What is it to Know Someone and Their "Cat Hat" Poem?
What is it to Know Someone and Their "Cat Hat" Poem?
I overhear Carrie say she might need people who have cat poems to take the stage. We are at the Rail Trail Cafe, a small foresty bohemian jaunt where wood-fired pizza burns and the tall trees wait for another offering of heart-filled music as bicyclists brush by.
This event was centered around a fundraiser for the sprawling cat rescue Carrie nurtured over many years. Carrie’s warm heart is a central light in a community built around openness and the deep harmonic lull of her and her longtime singing partner Apple and their band Barely Lace. I was invited by Trish, who curls around the community with the ease of a cat basking in the afternoon sun.
I feel on the periphery of this community. I see Diana, Scott, Apple, Sue, Lisa. We’ve chatted before. There is mutual kindness, but do we know each other?
I happen to have a cat poem. It isn’t just any cat poem. It’s a spiraling, spectacle of a cat poem filled with bees driving drunk on honey sugar, crowning curious cartoon cats in technicolor hats.
It is polished and ready for the stage. I take a chance. I tell Carrie, ”if you need more performers, I have a cat poem.” She replies in her liquid voice, sentences filled with easy confidence and always ending in a laugh, “You want to read a cat poem!” Instead of me replying “only if you need someone”, her response literally sets the stage for me to say, “yes!”
There are 50-75 people in varying degrees of fashion, kissing hello, passing out home-grown watermelon. Dogs wander and are welcomed searching for food and head-pets. Even though I say “yes!”, like we are old friends, I am on the edge of this community. I don’t know people and I am not known.
Except for: Andi, Trish, Scott, David. I know them. We have repeatedly shared food together, silently taken each other in, heard each other’s stories, honored the rhythm of our contributions, and been intertwined in an intricate dance of participation. We have gathered at BreakBreads together, the process my partner John and I created in 2020 as a panacea to the pandemic. It’s an intentional, structured and generative process where we leave knowing each other more.
What is it to know each other? Is it a feeling? Is it knowledge?
Several musicians warmed the space with braided melodies. Liana even sings a song from Cats, the musical. Then Carrie finally invites poetry. David Budd reads. His storytelling is always lit with the wisdom of life and death. I arrive, slightly nervous, but take time to really arrive. I place myself in the space, feel my body, acknowledge how we all showed up for Carrie and the cats. Thankfully I read my wildly alliterative and picture-book poem with relative ease.
I think the lines around my body became clearer for some that day.
I became less of an illusive blur in the background. Perhaps I was more seen, more felt, more known. Is the feeling of knowing someone, the same as knowledge? And just because you feel like you know someone, do you?
In Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku’s book, Time, Space, and Knowledge, he talks about knowledge (or knowing) via the idea of Lower Space and Great Space. Although his book is quite complex and rarely are there definitives, I feel safe to summarize. In Lower Space, the walls of knowledge (or knowing) are close together, structural and narrow. Great Space on the other hand is…greater…bigger; the walls of knowledge are see-through and our separation is less defined. It is in Great Space that Great Knowledge is possible and when we can transcend the walls of knowledge in Lower Space, new knowledge can emerge.
Great Space is also where we transcend the walls that keep us separate, that block us from really knowing each other or knowing our connection.
Lower Space isn’t necessarily bad or less. Culture is in lower space. It houses our social contracts, values, and sense of right and wrong. It is completely necessary for us to function as social animals. But without reaching up into Great Space on a regular basis, we can get stuck in unconscious cultural patterns and personal and familial assumptions that leave us boxed in, that can inadvertently leave us feeling unseen or not known and disconnected from our literal connection to each other. On the extreme end of the spectrum, war happens in lower space – the division that creates tribalism.
At BreakBread we intentionally reach up out of Lower Space into Great Space by exploring a carefully crafted prompt. Here’s an example:
“When you make your peace with authority, you become authority.”
— Jim Morrison
What is authority? Who decides and how do you exercise or resist it?
At the BreakBread, where we were exploring this prompt, our dear friend Jenny told a story about when she was a child in rural England. She was a young girl, 9 or 10, her rosy cheeks delighting as she remembers. She was out at recess with her friend and it started to rain, as it often does. The teacher called the children to come inside. Her friend slipped into line running for cover as directed by the teacher, but Jenny discovered her feet planted in place unwilling to move. When the teacher implored her to come inside, she refused. She cried “but the rain makes my hair curly!” She relished in the liberation of saying no, a defiance that felt utterly new to her, a powerful new moment. She still embodies an infectious delight and an assured connection to her senses and her resistance – both a sort of liberation. Through this process, I not only know more about Jenny, I felt a growing bond with her as she giddily shared her story and made the connection with liberation.
The urge to find meaning, to search for knowledge, to connect beyond the walls of the everyday — to reach upward toward Great Space – is an ancient spiritual act that when done in community, creates deep bonds. Meditation, dance, sound, music, religion (for many) are all ways to transcend those walls.
But how do you transcend the walls of lower space in conversation?
I believe it is through small communities (secular, spiritual, or religious) who boldly, with intention, reclaim how we gather and create knowledge through contemplation, sharing and storytelling. BreakBread is one of the many powerful ways to move into deeper knowing of self, others, and the world around. In our particular way of gathering, we gather in circle, which naturally levels the playing field, is less performative and puts the power in the hands of the people. Plus, our gatherings are imbued with intention and ritual.
But at the Rail Trail Cafe that day, feeling slightly lost in the maze of Carrie’s cat world, I became a little more known, not through a deep generative process like BreakBread, but because I had the courage to share my cat poem. I took this step because when I intentionally practice knowing others and giving them the opportunity to know me (through vulnerability), the cat can truly feel safe enough to put on its technicolor hat and dance and be danced with. It can buzz into the Great Space of knowledge to discover the world at its feet, along with its friends, the eye-glazed honey beez.
And now….the poem. It is best heard. I’ve also included a written version.
Cat Hat
A hat at the foot of the
stairs,
careless.
Someone was indeed careless
again.
Running
with hat.
He splat and flew yonder
like a cartoon cat,
spilled –
at the foot of the stairs.
And I,
ratcheted between
the face and floor of the step,
I hope to take
the hat there, like a
brown diamond crown.
And the beez, they buzzed.
Their eyes glazed over
from honey feast
side weeds.
Hat, diamond hat crown,
like
a scrubby
for my hair padded head knob –
they pick it up –
the beez that is –
and just fly it onto my head –
the hat that is.
Unknown,
how driving drunk on
honey sugar
love,
the miracle of crowning me
a curious cartoon
cat –
technicolor world hat
spiraled spectacle hat.
I was in Scooby doo
land,
grateful
because that’s
how I was brought up.
But also,
also,
all so colorful,
crayons shed their
stiff indignant
attachment to
rose, mango, orange, red
sunshine, pistachio
names,
and dance together –
an orgy
my eyes
my orgy
lost and stolen and given
by the beeziness of
honey drunk bee gods
doing a crown button dance!
Sigh,
sing,
covered in
paint fountains now,
a swim pail on each
foot,
a curious cartoon cat
at the bottom
of stair riser
movers,
surround by side weeds
now.
I am technicolor,
stained with electricity,
crowned with
brown diamond crown
hat.
Curious,
I am curious
bee cat.
Thanks for that
stair gaze.
Beez play.
Slip away.
That’s my day
for now and
now,
always.
Martha Williams (2016)