Communicating with my cat is so crazy, it’s like, you watch my back for predators when I sleep. You meow only because you know that I vocalize often, but the words I use are nothing to you unless they’re associated with things relevant to your little baby life (food, for example). You slow blink at me because you feel safe with me. You point your ass at my face, indicating that you trust me to watch your back for predators, because you feel safe with me. You sit in my lap and sleep pressed against my side because you need to warm yourself up, and you trust me to warm you. I know this because I have access to information. If I didn’t, these things would be weird to me. I call you Lulu, but you don’t need a name for me; you have your senses to identify me. You smell me to identify me. You nuzzle me with your head to mark me as family with your scent. We ARE family. You are both the baby I feed and the elderly little lady who watches over me. It’s a very special and pure interspecies bond. I have a concept of “love” that is metaphysical, conceptual; you have an instinctual bond to those that you “trust” to help you survive (and that you, in turn, help to survive). You DO aid my survival on an emotional level that you can’t possibly understand, because you try to aid me on the physical level that comes naturally to you. Who said survival of the fittest has no room for love? We share the pure love of deep friendship because you and I must survive. My creature, Lulu, my best friend. My stinky.
The comments and tags on this post have been very sweet, I really love hearing about everyone’s cats. Feeling a little self-conscious because this drunken emotional outburst (seriously, I had a few drinks, looked at Lulu, and started crying and writing this) has been tagged as poetry a few times. Now I wish I could go back in time and edit it for flow and word choice, but it’s too late now…
I have never seen the difference between witches and wizards highlighted so beautifully as in Worlds Beyond Number. I can’t help but think of the Ursula Le Guin quote from Tehanu: “Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs,“ Moss
said. “But it goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old
blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power’s like a fir tree, maybe, great
and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills
a blackberry bramble.”
How clever witch’s magic is, how small and weak it seems, but Grandmother Wren bound Orima long before stupid Morrow and his stupid gantry came along. How clever because Grandmother Wren did not bind Orima at all. Orima bound herself, by agreeing to accept Grandmother Wren’s offering.
And contrast Ame’s quiet competence with Suvi’s arrogance, her conviction that ‘Umora is for humans.’ Great and grand and tall indeed.
