WAKING with the Blossom Boys

My cats awaken me between 5:30 and 6:30 am every morning. It begins with the smaller cat, Ollie the Mensch, casually sauntering into the bedroom if he has not slept on my feet at the bottom of the bed. He makes himself known by tossing a make believe mouse around the floor. Then he lets loose a high pitched muted mournful sound. If I don't respond by turning on the light, his meow intensifies until he is yowling loudly as if he is suffering,and starving. He leaping onto the dresser, tapping the metal lamp base with his claws. The ceremony of disruption for attention alerts the second cat, a larger and more docile cat named Sweet Boy Buster. He pokes his grey head into the room. He wanders in and joins Ollie adding his odd cries, more chirps than mews to the invocation. I surrender, and get up. It is the only choice. The only response. They have trained me.

As soon as my feet touch the Tibetan Rug beside my bed, the cats, who I refer to as the Blossom Boys, part of the feline mafia , grow quiet. Tails go up in unison and they march triumphantly out of the room, wait in the hall, until they are assured that I am on the way to feed them. They are street boys, rescue cats, fearful.when the sun rises .that they may starve. Although they ate the night before, and slept on a soft couch in a huge warm room, a fear lives inside of them. It is the same as the memory of fear that crouches in wait inside of each of us, that we will starve, not be cared for, be thrust out of the comfort of our lives.

This morning, instead of getting back under the covers, I put the kettle up to boil, opened the curtains to let the light into the kitchen, and entered my iphone to see if there were any important messages. To my horror, immediately disturbing my sense of safety, I read that the US (the country? or the mad regime?) had invaded Venezuela, let bombs drop on the city of Caracas. My stomach turned upside down. The fear waiting in a dark room in my mind, slid out like the ooze of a polluted ocean discoloring and hardening sand. My body felt as if my heart was a drum pressing against my skin, beating loudly. The cats in a trance of eating, remained unaware. The plants whispered amongst themselves. I heard them, and calmed my mind my filling a pitcher with water - offering them indoor sustenance. An image of armoured tanks moving down Broadway broke loose from my imagination. It is possible, I thought. I remembered the excitement I felt before going to sleep that we had a new mayor in New York, that the novel I am reading leans against a pillow on my bed, was ready to pull. me into the next chapter where the author has left a bread crumb trail of beautiful words and lavish events where a fig tree is a central character and speaks.

I climbed back into bed. Legs stretched out in front of me, I sat with the disbelief that was now taking shape. It is a real event, another grotesque step in the direction of violence, and chaos. The history of my childhood and the powerful invocations that we must never let it happen again, had stored this fear in a small box behind walls. The lid that was sometimes of late lifted, fell off completely. The cats wandered back into the room. Seated away from each other, backs turned, making a pattern as lovely as the two sides of a great flower on the red rug, they cleaned themselves in unison. I watched and asked myself, How not to fall into despair? I opened a clean page in my journal. I would recollect, and revise, the series of stories in a performance I am sharing on Saturday night in a Jewish Arts Center in Atlanta called REJOICE,, REGARDLESS. Slowly, mapping out a story I have known for a long time, I let words, moving up through the maelstrom of my sorrow and shock, shift through me, speak into my fingers. I could write how I would tell the story given the increasingly dangerous and tragic events in the world without blaming anyone specifically. Letting symbol, image, metaphor, reach out. My heart calmed as I re constructed the story of a boy who spoke to animals and plants, and loved to walk in the forest. A boy who could not remain in the confines of the dark room of his school in Poland. The boy who the village took care of, strange as he was, by giving him a job of taking all the children to school every morning. He was warned not to take them through the woods, but he could not resist. He loved the forest and the joy that moved his spirit when he felt the trees around him. And he taught the dour children to laugh and sing, to walk almost like a dance, feeling their feet on the earth through their thin boots. When the children began to return home, cheerful, the parents accepted the boy's route because they were happy.

But the parents were not the only ones to notice that the children were changed, happier, healthier. The Evil One was furious. How could this boy bring so much joy into the world?

He complained to God and God said, "Go ahead, see if you can diminish or destroy his joy" And the Evil One, delighted, raced back to earth and took out the heart of a poor old man, deaf and dumb, living in a hovel, rejected by many for his difference and poverty. The Evil One placed his dark heart into the body of the old man at night and turned him into a monster who roamed the forest causing havoc, inciting terror in everyone.

As I wrote out the story, not changing it, but bringing it to light, I let words rise up through the fear, dissolving its thickness, opening a path to my joy that was inside, inextinguishable, present. Joy and fear mixed. I was infused by my recognition of how potent the fear, how possible that the fear could render me paralyzed, and filled with frustration and hopelessness. My body settled. I let intelligence and joy invent words. It did not obliterate reality, but let reality be seen and felt without needing to cut myself off from the joy within. Ollie leaped onto the bed and took his place against the back of my knees where he pressed himself against me, the one who feeds him, who does not put him back on the street. And Sweet Boy took his place on the edge of the couch, near the plants, where he slept, cautious, still cautious because having spent two years on the streets always afraid, hungry, and in danger, he was getting used to being safe. Now, awake, I am ready to face this day and what it might bring. I make a pot of french coffee. I thank the beans and the electric water boiling pot. I glance over at the plants climbing up tall green poles making a curtain. I see new buds. I watch dead leaves fall to the floor. As a storyteller, this is my task. The old story, I first told when I was twenty two years old over forty years ago, awakens fresh ready to enter the mindstream heart ears of those who will come to the concert, who like everything in this world is capable of remembering the victorious power of joy, regardless. You may find this naive. And perhaps it is. But the world is made of energy, spirit, connectivity, and the telling of a story from the heart has the ability to keep our eyes open and our hearts beating, awake.