Page 103 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

and spiritual experiences I had with them.

Although I had many religious experiences as a child, my first mystical experience happened

when I was about twelve years old. I remember lying in my bed at night, connecting with the

maple tree outside of my bedroom window in the moonlight, and suddenly understanding that

all of life was a great net, a web of connection. I saw how I was connected to the tree, to other

people, to animals, and how this connection went far beyond the beings that I knew

personally, extending all over the earth. I remember clearly being aware that time was not real,

that that these connections extended into both the “past” and the “future” in a way that was

both incomprehensible and perfectly obvious.

These experiences saved me. They allowed me to have a sense of connection, of belonging,

of family, community, and kinship that was lacking in my life. I was able to feel in a deep and

wordless way that I did actually belong on the Earth, even though I often felt like a stranger

here.

Guru Cat

My first meditation teacher was a cat. He was a beat-up street cat named Freddie whose

body was scarred and torn. He’d lost both ears, his eyelids were ripped, and he came to me

infected with FIV—the feline equivalent of HIV.

Freddie was semi-feral, and in our first months together, he scratched, bit and hissed at me.

And then, seemingly overnight, he made what I now understand was a conscious

choice...and settled down to become a lap cat and my first true guru.

My spiritual path up until that point in my life had been circuitous and without a clear focus or

tradition. After I left the fundamentalist Christian cult in which I’d been raised, I voraciously

read and studied, trying to find a spirituality that made sense to me as a young lesbian

woman whose primary connection with the divine was through classical music and the piano.

I studied the Buddhist teachings of Chogyam Trungpa, the writings of Christian mystics

Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Hildgaard of Bingen, feminist theologian Mary Daly,