People who are fans of my YCL website sometimes find their way over to my personal Facebook page, which I mostly use for communicating with family and friends and jabbering a bit about life throughout each day, and I often wonder what they think when they see me posting about my kitty, Poppy. It is generally acknowledged by all who know me that the word that best describes my relationship with her is this: obsessed.

I met Poppy when I was a house-sitter, during a time of travel that included a summer spent in Italy. I fell in love with her from day one–I came downstairs to meditate in this new, unfamiliar house, and a few moments later found a kitty curling up in my lap, making biscuits on my tummy pudge. When her owners returned from their travels, having decided they’d like to fully retire and didn’t want to find a house-sitter each time they left, I jumped at the chance to adopt her. For the past year, she’s been my little compadre, hanging out on a chair in my office to groom herself and sleep and wake from her naps when I pet her and tell her (in a high-pitched voice) that she is the Best Kitty in the Whole Wide World.

In my defense: I have never before been this way about an animal. The only plausible explanation is that she and I know each other from another lifetime, perhaps when we were both cats, laying around in sun patches grooming ourselves after eating a can of Friskies.

So, suffice to say, when Poppy recently took ill, this hit me hard–harder than I would have expected. It basically happened like this–she had been overfed in her previous environment and for many years, carried around extra weight. Living with us on a controlled diet, she slowly lost weight over the course of a year, leaving behind excess skin that I lovingly called her “fatty flaps.”

It was all good, until it wasn’t–a sudden diabetes diagnosis, which we first tried to manage with prescription food until the recent weekend that she crashed out entirely and it was too late to regulate her with insulin or routine subcutaneous fluids at the local vet. She was throwing up, completely sick, wasting away before my eyes–in a matter of two days. I brought her in to the vet hospital and they found her glucose off the charts and excess bilirubin, indicating that her liver might be failing.

When the vet explained to me that she might need to be euthanized, I listened calmly to the description of the euthanasia process, until the moment that she said the words, “…and that would stop her heart.” Then I couldn’t keep it together anymore.

Long story short? She was diagnosed with pancreatitis, for which she received several days of treatments, and now I have a massive vet bill.

For those of you who think that people like me are nuts to be so crazy about a pet, you might want to click away, now–because it’s only going to get worse. Now I’m going to talk about surrendering in the face of the unknown, which is what I practiced again and again during the week when Poppy was in the hospital, and that I continue to practice now that she’s home and making a slow, two steps forward, one step back recovery (complete with me now being the person who has to give her injections with needles).

So, sure–my cat’s life is not Darfur, earthquakes in Haiti, divorce, death of a parent, or flooding in Brazil. Nonetheless, she’s a part of my life that I would feel acutely if she were not around. It was a hard week.

It was hard because I had no control. I couldn’t make her eat or drink (which is extraordinarily frustrating when eating and drinking would help). I couldn’t make her get better. I couldn’t make the vet bills cheaper so that saving her would be an easier process, financially. Time to surrender.

It was hard because I didn’t know what was going to happen, next. I didn’t know where the money would come from. I had ideas of possible sources, but I didn’t know how I’d pay back those sources. Time to surrender.

It was hard because I was making a decision based on money, and making decisions based on money is absolutely contrary to my values. My heart of course wanted to simply save her from a curable illness. My bank account was stark black and white. Time to surrender.

It was hard because the solution that I did find for affording the treatments involves some trade-offs–physical and mental, as well as in how I’m organizing my time–and I felt resistant to those trade-offs. Time to surrender.

Surrender is not giving up–it’s surrendering to “what is.” I surrendered to Poppy being sick, the clarity I had that I didn’t want to let her go without at least trying to save her, the extra workload. My word for 2011 is “ease.” I found myself often asking, “How can I create ‘ease’ in the midst of this?”

The answer, again and again: Surrender.

There’s a larger context for this, of course–that we needn’t wait for life to unravel a bit before we practice surrendering. How much more ease could we walk with if we were living in a way that was wholeheartedly BEing our journey, embracing everything that came into the circle of our existence?

There’s new clarity, too–clarity with fear–and that is that if Poppy doesn’t recover in the coming weeks, I won’t be making the same choices to save her. That, too, requires surrender and acceptance, even though it hints at the possibility that in this story, there won’t be a happy ending. I’m even willing to practice surrendering to the concept that really no story does–because we all let go eventually.

When I’m willing to breathe past the fear that inevitably accompanies a thought like that, something else emerges–a desire to live more fully, to appreciate more, to experience more, to get present more. To notice how great the house is, even if it’s messy; to notice how great the extra teaching work is, even if it’s tiring; to notice and notice and notice, and then surrender without attachment–not to become detached, but because living that way is practicing living with more ease and really, living even bigger–Fuller–More 100% fully alive.