Not poetic justice after all. Thank the ineffable currents of causality and coincedence.

     I saw her last on Wednesday morning. She came to the door, but then something caught her attention, and she went slinking low and slow across the deck and down the steps to the yard. I put the can I was just about to open back on the stack.
     I walked out the back door to get into the truck to go down the small road to the bigger road to the desk where I spend most of every day with no cat on my lap. She was perched on the edge of the raised garden bed watching a very interesting gopher hill. She looked at me only to say that I'd better not come any closer and scare her preferred breakfast.
     And that was that.
     No kitty at the door that evening.
     No kitty at the door Thursday morning.
     No kitty Friday. Saturday. Sunday.
     The neighbors had not seen her. But the guy up the hill told a story about how one day last week he was talking to a friend on the street. "In broad daylight! The middle of the day! A coyote comes trotting up the street with one of those chickens from down at the corner hanging out of its mouth."
     That was after we found the dismembered raccoon hidden in the high grass next to the oak trees in the far back.
     It seemed pretty clear.
     It would be a sort of awful poetic justice, wouldn't it. A beastly equation. Predator becomes prey. Live by the tooth, die by the tooth.
     Holding grief at bay with: Maybe not, maybe not. But I put away her food bowls.
     My downhill neighbor called Sunday evening. "I opened the shed door and she shot right out!"

Thinner but apparently not traumatized. Sitting on my lap so close to my face that I could hardly take the picture.

Pareidolia

Everywhere I look

Faces look back at me

Kittens in the water droplets

The smiling waif in the fold of the curtain

Elves from the vines embracing the corner of the house

The naiad among the pebbles on the bed of the creek watches the sky

There is a name for this, I am told.

We are creatures who see patterns where there are none.

We see hunters in the stars and sleeping ladies in the hills.

When we look harder, the angry Wookie staring out of the edge of the wall

dissolves

into

cracked plaster and two vacant nail holes.

I feel their eyes on me

I wait for them to speak

Books

I really can't get over how busy work has been. I dream of creation, and know that when I have a spare hour I'm going to be gasping like a drowned fish unable to so much as touch a pen. Words, words, words, all day and half of every night.

And still the one thing I love to do almost more than anything else (Almost.) is to read. I read like other people meditate. I always feel better afterwards. And during. Lucky me. This is the only pastime I can really partake of, though not as much as I would like. I have a couple of nonfiction books going now--Coyote America, a book on Jung, The Forest Unseen...I dip in and out of whatever I have the energy for at the moment, and depending on how many moments I have. The Forest Unseen is great because it has short chapters and I feel like I've completed a thought when I finish one. For fiction I've started The Lord of the Rings again because A) I love it, and  B) I know what's going to happen so if I get sleepy I can put it down without worrying about leaving characters in the lurch. It's my comfort book. And I get something new out of it every time I read it, even after all these years.

Ack. It's late. Better get back to it.