuous on my part, like stepping in oafishly when Raina and Pat have so many years and so many struggles in their intimate history. But this time I asked for an audience with her because I needed that profound effect. I have been troubled and unfocused, and I needed to feel I was in the presence of old wisdom. It's like surveying an old river, knowing it has flowed steadily through many generations, millennia, eons - constant while everything else around it has emerged and lived and faded away. When I arrived, Pat walked me into the cozy room along her back porch, sun pouring in the windows onto a little sheepskin cuddler bed where Raina was napping curled up with her hot water bottle, picked her up gently and handed her to me. With Raina this feels like an act of generosity. No, like an act of communion.

Now Pat herself is also possessed of quite a lot of wisdom, and kindly interjected my restless ramblings with the perspective of one who has been quite visible in public life, overwhelmed and overworked but tremendously capable, with the common sense to assess things and to lay them out with directness. I appreciate that about her so much. And Skye is just a beautiful rottie girl with a happy smile and I feel so at home around her. She's been through multiple hip surgeries and I am glad to see her having so much better quality of life than my Diva ever had. And it's precious to see her be exuberant with Raina but also respectful of this creature just a fraction of her own size.

And again there's Raina. Coping with multiple medical issues, she's just recently been able to get barely back over the 4-pound mark. She's not a lap cat. She's a collarbone cat. That's just where she fits naturally, faces close. She surveys things. Sometimes she talks and purrs. She's so regal and her eyes are so vastly deep, yet she will nuzzle and nudge and demand rubbing and behave in a rather somewhat more hedonistic way than one might expect in the presence of greatness.

She was with me this morning also, when my throat was raspy and my breathing a little rough, despite the boatload of antihistamines I took before our visit. I am allergic to cats even when they are oracles.