Simba

My backyard has always been popular with my neighbor's cats, but none more than Simba. Simba has pretty much established dominion over my yard, graciously allowing me to swim from time to time in what he considers his naturally occuring lake.

Simba likes to curl up for a nap on the top of my neighbor's shed where he can look out over a large part of my yard, watch birds, squirrels, rabbits and catch a few z's. When I see Simba up on a roof, I'm reminded of a wild cat taking a position of peace, security, solitude, and looking out over its little piece of the world -- seeing others more than being seen itself.

I think it is interesting to try to picture the world the way our cats, dogs, and other animals might see it. A yard becomes a world. Things we take for granted, walk right past and perhaps have never seen come into focus. Sometimes its nice to curl up with a view of our small piece of the world, slow down, and reflect on our place in the cycle of life.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Henry Beston's book The Outermost House:

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." -- Henry Beston from The Outermost House