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Veronika Bond's avatar

Beautiful!

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thank you Veronika✨🌟💖🙏🕊️

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Bridget LeRoy's avatar

Oh Camilla! I love this! I remember having a deep discussion with one of my Buddhist leaders when we had an invasion of insects at our place up in Wilmot, NH (the answer was that violence is never the answer but that I could protect my home from invaders). “Kindrovert”…. Perfect. And how lucky to share that sacred moment with another species—it always puts our own egotistical importance in perspective, doesn’t it? Man is not “God’s favorite” — we all share this space equally. ❤️

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thanks so much Bridget! And yes, it's a beautiful thing to contemplate the killing of any sentient being, and to simultaneously recognize our right to protect our home from invaders😁 I love how you put that. I always love hearing from you Bridget, thanks for reading and commenting✨🌟💖🙏🕊️

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Isabella E McClellan's avatar

This is totally me! I have to chase a furry shadow this morning... lovely writing.

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thanks for reading and responding Isabella! and cheers to a fellow kindrovert💕🙏🕊️😁

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Bernadette Geraghty's avatar

How wonderful to experience such a creature:)

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

thanks for your kind support Bernadette. it truly was. i feel very lucky❤️🙏🕊️

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Erma Cooke's avatar

Beautiful. It reminded me that at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, a bobcat came to my house, sat on the corner of my carport and just looked in. It was young and beautiful and we just sat and looked at one another. After a bit I looked away and when I looked back, it was gone. Looking back on that time, I realize it was my deeper dive into solitude, quiet and befriending my being. I was single, relatively new to the community and working in a hospital. I would work a week and be home alone a week.

What an amazing journey this has been and continues to be. Thank you for sharing your story as it helped me put together the pieces of mine.

I like and resonate with the kindovert as well. I love my quiet and I, like you, love the deep dives and small, thoughtful conversations.

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thank you so much for your lovely response Erma! And I'm delighted to hear of your experience too, and that you have "befriended your being" ❤️🙏🕊️ Congratulations on this! I do believe that if more human beings did this, our world would be a much healthier place✨🧚‍♀️🤸‍♀️🌼🌷🌈🌺🪷💕☀️ p.s. I'm very happy to hear that me sharing my story helped you to put together pieces of yours! I love how art, and any creative practice including writing, brightens the connections between us humans😁

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Michael Edward's avatar

A wonderful piece, Camilla.

Also, in some perfectly synchronistic way when I saw your post titled ‘bobcat’ I had been writing a piece about when my friend and I were in the US on a skate trip and we saw a Bobcat when we’re were hiking along a trail in the Hollywood hills.

I just found that too cool not to share :)

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thanks Michael, and that is a way cool moment of synchronicity😁 thanks for sharing and making me smile, yet again. And I look forward to reading your piece. Always fun to hear from you Michael♥️🙏🕊️

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Julie Schmidt's avatar

Yes! The moments with nature when she reveals herself in her wild and feral ways. What a wondrous experience, a precious gift. Truly a moment of bobcat medicine! Reminding me of my own meeting with a wild cat, a mountain lion which I wrote about a few posts back.

And I completely agree... "the arrogance of our human species in how we believe we’re so entitled to claim this planet earth as only ours." The more feral I become the more ridiculous that whole notion is.

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thanks Julie. Reading your last line, "The more feral I become the more ridiculous that whole notion is." made me smile. And I love the timing. Right now in this River of Words class I'm taking with the author Beth Kempton, in today's class she quoted Mary Oliver:

“Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog. I don’t think anyone saw me! At the end, I was exhausted and sore, but I had seen the world from the level of the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces. I was some slow old fox, wandering, breathing, hitching along, lying down finally at the edge of the bog, under the swirling rickrack of the trees.

You must not ever stop being whimsical.”

And then she adds, as if as an afterthought,

“And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”

Boom. That’s the kind of place that our wildness takes us. - Beth Kempton

Love, love, love. May we all re-claim our whimsy and wild ✨🌟💖🙏🕊️

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Beth Kempton's avatar

❤️ What an encounter!

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Camilla Sanderson's avatar

Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Beth!❤️🙏🕊️

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SuddenlyJamie's avatar

Love the story about encountering a bobcat (!!), but am even more intrigued by @Beth Kempton 's concept of the "Kindrovert." I hadn't heard of that until you shared the excerpt from her book, and it rings so true and familiar to me. I just never had a word for it. (Hooray for making up words when we need them!) And now I'm off to check out the piece you recommended by @Veronika Bond - thanks for putting me on this path!

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