Appreciation (50) – Toots gone too soon

Torrey Orton
May 26, 2013

Honouring her…

 

Toots went out a few days ago and did not come back.  I didn’t know she wasn’t coming until I got a phone call from a vet up the road from us later that morning…not Toots’ vet. He announced, in the de rigeur, indirect way that’s common now, she had “passed away”. Toots was a two and a half year old, short-haired tortoise shell domestic with four white paws and a white chin, amplifying eyes and whiskers of unusual grandeur. She had encountered a car somewhere over the back fence from us, the vet imagined. Damage was slight and death was quick.

A woman had brought her in to the vet’s and left without leaving a name we would have liked to thank her for her effort. Strange what people don’t want to be involved with these days – the prospect they might be thanked which turns into a prospect they might be blamed for a samaritanism spontaneously provided. Let this be our thanks. Otherwise Toots might have been an Otty – our cat who disappeared a year ago and is a fate for us worse than death.

Toots seemed to be much more weighty dead than alive. Perhaps a feature of death that the loss of life weighs more with us, or its value is more present to us in some respects than life?? Presenting her to me for her last ride, the vet had wrapped her in a greenish towel and tied up her package with a length of light purple tape, topping it off with a note saying “Honour” - her original registered name they found from the micro-chip identity tag which had brought them to me a few hours earlier…

Toots started as of a few days ago to push up daisies in our garden along with many of her predecessors, under a rock or a bush as the habit of each epoch’s burial over our 40 years here assigned them. She will probably push more vigorously than some because she had a certain sparkling liveliness mixed with an intensity of gaze that commanded attention.

Toots was Lulu’s caretaker, to the last ensuring the younger, deeply traumatized long-haired owl-faced one was cleaned up on request and providing a pillow for most sleeps. There was occasional testing of the pride lines, mostly initiated by the junior who now still wonders at her senior’s absence, retreating to her earlier anxiety about the great outdoors of our garden, wandering forth with more cautious steps because Toots isn’t there to lead the way. They had shared a caged existence for 6 months in a local cat shelter before we found took them away with us 8 months ago.

We miss Toots lots…too short loved, too long gone. Lulu does, too.

Appreciation (30) … Water days

Appreciation (30) … Water days

Torrey Orton

Nov. 2, 2010

A different Australian nature, a wet one. We did waterfalls two days ago, as many as we could get into a 6 hour driving window – Lal Lal, Sailors and Trentham – spurred by a 3 inch rainfall in our backyard and a BOM-enhanced confidence that the outer plains and hills got up to 5 inches. The Lal Lal in the link and that below are seriously different. My pic is 311010 a day after the big drop. Trentham was like this by higher by 10 metres and ½ again the water volume. Lal Lal swished, Trentham thundered, Sailors burbled from two distinct rivulets coming over the same cliff edge. Interestingly to me, the pic does not capture how muddy the water actually was, as many in the link do not either. Probably trashy photog work by me. I am not alone. Turn your screen on end for the next minute.

The drive, totalling 300ks, was pocked for me by incessant glimpses to one side of the road and the other looking for water. It took a while to realise what was happening. I needed to see water in the fields and woods, knowing that it must be there and that it could be ten years again before I would see it (and, I now realise while writing, that ten years may not be there for me to do so). I yearned for it – the sight of water on land. I don't know that I've viscerally yearned before, but the word is right though I've never spoken or written it. I must have learned it in others' speech and writing.

Ten years of drought has meant very little water on land. What appeared sank so quickly out of sight it often did not even bring stream beds back to a watery life even for a few days. We've walked a dozen stream/river beds of sand and rock, looked for a slight run-off in dry creeks. I've often thought I was fully habituated to the great Australian dry and flat. Yesterday tells me I'm not I've just been hankering slyly for the rolling and the wet. My perception of being in the rolling wet yesterday was enhanced measurably by the amount of introduced greens along the way – exotic trees and food crops which a spring in northern hemisphere always produces. Trentham / Daylesford/Lal Lal are rolling and presently wet.


This yearning comes in company with my many wonders about things past and struggles at the moment about how much of the future to devote to them – to focussing them, refining them, rediscovering them. My water worries must be an edge of this need arising from my long pleasure in places, especially the natural ones or the nature in places not so natural like the trees of Paris or Beijing. There is something unfinished – missed? – there in my old places. Next year US and Europe – the first looking back seeking to tie off something(s)? … the second a back (to France) as a step towards futures spent there in part.


Or perhaps my flow is deeper than that.

Appreciations (1) …why appreciate?

Appreciations (1) …why appreciate?
Torrey Orton
May 6, 2009

While this is a new theme for me, it is not new for humanity. Various people have recommended gratitude to us. While approving, I’m not moved by gratitude because of its links to quasi-religious formulas like ‘blessings’. I discovered that there are wonderful things to acknowledge, celebrate, reward by remarking…things which I notice but leave in the innards of my awareness. Often, reporting them makes others feel new interest, insight, desire, awareness, and sustains mine along the way. Building the latter resources is my primary aim here. If I try to write what I appreciate I am forced to get it together in some affecting way which meets my own experience and has a hope of offering that to others. For me, the process is always illuminating in unexpectable ways.

I also undertake this venture because my sceptical side is tuned to the problematic, the doubtful,…which leaves me tending to underestimate the certain, the sure, the light and light-hearted. Conscious countering of this tendency is possible, but I never get much better at automatically reaching for a star rather than the scar. Hopefully, like wearing seatbelts because it’s the law, I’ll get naturalised into appreciation with never a thought of deviating from it as normal.

In another frame, I am a late life convert to story as a way of making and finding meaning. I find myself telling stories to therapy and coaching clients, and using them to structure activities for leadership events. These are usually real stories, not ones I’ve picked up somewhere in the training ether. I don’t do storytelling well unless it arises spontaneously in the work with clients.

I have friends who are really good at this – the kind of good you can get by trying a lot and watching others who’ve been doing something longer and better than oneself. So, this is an emulating initiative for me, too. I’m slow to allow the possibility that someone else has thought of something useful to do and developed it before me (though I know perfectly well that they do so).

Further, this is not an anger driven event (not to preclude the possibility that I’ll also find myself appreciating some matters arising from angers). It came to me in a moment of appreciation, from the perspective of which I noticed I had been appreciating more over recent years. At the moment I can’t remember the original appreciation. Maybe it was a search of Appreciative Inquiry which I was trying to appreciate against the grain of an original exposure some years ago where AI became a cover for being ‘nice’ and not looking at hard things except appreciatively (or so it seemed at the time). Hard things can be appreciated, but they have to be acknowledged first. There goes that problem seeker again.

A recent example of something I appreciated was revisiting sites we have walked and skied for decades after the Victorian Black Saturday fires of early February ‘09. This was a reality shifting event. There’s nothing like seeing the remnants of natural and human landscapes soon after a fire. We’ve done it before at various stages of recovery, but never so close to home and so much of those landscapes ones which we treasured by repeated visits. See next Appreciations for my impressions.