My Heart is a Singing Cat

Hello, Brave Creatives 😘 How are you feeling about crafting, deepening, or sharing your voice these days?

I’m in a dreamy, liminal flow. Caring for others. Tending the garden of my Soul. Softening into trust. Setting aside Monkey pressures (are you ever gonna finish that graphic novel? that short film?)

I follow my heart’s whispers. She’s not productive. She dances. She’s allowed to feel the pulse of right now. Like a cat, she sniffs the air, stares out the window.

Buster, our daughter’s cat, knows how to live in the Now.

The spaciousness of the ocean, even on a rainy day, calls me to her side to sing. Sound and song-making flow like a river through my days (cats do sing!).¹ Then I open the book on my nightstand to find this gorgeous synchronicity.

A Brave Voice: exquisite writing about music

“Mr g: A Novel About the Creation,” by Alan Lightman (author of Einstein’s Dreams), playfully considers the creator and his universe. From the blurb on the back:

“Once before time existed, Mr. g woke up from a nap and decided to create the universe. In the shimmering Void, where he lives with his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva, he creates time, space, and matter. Soon follow stars, planets, animate matter, consciousness, and intelligent beings with moral dilemmas. But creation of space and time has unintended consequences… As Mr. G’s favorite universe grows, he discovers how an act of creation will change everything in the world – including the creator himself.”

Mr. Lightman’s prose plays like music in my heart. On page 162, he affirms the eternal power of music. Which inspires my Brave Voice to carry on singing:

Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music. From one star system to the next, intelligent life forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive… The music dances and glides and swoops. Not that all of it is melodic or soft, but even the dissonant and the jarring contain a rapture, an ecstasy, an embrace of existence.

For some time now, I have admired many of the melodies invented in this universe, and find myself singing them as I move about in the Void. As do Uncle Neva and Aunt Penelope. We continue to sing our favorite songs trillions of atomic ticks after the composer has died, after the composer’s civilization has vanished, sometimes even after the composer’s central star has burned up and faded to a dead ember floating through space.

Then, Mr. Lightman lights up the ways that music connects us.

His utterly unique voice illuminates how we feel about our voices. His insights make me smile, giggle, and nod at our foibles and petty fights. I 💗 this so much:

Before this new musical development, each of us often wandered alone through the Void, following one empty path after another during our excursions or simply searching for a solitary place to ruminate, shielded from one another by vast quantities of nothingness, like beings on separate islands at sea…

Now, however I no sooner set out on such a contemplative journey, glad to be alone among my own thoughts, when I hear Uncle or Aunt at some other location, loudly humming a tune, picked up in the new universe. Will you please keep your singing to yourself, Aunt P shouts in the direction of Uncle D. I was having a pleasant stroll through the Void until you started up. You are want to talk, Uncle hollers back from a great distance away. I’ve been listening to that disagreeable song of yours now for eons, and I cannot hear myself think. Oh really, shouts Aunt P. Are you thinking or singing? Which is it?

When Aunt and Uncle gets sufficiently annoyed with each other, they begin humming at high volume the very worst tunes in the universe, carefully selected from galaxy to galaxy and epoch to epoch.

Your voice sounds like the scaly underbelly of a bottom feeding fish, Uncle D screams to Aunt P.

And you sound like a rotting pile of animal dung, Aunt replies. 

Ha, ha, ha, Uncle shouts in a fake laugh. You know the difference between sounds and smells about as well as a rock can climb up a tree.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, shouts Aunt Penelope. I’m married to someone with an amber sunset for a mind.

🗣️ Your comments light up my Soul.

1. What makes your heart sing these days? An aria? Folk song? Or the Chipmunks?

2. Are you more like a cat, a dog, a turtle, a fish, or a — ?

3. Do you enjoy cosmic questions, like Mr. Lightman? And Mr. g?

4. Do you have an amber sunset for a mind? What kind of space is your mind?

Thanks for allowing your heart to sing in the ways she wants to. Please share with a friend, click that heart, or comment. It helps brave creatives find us. More to come,

1. Can Cats Sing? Uncovering the Musical Talents of Our Feline Friends