Recently I communicated with a cat named Rafiki, for his person Tatiana.
One of the questions Tati asked Rafiki is why is he peeing on her things, most notably her pillow?
She said it seems to happen after they have been some place together and have just come back to her apartment. For instance when she takes Rafiki with her to her mother’s house to visit.
When I showed Rafiki her question, he right away answered with an image of him being outside somewhere and the feeling of fear that he and Tatiana may get separated from each other. He showed me this communication impression several times very vividly, with a sense of panic, as if he were saying, “I could easily get lost from my person, and this frightens me.”
He went on to say, “If she smells my urine, it weaves us closer together, me and my person; this way if we get separated from each other, it will be easier to find each other again.”
Tati said this made a lot of sense to her.
Recently, she had taken Rafiki to her mother’s home, which is on several acres of land and close to wilderness. Tati had left to run some errands and while she was gone, Rafiki had wandered too far, and her mother couldn’t find him.
As Tati was pulling into the driveway it was dark out, but luckily Rafiki’s eyes shone in the headlights and he came running up to Tatiana after she got out of the car.
Tati’s mother told her that there were coyotes all around and she was terrified; it was a close call.
Everyone felt that Tati had come home just in time and it saved Rafiki’s life.
Rafiki was definitely very traumatized from the whole experience, and he was doing what he knew how to do to prevent this situation from ever happening again.
By peeing on her things Tatiana would be flooded with his scent, and in some mysterious way this would connect them more deeply and more permanently, on a visceral level.
In his communication images, Rafiki showed me these energetic lines between him and Tatiana being more numerous and more dense, as a result of her sniffing his scent.
Using Rafiki’s logic, when you know another being’s scent, you find each other more easily when separated, because in the knowing of each other’s scent there is a deep connectedness formed. And in this intermingling of scent, it’s like you open to a place where you experience a kind of oneness.
It is something of the way all living things open to the world around them and thereby are changed, learning and growing and participating in life.
I was so struck with a sense of wonder when Rafiki was sharing this.
Like this cat knows something profound about how we become intertwined in this world through the sense of smell — with other beings, with places, with all of life.
In explaining why he pees on his person’s pillow, Rafiki painted an image of a world where there are these pathways of connection that unite us with everything around us, especially our loved ones. And we can consciously make those pathways richer and more dense if we choose.
What’s more, we humans don’t really acknowledge these pathways, or if we do we don’t fully understand them or we dismiss them as insignificant.
It made me reflect on the scents of the places I have been and the people and animals I have loved in my life. And I wondered if those scents carried far more information than I was acknowledging, or even able to take in as a mere human being haha.
After all, so many animals have much stronger senses of smell than we humans do. I learned some years ago that cats have something like 200 million odor receptors in their noses, while we humans have 5 million (and dogs have 300 million!).
Just imagine how much richer an experience of life this would make possible, having noses 40x or 60x more sensitive than we are used to.
It is a lot to take in! No wonder dogs and cats need to sleep so much more than we do.
As we continued the conversation, I showed Rafiki that smelling cat pee is very disturbing for human beings, and so if he could stop peeing on Tatiana’s things she would love that.
Also, I let him know that she is doing things to make sure they don’t get separated again.
Rafiki seemed to catch all of this, and sent me the following knowing about peeing on the pillow: “Ah ok, this doesn’t work for my person, she doesn’t like this.”
I could feel how at this point in the conversation, his anxiety was lessening.
Rafiki was understanding Tatiana’s point of view and Rafiki, himself, was feeling understood and respected.
The whole experience of communicating brought a sense of calm to everyone.
While it has only been a few days since our communication session, there has been no peeing on the pillow so far! And in a recent email Tatiana shared, “Rafiki has been very cuddly since our communication session!! And I have been sure to give him plenty of good sniffs — hahaha.”
