Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Part 6
Going deeper, getting weirder.
There’s a local cemetery I love to take walks in with my dog. I’ve written about it before but its majesty bears repeating. It is deathly peaceful there - sorry, not sorry - but in no way haunting — on the contrary, it is teeming with life and I go there often because I always come away more grounded, calm and inspired. I feel in greater commune with myself after communing with nature, especially the trees.
This morning it provided a perfect serving of Autumnal delights: enough crunchy leaves underfoot to satisfy the senses; a nice squelch of mud too to make the clomping walking boots worthwhile; the still surprising heat from the October sun was gently dappled by the still green and some already turned burnt orange leaves, rustling, ready to surrender their bounty to the cool but not yet biting, breeze. A butterfly even landed close by me with deft auspicious timing as I contemplated this seasonal transition per last week’s post.
At some point a cat appeared on our trail that my dog was desperate to get near and somehow no matter which way we wound round the heavily wooded well-worn paths - some paved, some trodden - she would keep showing up. A gorgeous soft ginger thing, white-bellied and green-eyed. We spotted her in trees, atop gravestones, or on one occasion just passing through in the opposite direction we were bound. Was she following us? It felt much more like we were tracking her because she always seemed to be one-step ahead.
It’s an odd thing to me that we delineate between dogs and cats in such a binary way but I undoubtedly have a natural affinity with dogs that I just don’t experience with cats. In fact I experience this affinity with I would say all creatures except cats — please refer to the aforementioned butterfly completely undisturbed by the closeness of my proximity — Cinderella eat your heart out. With cats I have to muster the courage to even remotely interact with them and I mean that in the most nascent sense of the word: strength of heart. I consider myself at the start of a long-borne process of opening my heart to cats because the truth is, they terrify me (I could potentially put this down to some particularly vicious encounters with friends’ cats when I was younger) but it feels important that I find a way to connect with them. It’s like they have something profound to teach me. It’s not just that they’re so naturally enigmatic, I am certain there is something truly mystical about cats and the mercurial understanding of them is just beyond my reach to be made clearly manifest on the other side of the threshold of transformation that I am experiencing. So too, I feel that this is somehow effortlessly captured by Lewis Carroll’s cryptically mocking Cheshire Cat. This theory of course has only been further validated (for me personally at least!) by the kismet of this particular cat showing up everywhere my dog and I went this morning on the very same day that I am sharing the chapter where we first meet this curious stranger, whom it’s unclear whether we should trust or not. Is their’s a lead that we should follow?
Whenever I walk in this cemetery I don’t decide where it ends, mostly because I get pleasingly lost nearly every time I go there. My dog and I simply set off and see where the journey, where our intuition, takes us and there is yet to be a venturing out where we haven’t stumbled upon a new row of long-forgotten names. I had the exact same experience when I lived near Hampstead Heath and would find some vast new undiscovered route to explore most weekends. Funnily enough that was also during a time of great personal transformation.
Here though, during this next chapter of my life, it feels like a practise in surrender to the living, surrounded by those who have experienced the ultimate surrender of death. Perhaps this is easy to do because it is a small and contained space and unlike Alice we know we’ll always find our way out eventually - plus there’s a phone handy enough to help us out if we truly got stuck - but I still can’t help but feel that in order to get more comfortable with uncertainty and the painful constancy of change, particularly in the midst of long-drawn out transitions, consciously inviting in the unknown is a great place to start. It’s also a wonderful way to deepen the connection with our intuition, to be present with our surroundings, to observe the signs no matter how obscure, and listen — then perhaps we’ll know, whether or not to trust a stranger.
