Finding Pleasure in Flowers: A Search for a Lost Pet

An animal and nature lover, Radhika, tells us the trials and tribulations of looking for her pet cat. A Different Truths exclusive.

My cat went missing last week. To say I went absolutely crazy looking for Mr. Kitty is an understatement. All the time I had apart from my job and between sleeping at night, I have spent looking for him. I looked for him in our building, in the parks, in the basement parking, the staircases of neighboring buildings, in abandoned construction sites, I called out his name a thousand times and my imagination played tricks as I swore I could hear him meowing a few dozen times, this has been on for days and I don’t know when it crossed the point of obsessiveness.

I was like a deer in headlight, my mind frozen in the face of this unbearable truth, Mr. Kitty was gone, perhaps forever. Today morning, I was scouring a patch of desolate wilderness in our neigbourhood, with a big hat and a snake hook, I was looking behind bushes and the thick undergrowth for signs of him. Then suddenly I noticed my surroundings…like really noticed them beyond the chatter of my mind. I noticed a frightened peahen rushing through the bushes as I walked past…I noticed atleast seven different species of butterflies flying around the wild flowers, I found an army of marching ants off to their new conquest, I even found a leaf full of a hundred (atleast) baby caterpillars …the breeze was blowing…I took a deep breath…and let all this sink in… breathed in the quietness, the solitude and the sunlight. I realised this was a rare moment.  One of those moments you know you will remember forever, the ones you normally missed out on, realizing only later that they were important in retrospect. So, I just stood there and watched, just being a witness to life for a few precious moments instead of being pushed and pulled by it. And suddenly it was Okay, it was like the clouds had floated away silently and “I could see clearly now that the rain had gone.”

I thought of how much I love Mr. Kitty but that I could not control life or the outcomes of anything. That is the nature of this life we are experiencing, it’s a process that we go through. I realized also that it was the power of nature that brought me back to mindfulness today, to this realisation that its in the ebbs and flow of life, the rise and the falls that the biggest lessons lie for all of us. Life whispers to us in the darkness and dances with us in the light. It speaks to us through the silence of the woods, through flower buds about to open with promises of tomorrow, through caterpillars on half eaten leaves waiting for their uncomfortable but beautiful transformation and through our hearts bursting with love for another soul and through the pain of loss.

Poet, Robert Frost’s, in his contemplation of life in A Prayer in Spring wrote:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Frost talks of wanting to preserve the beauty of the time as it is, to fully enjoy the moment for as long as possible before it passes by. Flowers, orchards, bees and birds constitute love. Everything in nature, man included, is celebrating rebirth and recreation of body and soul. It is here where the self finds freedom – freedom away from the outside pressures of social reality.

My search for Mr. Kitty continues but from a place of knowing, from the patch of wilderness I went in looking for sometone I lost but …found myself in.

©Radhika Bhagat

Photos sourced by the author and the internet

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