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‘Alas!’ said the mouse, ‘now I see what has happened, now it comes to light! You, a true friend! You have devoured all when you were standing godmother. First top off, then half done, then –’ ‘Will you hold your tongue,’ cried the cat, ‘one word more and I will eat you too.’ ‘All gone’ was already on the poor mouse’s lips; scarcely had she spoken it before the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world. 136
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ALICE WALKER – from Frida, The Perfect Familiar – Born in 1944, Alice Walker is a Pulitzer-Prize winning American novelist, short-story writer, poet and activist. Best known from her novel The Color Purple (1982), for which she won a National Book Award, she is also ‘mature enough’ (as her daughter assures her) to own a cat. S hortly after arriving in San Francisco I had been fortunate, with the help of my partner, to find a place in the country in which to dream, meditate, and write. A year or so after being there I recon- nected with the world of animals and spirits – in trees, old abandoned orchards, undisturbed river- banks – I had known and loved as a child. I became aware that there is a very thin membrane, human- adult-made, that separates us from this seemingly vanished world, where plants and animals still speak a language we humans understand, and I began to write about the exhilarating experience of regaining my childhood empathy. I discovered that not only is there an adult-made membrane separating us from animals, rocks, rivers and trees, ocean and sky, there is one separating us from our remote ancestors, who are actually so near that they are us. I began to write The Temple of My Familiar, a book that immediately became my home, just as the land I lived on became 137

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‘Alas!’ said the mouse, ‘now I see what has happened, now it comes to light! You, a true friend! You have devoured all when you were standing godmother. First top off, then half done, then –’

‘Will you hold your tongue,’ cried the cat, ‘one word more and I will eat you too.’

‘All gone’ was already on the poor mouse’s lips; scarcely had she spoken it before the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world.

136

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