Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

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“If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death . . . If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life. The heart is what makes us human . .”

-- Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy.

I attended a “Circle of Trust” retreat focusing on the work of Parker Palmer, learned about the power of the “broken open heart,” and came home to my cat of fifteen years whose body suddenly felt like a sack of bones. The change was so profound in the two days I had been away, I couldn’t take in what I felt when I held him. A week later he died with his head craddled in my hand and my heart broke. If there is power in that, I don’t feel it. I don’t know if my heart broke open or simply broke. His death is perhaps too recent, the experience of loss still too profound. What I do feel is an empty yearning for his presence, wonderful, annoying, compelling, and comforting, a gift to my mornings when he would walk over and around me, or simply sit and stare until I got up and let him and Conner-the-dog outdoors.

Now Conner learns that waking me is his job. I watch him as he explores how to live in our household without Max.

Max’ presence rewarded me at the end of the day when I felt my efforts since morning had been inconsequential, invisible. His presence rewarded me on days that had been rich and full, when I came home spent and weary and retreated to our couch where he settled his full-bodied warmth on to me, anchoring me, and then all my effort seemed worthwhile.

He came to us a kitten, adopted from the Humane Society, a kitten who immediately filled our household with Presence. He was never afraid of Timber, our 100 pound German Shepherd. She was surprised by his gutsy playfulness. Timber had carried the weight of our household, the responsibility for our safety, for nine years. When four years later she died at thirteen, Max naturally and gracefully assumed that responsibility.

“‘Heart’ comes from the Latin, cor, the core of self, that centerplace where all of our ways of knowing converge . . .”

Max moved in with us just as a business I had grown and nourished died at eighteen. I would return home every day from that process absolutely heart-broken, heart-sick with loss, failure, defeat, betrayal and death, and Max would charm me back in to the world with his wild pleasure, exploring every centimeter of the household, finding the most mundane items endlessly fascinating and entertaining.

He stayed like that, curious, engaged and full-out alive. Gorgeously grey, he was a solid and supple twenty pounds. Dominant in every sense of the word, he ran the household, patrolled the yard, yet came running when friends visited, was often there at the gate waiting when I came home at the end of the day.

When I was studying to become a BodyTalk practitioner and offering in-home practice sessions, friends would come for their session, we’d start, and then suddenly there was Max from wherever else he had been in the house or yard. He wanted to lie on them during their session, or under the table, or on the couch nearby. I never was certain if he was offering healing, receiving healing, or both.

These last two years I had used my training in BodyTalk for Animals with him, focusing on helping him to live to fifteen. Now I wonder what stopped me from imagining a healthy-hale seventeen year old cat.

Since his death, I have spoken with others, with both old and new friends, about cherished four-leggeds who were so much more than “pet,” neither surrogate son nor daughter, but full-on companion and friend. Animals you were incredibly gifted to know and live with, sharing time and space, and yes, love.

For years, I’d gotten ahead of myself, afraid as Max aged, savoring the time, watching it as if it truly was the sand in an hour glass running out, wishing I could add more sand, hedge the inevitable. I knew however much time we had, it wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t imagine my life without him, living without him. And now, I am.

“There are some human experiences that only the heart can comprehend and only heart-talk can convey.”

My daughter picked Max from his litter mates, something I have thanked her for so many, many years. I thank her now again for the amazing gift to our lives of his full-out presence.

We all have deaths we chronicle, deaths that form and shape and unalterably change, define us.

I am changed. Our household, changed. Our hearts, changed. Broken open or apart? I don’t yet know. What good may come of it, I don’t yet know. A hug with my daughter, shared tears, shared stories, cherished memories bring us close. We watch Conner-the-dog adjust, watch as he expands his presence, trying to figure out who he is after eleven years of having his life shaped by Maxwell the Maximum Cat.

The leaves from the raspberry bushes that shaded Max as he lounged under them this past summer still clung to the plants as he died, dark and red and dying themselves. We gathered them along with lavender and sage to honor and protect him on his journey, wrapped his body in towels and in love and appreciation.

Always a full-bore sensualist, Max would have reveled in these recent magical days of November, redolent with sunshine and warmth. The cold, long days of winter, he simply endured -- the coming long days of winter, empty of his footsteps in the snow.

