Think of a cat purring.  Think of the cat’s face.  What do you see?

I see an animal at full unrepentent repose, comfortable in her skin, unafraid of letting the world see her as she really is.

This is purr power.

I don’t think of it as egotistical at all.  I think of it as being in my natural home – a place of being happy in my body, mind and spirit – a place where the hamster and her voices have gone to the meadow to play and left me with the simple pleasure of being happy in my own company.

Should someone come along and stroke me, all the better.  BUT I don’t need that outside stroke.  I and my world are fine just the way they are.

How often do you find yourself in that place?  And if not often enough – or at all – why not?

I can share my own reasons:  the hamster voice (she who is best friends with my scared limbic lizard brain) telling me that unless I’m striving every single moment, unless I am the ant endlessly toiling day-after-day doing something I do automatically with no passion but lots of professional, then I am not living up to my potential.

But Cat has something to teach us.  It is that making a living at something you absolutely love, living in your integrity while doing it, may never take you to the top (however you define that), but it will satisfy your soul.

And what did you come here to do?  Impress everyone with all the material things lots of money can buy?  Or leave the world a better place for those who come after because you paid attention to the path only you can follow – that path that makes a stronger fabric of life for everyone now and to come – that path that honors what those who have come before and sacrificed to create a space for you to be who you really and truely are.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are days that hamster and lizard sound impossibly logical and I don’t know how I can ignore the lure of comfortable “security.”  Then I remember that in life there is no such thing as security.  There are earthquakes that happen where earthquakes have never happened.  There are tornados that tear paths across landscapes that see a  tornado once every 100 years, there are floods where no one has ever seen them before or higher and stronger than anything in history.  There is cancer and heart disease and all the uneases that pharmaceutical companies want to sell you a pill (just ignore that long list of side effects at the end of the commercial).  There are days that I think if I could just drown out my heart and spirit and collect a paycheck from, say, the military industrial complex that is the main way of making a living where I live, then I could have so many more things.  All those things the hamster and lizard are convinced I need to be happy.

But my heart knows.  After years of practice and tons of experience trying to be something I am not, and chasing goals that are great for my bottom line but not so much for my spirit, my heart easily wins out.

Joseph Campbell says, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned.”

And I will add that’s not just a one time thing.  Life keeps moving as long as we are alive.  There is no arrival.  Arrival while you’re still living is another version of stuck – whether or not the outside world is drooling to be where you are.

Back to Cat and Purr Power.  Cats I’ve had also drool when they’re particularly happy and purring really really hard.

What would it take for you to be  Purr Power?  What life do you have to get rid of to get there?  What story needs to die?  What chasm must be lept? And what in the world are you waiting for?

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also that delicate silver bells would ring to announce the arrival of grace [oh! yes!  pleeeeaaaasssseeee!!]; but no.  It’s clog and slog and scooch on the floor, in silence, in the dark.  I suppose if you were snatched out of the mess you’d miss the lesson.  The lesson is the slog.  Ann Lamotte.