Each time you allow the universe to expand through you, it is a living prayer. My Dakota hunka showed me by her example that the truest prayer is how you live this one precious life that has been entrusted to you. Do you selfishly squander it or do you “walk in beauty so that the people may live”?
You never know where or when your helpers might appear. Intervention can come sporting any disguise. A campaign lawn sign (“Presidents are temporary. Wu tang lives forever!”). A tiny baby being born next month to parents you have not yet met. A powerful dream you had last night. A helpless kitten literally dropping dramatically in front of you, as if a fledgling angel had fallen onto the sacrificial altar of a concrete highway at rush hour.
It was late afternoon on Indigenous Peoples Day (aka Discovers Day, fka Columbus Day). We had just left the airport and were homeward bound. We were having a conversation about the grace occasionally experienced in one’s later years of being invited to don a pair of “angel wings”, to step up into true selfless service.
I had on my blinker, preparing to make a left turn onto eastbound Hana Highway on which I would proceed into the rest of my life. The traffic light had just turned red stopping me in my tracks.
The conversation we had been having ceased just as abruptly. Our attention had been grabbed by some thing lying out in the roadway. Was it a rag or a windblown bag? Or was it something alive, trying to move?
In that split second between my light turning red and theirs (the 4 lanes of rush hour traffic) turning green, we both realized that a wounded and dazed animal was struggling to stand in the middle of the highway. There was no time to think or talk, only to act in the blink of an eye.
Without a word, River immediately leaps out of the car and sprints into the middle of the intersection waving her arms. I lay on the horn and run the light insinuating the car between River and the oncoming traffic.
He was lying in the middle of a traffic lane. I thought I saw a car pass over him without hitting him, but I can’t say for certain. The whole scene was happening so fast that my “way of seeing” may very well have jumped the tracks into some co-extant time warp. Perhaps a peculiar twist on Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously both dead and alive. It could not have been more dramatic.
River scooped him up and held him to her chest while she jumped back into the car. It was over in mere seconds and then we were barreling toward home, not even knowing who or what we had just rescued.
Or how badly he had been injured. One eye was shut, his nose was bleeding, he was clearly in shock. So many things about him did not look “right”. But there was never a question that he had found us and we had found him. Wherever that mystery led would be revealed in the fullness of time. We named him Hana Hou, which is a Hawaiian expression for “to come again” or “encore”.
In some strange mash-up of quantum mechanics, feline “righting reflex”, Tibetan Buddhism, sacred geometry (as in 9 lives), the transmigration of souls and some good kitty karma, this little guy seemed to have dropped from the spirit world directly into our path.
Having lost my deamon feline companion, Bushi, just 75 days earlier, I was still working the worry-stone of grief. According to an avowed expert in the admittedly arcane field of feline incarnations, it takes about 7 weeks for a cat to move through the bardos between lives. The veterinarian estimated that HH was 4 weeks old on his first visit. A quick look at the calendar confirmed that his birth was 49 days from the very date that I had buried Bushi. In a quick calculus of love and loss, this heart math proves up.
I tried not to get too attached to the new foundling. My heart was still integrating deep feelings of loss and sorrow, still stirring the pot for the gratitude that eventually rises to the top of that cruel and bitter brew. In the ways of the Red Road, the bereaved are seen to be very sacred because they are walking between the worlds, one foot in each. It is a confusing time, the heartmind a crazed compass needing recalibration to get back on course. One feels compelled to stay enshrouded in the pain of separation.
But the spark of life on this physical plane is no inconsequential fire and I could not resist its allure, finding myself once again quickly drawn into the flames of love. Our “kama matu” had clearly been fully activated. On Discovers’ day, no less, we began to light into the unexplored landscape of this new relationship. It was dizzying emotionally. I had to remind myself to breathe. I admit to feelings of elated relief, even pride, as I bore witness to his first solid poop on Day 2.
His heart-rending seizures also began on Day 2. He would walk in circles as if to unwind the nightmare he had just survived. On Day 3, we managed to get him to a veterinarian who aged him at 4 weeks old and weighed him at less than a pound. After some testing and deworming, he sent us home with antibiotics and hopeful hearts. Once HH got some milk replacer in his belly, the seizures mercifully stopped, and he started purring. He has not stopped purring since. He has a hearty appetite and seems to have fully recovered from his ordeal. We just celebrated the third week of his homecoming.
Having had two cats in residence for the past decade, my house is filled with cat toys and furniture. HH did not hesitate to map his new world, making the rounds to orient himself, gently laying his kitten mittens on anything even slightly interesting. I was delighted but not really surprised that his clear preference was and continues to be Bushi’s favorite things like her “rug” and her scratching “garage”. I am reminded of the story about the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation as a baby boy who puts on the eyeglasses of his predecessor in apparent recognition of his most recent incarnation.
This intersection of our three lives (in the middle of one of the busiest intersections on the island) at that precise moment was nothing shy of a karmic intervention orchestrated with surgical precision. A few seconds sooner or later and it would not have happened the way it did. A plane arriving early from Denver, the vagaries of baggage claim, the ebb and flow of traffic, the timing of the traffic light, the coordinates of chance. There were so many variables in this impossible algebraic equation whose proof is x=Hana Hou
In situations like these, you are being invited to step up to a higher level of humanity. This is a great gift. Spontaneity “under pressure” is the purest example of free will. In the blink of an eye, you must choose to act or to think. It is not a test, but it is an opportunity to expand, to be made larger. And the path you take is a self-revelatory testament that can inform you about where you are on the map of your soul’s journey. This is Hana Hou introducing his hanai brother Hoku.
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