Dark Tabby Wisdom

By Roscoe Lee, for the Cat Wisdom Lecture Series, edited by Alden Cox, ©2009, 2025

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Thank you subscribers, followers and friends for your kind attention. I’ve been peddling along on in these Substack byways for the last 8 weeks, publishing these little books written ages ago, just to get the habit and the feel of regular publishing. Now I’m done with these training wheels, and ready to start free associating for real. I’ll be wobbling for a while yet, but who cares? Please do ask questions and make comments as we ride along together; I’m as likely to be checking you out and maybe we’ll cross-pollinate, collaborate or simply chat along the way.

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And now at last, here’s the final book in a series of seven small books that I wrote, printed and bound as gifts for friends and family between 1993 and 2009. 

When I posted Roscoe Lee on the Space Time Continuum, I didn’t add any notes about what was happening in my life at the time, beyond the arrival and departure of our beloved Roscoe Lee himself. Between 1999 and 2006 I met and married my third husband, James, a jazz musician and cat person. In 2006 I began the three year training in Somatic Experiencing, which was a game changer in my practice of trauma therapy. Tapping into and tracking my own autonomic nervous system process as I rode the waves of my experience in the moment was exhilarating, empowering, and enlightening in so many ways. I loved, loved, loved arriving more fully in my body, and my practice of tai chi deepened. My marriage began to change as well. I could literally feel myself rooted in my own ground, able to make more conscious choices and speak clearly from my heart and gut in a ways I had never experienced before. I had been fairly well grounded and present in my work for years, but now this integration was thawing territory that had been frozen since before I was five years old. 

The year 2009 was a wave crest year for me in many ways; I had gone as far as I would go with the Dialectical Behavior Therapy work I had been doing with people who have self-harming and chronically suicidal behaviors, including consulting for residential treatment of adolescents with severe behavioral problems in three states. Marsha Linehan, founder of the DBT model, used to say that her treatment model was effective for getting a person’s life on track, but often left them with a depth of quiet misery. I decided at the time that treating underlying trauma needed more specific and skillful attention, which was why I set out to learn Somatic Experiencing. In that last year of training, I learned that the missing essential in trauma work is to restore the capacity to be present in the moment through the senses, connecting to the environment, able to freely experience simple pleasures. I’ve since written The Frontiers of Pleasure, Beyond Resilience to Creativity and Fulfillment.

In mid-October 2009, my father Wendell had a stroke, months after a cancer-free report following radiation treatment for metastatic skin cancer. I jumped in the car and drove the eight hours down to Virginia to help my mother. I called from the road to check in; my mother answered and said, “I’m talking to the neurologist; here, talk to your father.” She hands the phone to my father, who is barely able to speak, but cheerfully serves me up some word salad. In the midst of it, he says, “I want to be of use to you.” I’m confused, but just tell him I love him and I’ll see him soon. After I hang up and focus on the road again, I burst into tears, suddenly knowing that my father is going to teach me about dying. And so he did, over the next five weeks.

This book was compiled a few weeks after his memorial service, just before Christmas, as a way to keep my hands busy, and offer some comfort to my family. Some of the pictures were gathered on the internet, some from CuteOverload.com, and some are pictures of family cats. In one, Lily, the one eyed cat, is napping on my father’s lap. 

Each page of the small book has a picture and a sentence or two as follows…

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Sometimes, in the wake of a devastating change, savoring some small pleasures, some soothing fluff, allows you to relax into the falling action post threshold, until the ebbing tide leaves you on solid ground again. Do you have a story about sliding down the back side of a big wave? What were the small pleasures that eased the way?

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