~ Thanks to Parker Palmer’s “Healing the Heart of Democracy,” and to non-profit Hopa Mountain for hosting the retreat that introduced me to his work. And, always, thanks to Max.

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“...We must understand that we are all in this together . . . we humans are a profoundly interconnected species -- entwined with one another and with all forms of life . . . “.

-- Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy

Imagine you had the best mentor in the world. What if that mentor isn’t a person but is the life all around and within you?

At the October Montana Non-Profit Association Conference in Missoula, Certified Biomicry Specialist Toby Lynn Herzlich suggested looking to nature for guidance, invited those of us listening to study nature’s “best practices,” something that we here in Montana are ideally situated to do. On her website, Herzlich writes, “We are learning to live sustainably on planet earth – why not turn to the Earth, itself, and gather insight from the 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success?”

Most Western institutions are based on a Newtonian world view, seeking to understand the world by breaking it in to parts. The result? Fragmentation and brokenness. Biomimicry and the study of nature’s best practices invite a shift from a linear approach to one that’s cyclical and adaptable, one that moves us from isolation to an awareness of being part of an interconnected whole.

“Life already does what we are trying to do, creating conditions that are conducive to life.” Herzlich said, “An attitude of awe is the first step to becoming a student of nature.”

In that study are time-tested solutions for the complexity of challenges we face, challenges that are systemic, global. She said, “We are called to rethink our basics, to think less like a machine and more like an ecosystem,” to reshape society in ways that are healthy, regenerative & just. We need to be open to discovery of how we can organize ourselves differently, need to shift our attention from what we knew and look to the natural world as a mentor.

For instance, nature cooperates; builds community; saves water in times of drought; invests in the next generations; educates; and protects. It finds opportunities even when conditions are tough; its purposeful; collaborative; adaptive; resilient; constantly confronting new possibilities. It models shared leadership.

Nature is a feedback rich, criticism free zone. Herzlich said that we need to listen for messages in our system, try a lot of things, fail fast,integrate the unexpected, institutionalize what works and let go the rest, let go of what no longer works. We need to learn to work with nature, not exploit it or force it.

“Nature is not ‘out there,’” she said. “We are it, part of it.”

"Be part of a new story of living on earth, humbling ourselves to sit and listen and learn and be grateful for what is all around us.”

How might you make that invitation a part of your Thanksgiving celebration?

Resources to learn more:

http://www.asknature.org

http://biomimicry.net

http://www.bio-sis.net

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Kathleen Clary Miller has written 300+ columns and stories for periodicals both local and national, and has authored three books (www.amazon.com/author/millerkathleenclary). She lives in the woods of the Ninemile Valley, thirty miles west of Missoula.

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          “Who’s this?” asked my twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Clary.  She, her year-younger sister, Kate, my sister, and my niece had each traveled from a different state in the nation to celebrate my sixtieth birthday.  Our party favors had arrived a few days earlier in a box my sister sent ahead filled with five pairs of matching flannel pajamas. 

It was raining outside, so at noon we were dressed in them, my girls and I snuggled in front of the fire ogling old photographs while the other two hunched over jigsaw puzzle pieces laid face up on the corner table.  They only interrupted their concentrated effort to take a look at any picture of particular interest we’d unearthed. 

               “That’s your grandmother,” I replied after looking over Clary’s shoulder at the black and white image of a knock-kneed and awkward pre-teenager dressed in a droopy white dress, her blunt haircut adorned with a crooked veil.  “It was her Confirmation.”  Small wonder her granddaughter could not recognize in the sour expression of the girl who stood akimbo and squinted into the camera that glamorous woman who all their life had smiled gaily while whisking around in crisp petticoats beneath Grace Kelly dresses, wearing high spike heels to plant potted daffodils.

            When I was growing up, my mother stored her uncategorized cache of family photographs in the deep bottom drawer of her mahogany bedside table.  There was well-intentioned talk of albums in which she would someday house them—annually, her New Year’s resolution.  But organization was not mama’s forte.  The surfaces of our house were paragons of tidiness, but if you opened her desk drawer, you risked the ability to close it. 

