Animal intelligence

My 19 yr old cat makes every effort to avoid throwing up on the carpets I inherited from my Mother. These aren't hairballs. It is bright yellow bile. And she understands that it upsets me more to clean it up from the carpets than when she makes it to the wooden floor. When she can't make it, I always feel sad because it is another reminder that she is aging and her life, like mine, or my Mother's before me, is finite.

Today, I only wrote 122 new words for Chapter 4 of my dissertation on "Trigger point theory as aesthetic activism." But I have figured out what I want to write about relationships between various forms of mapping that represent what I want to say about complexity in the anthropocene. My cat, my Mother, the carpets, the fish of Fish Story, are part of an elegant tapestry not a brick in a pyramid with a top and a bottom. We living humans don't sit at the apex of a pile of bricks, we are a dot in the complex tapestry that maps our future. I think that when we see that our lives are no more important, no more thought-based than any other being, perhaps we will see how to choreograph our decisions with greater grace. Then we might know how to survive the anthropocene.