Finding allegory in Inky's great escape

There are some amazing stories of pets finding their way home after long absences.  But, an octopus?

Octopi are intelligent, curious creatures. They are so intelligent that aquarium keepers use an enrichment manual to help ward off boredom for octopi in captivity. Aquarium octopi have toys like Mr. Potato Head and Lego, and some can solve puzzles that have a series of locks and keys.

A couple of years ago, an octopus named Inky got himself caught up in a crayfish pot and was in bad shape when a New Zealand aquarium received him. But, despite the aquarium’s tender care and advanced education program, it seems Inky had no intention of staying forever. 

Whether Inky was more inquisitive and restless than other octopi, he was wily enough to escape. I can imagine him plotting his jailbreak like the fish in Finding Nemo, the tale of a clown fish that gets captured, put in a tank, and makes it back to the ocean to be reunited with his father.

Inky’s opportunity for escape came one night a couple of months ago when someone failed to secure his tank properly.  Under cover of darkness, he made his slippery exit from the tank, crept across the floor and squeezed his supple rugby sized body into a 6” floor drain. Good thing the drain led to the ocean.

We can explain Inky’s daring and successful escape using scientific knowledge and common sense.  A number of factors coalesced in his favour. An unsecured tank, no keepers in sight, a wet floor, a drain leading to the ocean, an intelligent, curious creature whose body is perfect for Houdini maneuvers converged in a perfect storm. But I prefer to think of Inky’s escape in terms of mystery.

Seeing Inky's escape as allegory

For Inky, the ocean was home. It was where he belonged. While the aquarium restored him to health, provided for his physical needs in a safe environment, and stimulated his brain, Inky was restless.  His tank mimicked the ocean, but was not the ocean. Ultimately, enrichment activities with intriguing toys were a poor substitute for life on the reef; he was itching to leave the ivory tower of the aquarium and try out his new skills in the real world.  Perhaps something of a metaphysical nature, something that eludes our understanding, fuelled Inky’s desire to escape. Perhaps Inky had an intuition of divinity and his place in creation that compelled him to make a break for the ocean.

So while media reports of Inky’s escape focused on the intelligence of octopi, I saw allegory in the story about Inky.  Inky’s restlessness points to the restlessness of the human spirit of which we are often oblivious.   Like Inky, we are not satisfied with the place we inhabit. While crayfish pots draw us in and capture us, they cannot hold us for long.  Nor can the finest tanks and toys stave off our dissatisfaction.  They are merely distractions from our spiritual longing. 

So, as we attempt to transcend our traps and tanks, we spread our tentacles in search of drains that may lead nowhere. We wind up following the wrong gods home.

Seeds nourish us - body and soul

“Look, Granny. Basil sprouting!” exclaimed my granddaughter as she took me to see the tiny seedlings on the table in her playroom.  Earlier that day, we had wandered around my yard, hand in hand, looking for sprouting things.  We marveled at the tulips poking through the leaf mulch, the buds forming on the lilacs, and the hellebore Lenten Rose blooming on the sunny south side of the house.  The hellebore is the first thing to bloom in my garden and I am always tickled when it blooms before Easter.

A few days later, my husband and I took our granddaughter to Seedy Saturday, a nationwide movement that promotes the cultivation and preservation of heirloom and endangered varieties of food crops.  Our local event had a kids’ planting table, and before our granddaughter planted her seed in the Styrofoam cup that she had filled with soil, she cradled it gently in her tiny hand as if she were in the presence of something holy.

I have a healthy respect for seeds.  Coming from an Italian background, I grew up with a vegetable garden in the backyard. It was a riot of plants that produced abundant crops, many of which my father planted from the seeds he saved annually. Tomato seeds germinated in little pots by the basement window; others we sowed directly into the ground.  From seed to table, I grew up with crunchy carrots, juicy tomatoes, meaty roman beans, tender lettuce and bitter radicchio that tantalized (or tortured) my taste buds and nourished my body. 

Image courtesy of KEK064 at freedigitalphotos.net

Seeds keep up rooted

I used to wonder why my father kept seeds when it would have been so much simpler and tidier to buy them.  But, keeping the seeds was a symbolic way for my father to stay connected with the land that his family had farmed for generations in the old country. My father’s method of gardening, including his insistence on planting according to the phases of the moon, kept us rooted with our past.

I shared some of this with Mohawk seed keeper Terrylynn Brant, who sees an intimate connection between the seed, ancestors and land, and who, like my father plants her crops based on the moon. 