            Once a year or so my sister and I would sit Indian style for hours on the floor of our parent’s bedroom—sanctified ground with plushier carpet than even in the living room—to gingerly open the infamous drawer and randomly select black-and-white streaked and smeared Polaroids from the hopeless jumble of recorded memories.  As we grew, our trips to the stash revealed more recent poses.  “Welcome to Yosemite” advertised the roadside sign that we’d reluctantly flanked, wearing the matching red, white, and blue outfits my mother had purchased for the road trip.  Like Dorothy skipping into the poppy field after days in the dreary forest, suddenly we were in color!

            At some point during my college years, being the “Type A” daughter I stepped in, dumped the drawer on its side, piled the passage of time into stacks, and tidily inserted them into leather bound books merchandised at our local stationery store.  By this time, my own penchant for snapshots that well might now be diagnosed as Instamatic Mania required I become a steady customer of the establishment, and my father build more bookshelves for the upstairs attic. 

            After my mother died and the family home had to be sold, I thought twice about hauling dozens of bulky photo albums to my own home with inadequate storage space.  On an especially emotional afternoon between the signing of real estate documents and close of escrow I peeled carefully arranged pictures off their sticky backgrounds and slipped them from their plastic sleeves —to drop them untitled and willy nilly into cardboard boxes with lids that could stack neatly in any closet corner.  Whenever we got around to looking at them, I thought, we’d pick them one by one and out of any order—each curled-edge square a time-machine surprise.

            “What in the heck were you doing here, Mom?”  Clary burst out laughing and pointed to the tissue paper flower arrangement the size of a beach ball tethered to my noggin and atop my body clothed in nothing but skin-tight green leotard and tights—at an age where my tummy still protruded and my braces glinted in the sun.

            “My mother’s idea of the perfect Halloween costume—I’m a flower!”  I said as I rolled my eyes.  It’s vital that a mother save such incriminating evidence of her own “bad phase” so that her own children are comforted by images of theirs that they consider she cruelly captured on film.  Not to mention that by comparison, their memory of my having permitted them any costume of their choosing proved considerable parental benevolence on my part.

            “Look at this one, Mom!” Kate exclaimed while producing the one of me sitting at her third birthday party, my hair in a long, blonde, French braid, “You’re so young!”  I knew that was coming. 

            Despite experiencing childhood in different eras, my daughters couldn’t help but notice the resemblance to my sister and me—color-coordinated outfits, poses on a bench in the front yard, sitting side by side wearing red coats and holly berry wreaths in front of the decorated Christmas tree. 

            It’s a senior thing to say, but nowadays pictures abound in staggering numbers.  They are flopped by the hundreds into folders on computer laptops, accessible at the click of a mouse—no spatial storage necessary.  I must admit the bright screen enables enhanced, colorful and dramatic viewing.

            “Still,” Clary mused when she passed to me a frozen moment in time showing her as an infant so I could please explain whatever had possessed me to put her in that baggy dress, “there’s something about reaching into a box, picking out a picture, and then fingering it in your hands.”  Indeed.

            Hours later, after tripping through time and generations, we set the first box aside and left the second one for tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the five of us gathered together in our pajamas, operated the automatic timer on my digital camera and saved the moment after discarding, right there on the spot any frames that didn’t suit our fancy.  I immediately connected a power cord from camera to laptop and e-mailed our top five selections to each of them.  They dragged them into a folder marked “Reunion,” or some other such title for the precious and fleeting time we would spend together.

            The morning I ferried them all to the airport to fly to their respective homes, once again my throat thickened and my heart ached with the loss.  I drove to Kinko’s and transferred the digital images until they slid from the machine through its slot, metamorphosed into glossy photographs that I promptly mailed to each of their addresses.  But before I stamped the envelopes, I jotted a quick note.

            To begin your own cardboard box.

                                                              END

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• Photograph at a distance. You’ll need to because fire zones are protected both because you need to stay out of the way of fire fighters and because your safety is essential.

• Use the sports mode or a similar setting that uses a fast shutter speed to produce sharp, detailed images. Slow speeds give softer looking images. Experiment.
  

• Fire is particularly dramatic contrasted against an evening or night sky.  Avoid distracting artificial lights like yard lights and headlights.

• To help get clear, sharp photographs, use a tripod to stabilize your camera. Or hand-hold using a lens with built-in vibration control. Why? Vibration kills sharpness as surely as a bad lens or bad focusing. If you plan to take long exposures, be sure to use your tripod and turn off your vibration control.