Litter box meditations The annals of the search for meaning in daily life: The Tao of litterbox cleaning
don't have a classic Japanese dry garden to rake, like Ryoanji or Daisen-in. But I clean Abiko and Misu's litter box twice each day. Abiko at most only cursorily covers what she leaves, making it easy for me to scoop it out. Misu, on the other hand, overzealously buries what she does, sending litter flying out of the box, so that I have to sweep up litter she thus ejects on the floor, outside the box [I wish Misu would do more like Abiko!]. I recall the Japanese dry gardens, and imagine as if I was raking one of them. Cleaning the cats' litter box thus acquires, in some measure, the meditative quality of raking a Buddhist temple garden.

Bless your pet!

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Notes: (1) I generally use a blend of ScoopAway and Arm & Hammer Super Scoop "clumping" litter. (2) True-life litterbox humor: Person-A is stooped down scooping "clumps" out of box. Person-B walks by and asks Person-A: "A snack?" (3) Cat fact: "The 10,000 tigers now being kept as pets in the United States outnumber the 6,000 in the wild worldwide" (Dr. Bruno Chomel, professor of zoonoses at the University of California, Davis, quotes in Lawrence K. Altman, "Tackling the Animal-to-Human Link in Illness", NYT on the Web, 25Mar06)
Go/Return to Daisen-in. Learn more about Japanese dry gardens. Haiku.   See  garden I designed for front yard of my home, inspired by Ise "Wedded rocks" (1996?).   Why  was The President of The United States cleaning the White House cat's litterbox? (Political satire) See two great cat cartoons.   Meet Abiko Maine coon cat ("PTSD kitty"). Meet Misu Maine coon cat.

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Read Claude Levi-Strauss reflections on cats, savages, and us.
Parable of a kitten.

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http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/litterbox.html Copyright © 2003 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net 26 DECember 2006CE v01.20	Abiko and Misu love Fency Feast Savory Salmon Feast.

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In the old house, the litterbox was on the far side of the kitchen and dining area on the main floor, under the table with the microwave on it, and the cats' food and water dishes were on the opposite side in the kitchen, near the refrigerator, sink and stove: light, airy, and convenient. (One of the things my wife hated about the old house was that the cats' litterbox had to be in the kitchen because the house was so small there was no place else to put it.) In the new house, the cats' litterbox, and their food and water dishes are down in a semi-finished space in the basement.... The basement is so dark at night that I plugged in a nite lite so that the cats can see where their litterbox and dishes are at night. Do I recall correctly some lines from a Schubert song: "Dunkel ist der Leben...."?