I’m copying a fellow Substacker’s post here because it was exhilaratingly entertaining. I knew at once it was going to be good when she began:
We stood in the grass, an infinite moment or two—my bare feet on morning dew, Kitty Nova wearing her best fur—and watched the world, more ears than eyes, more nosing than knowing. I tune myself to her tail-conducted symphony, discordant human notes relaxing agenda, and together we go nowhere and arrive now-here.
This is how Kimberly Warner begins her post, In defense of going nowhere. She’s talking about her cat. She’s talking about life, she’s talking about creativity, she’s talking about going nowhere.
. . . nowhere is where everything comes from. Like yin and yang, within going nowhere lives adventures untold—the limits on wonder only a lack of imagination—while going somewhere can often fail expectation and leave ennui and emptiness in its wake.
So true. I like that. Essentially that’s what I practice every day when I mount up on my bicycle and head out. There are destinations and then there are destinations unknown. Destinations unknown are the best. That’s how I found all the known destinations.
Going nowhere requires a willingness to show up for how life presents itself, not how we think it should be—to wander slowly and very much at random, letting ourselves drop into the miracle of existence.
That’s pretty good and so much of what I feel these days. Certainly no solace to be found in the news. The news, with all it’s manufactured issues that I don’t even believe in anymore. I believe in nowhere and wandering there.
There has been a fundamental shift in my self. (Using the word ‘self’ because I don’t know what else to call it) A call to simplify the way I live, an urgent need to be aware of the moment I’m in. ‘Now here’ as Kimberly puts it in her essay, not nowhere.
She ends her post with an homage to her kitties, who she takes for walks on her property - here and there and nowhere, safely tethered on a leash.
Tethered to my fur-gurus (furus!) with nowhere to go, I glimpse a return to perception before separation, before a here and a there and an I within that space to navigate it. Unbidden, I become cat, cat becomes tree, tree becomes sky, sky becomes I, a mending of life’s original rupture through rapt, devoted attention. Leashed to Love—our ultimate master—we are nobody going nowhere, infinitely now-here and of course, as my beloved kitties make it plainly clear, everywhere.
I don’t have tethers for my cats but we do wander together sometimes, especially White Tail who loves me. The others are fond of me but not like that. He will entertain my presence, share his catness with me, display his affection with a special meow and a head tilt/blink blink. I get it.
He will show me how to be nowhere. He doesn’t have the circuitry for much else. I have way too much circuitry. A veritable raging torrent of unsupervised random thoughts running non-stop in my head. I saw it one day. I was quite ill and I couldn’t turn off the machine. Scary.
Yeah we have advanced circuitry, no doubt about it. We’re a smart species and proud of it. We can think of so many things. Look at what we have thought of: nuclear weapons, atomic attack submarines carrying blast-offable from underwater nuclear tipped missiles so no one knows where they’re coming from, multiple re-entry vehicles so when the missiles comes back to earth they split up into multiple missiles targeting individual targets - harder to shoot down. Pretty smart. No monkey can do that. Certainly not a cat.
I love this post because being nowhere is a lost art that humans need to re-discover. We could benefit from being in a state of “rapt, devoted attention”, as Kimberly puts it, once in a while. I invented a new word after reading her post: cataphonic - the state of being super mellow and totally activated at the same time. We decided to spread it around and see if it can go viral.
A picture of one of Kimberly’s kitties on walk about.
Sign up for her Substack here Unfixed.
And Whitetail being totally cataphonic.
yeah !!