Brant grew up in a family that was able to maintain its agricultural practices despite government policies that threatened the traditional agricultural way of life of the communities of the Haudenosaunee. From an early age, she had a passion for gardening, which she believes is her gift from the Creator, and she has always been mindful of the importance of keeping the seeds of her ancestors, some of which, she told me, go back to time immemorial. 

A seed is a sacred thing

For Brant, a seed is a sacred thing and a metaphor for the innate dignity and goodness of the individual.

“Seeds have their own inherent responsibility given to them by Creator. It’s basically to grow and to reproduce themselves. That’s the duty and responsibility they’ve been given…to continue who they are and what they are” and the seed will always do its best to honor the task creation had in mind for it.

Brant applies this concept to people.  “The Creator sent us here as beautiful, perfect beings. He intended us to grow beautiful, to be compassionate with our fellow man, to share everything we have, to love one another.  And yet, we are the ones who mess that up…We should look at the seed, and we should be reminded every time we hold it in our hands what is pure, what is good, what is right, but we do not.” 

There is a genius to a seed that we miss when we lose contact with the soil and the source of the food on our table.  Sowing a seed, nurturing its growth, and plucking its fruit off the vine does more than feed our bodies; it nourishes our spirit.  

When we wonder at basil sprouting or feel our heart leap up at the blooming of the Lenten Rose after a dark winter, we touch the goodness inherent in our selves, and intuit the possibility for our own transformation and that of the world. The seed helps us get back to the garden where we glimpse the perfection and harmony for which we long.

Lessons from Cato, my cat

Opening a can of tuna will never be the same for me again.

The distinctive sound of the can opener puncturing the tin always brought our cat, Cato, running to my feet. She would sit, looking up at me with anticipation, before getting dangerously underfoot as I moved to pour the water from the can into her bowl.  

Tuna water was her favorite treat, and on one occasion I was able to coax her down from the top of a high tree simply by saying “tuna” and opening a tin.  Cato lived with us for 18 years, and during that time she became a member of the family.

The amount of money that North Americans spend on pets suggests that we have gone gaga over them. In 2011, Canadians spent $8.9 billion on their pets, and Americans spent a whopping $50 billion.  While it was not my practice to spend exorbitant amounts on Cato, I coughed up several hundred dollars without hesitation when she required emergency surgery after raccoons attacked her.

Pets win our affection

We lavish attention on our pets because they win us over. My relationship with Cato was a good example of the affects that a pet can have on an individual’s heart.

When Cato first came to us, the kids were more excited than I was about having a cat. As one of my children described it, Cato and I had a business relationship. She kept the mice out of the house, and I made sure she was fed.  

Cato, in the early days
Louise McEwan photo

While it is unclear if I trained her or she trained me, we came to understand one another almost perfectly. While I am not exactly a lover of animals in the mode of Saint Francis, who famously preached to the birds, I found myself talking to Cato on more than one occasion. 

Cato, the preacher

It was Cato, however, who did the real preaching. Even though she possessed an instinctual ruthlessness as a hunter by nature, her feline traits spoke to me of contentment, and her presence was soothing.   From her vibrating purr to her ability to lounge on any surface, no matter how hard and uncomfortable, she conveyed a spirit of softness.

In the hubris of my humanity, I never expected to learn anything from a cat. This was an ignorant, perhaps even a sinful, attitude, for as Saint Francis knew animals have the potential to deepen our awareness of the presence of the divine in creation and in the human heart. They have the ability to call forth deep levels of kindness and compassion; as the saint taught, “men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity will deal likewise with their fellow men”.

There is a deep connection between people and their pets

Dizzy reads along, ready to turn the page
T. McEwan photo

Saint Francis perceived an affinity between people and animals: people and animals originated in the same Creator, whose providential care sustained them both.  While not everyone shares Saint Francis’s worldview, most will agree that there is a deep connection between people and their pets.  

I was sad and upset as my cat’s life ebbed away and the inevitable visit to the vet loomed. I was unprepared for the lingering sense of loss I felt after she died; I did not expect to be looking for her in the old familiar places in the weeks that followed. Cato had brought a mellowness into our lives and the house felt quiet and empty without her.

The deep connection we have with our pets makes that final farewell difficult. The exceptional kindness of my vet and his assistant on that last visit made the parting easier.  Each of us understood the bond between person and pet.  It was there in Cato’s dying. 

I knew she was gone before my vet whispered the words. The light had faded from her eyes.  She had returned to her maker who was reflected in the intangible softness she had brought to our home.