When I started writing this series, I was taken by the hand rather than being truly in charge of the writing process. Even though I, Nathalie aka Nannie, was the human behind the screen, the characters’ invisible fingers were really the ones striking the keys, and I was a mere translator of their urge to be heard. It was a semi-conscious way for me to learn more about those souls’ urges.
At first I thought it would be great to use that beautiful kind of ‘channeling’ through writing young adults stories. However as I kept discovering more depths in the tales longing to be told, I realized that what needed to resurface through my quill would not always be adapted for young readers, even if they were happening in cats’ dreams. Some human adventures entail a lot of pain, heartbreak, violence, treason, and cruelty. The kind even adults are not fully equipped to handle.
This is the main reason I only wrote two episodes of those Dreamtime Cats adventures. The process, however, brought me much joy, many teachings (and teaching ideas), together with a perfect training ground for honing my writing skills in English, a third spoken language alongside Spanish and French . Even though the young adult books were a short-term adventure, more chapters begged to be written, and more themes to be explored, so they started making their way quite naturally towards this digital home, under the site’s blog section. One of my favorite ways to reCORNect with myself and others is definitely through creative writing. Therefore, dear reader, I want to thank you very ‘meow‘ch for loving stories (mine and others’). Please keep finding gems scattered throughout unique times and places, in this universe and other digital realms.
Much love, and keep reading, writing, and welcoming good stories!
The Dreamtime Cats loved their adventures in the Dream Realm!!!
I believe cats to be spirits that come to earth.
A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud
without coming through. (Jules Verne)
When humans and animals speak the same heart language, they can also communicate through their thoughts and dreams, even when they are thousands of miles apart.
Once upon a time, although not too long ago, two “she-cats” lived in the Kingdom of Spain. Their “hu-mom”, a human mom named Nannie, was away somewhere, building a real-life dream for them all, and they missed each other very much. Many times, when the cats were asleep, they would feel Nannie tip-toeing in their dreams to let them know she was ok. She wanted them to feel confident that soon they would be reunited. Somehow the cats heard her, while dreaming in the house emptied of its original human being. She had sent other kind humans to take care of her kitties, but the cats wanted to see their favorite “hu-mom” again soon. So Nannie thought of a way to entertain her cats while she was away from them, using her heart’s voice to reach out to them, and a special wooden pendant in the shape of a cat… The residence of the two “she-cats” was a big, beautiful house in front of a big, beautiful snow-capped mountain, in a little village near Granada. The city of Granada, in southern Spain, is home to the Alhambra, a Moorish Palace built many moons ago.
The Dreamtime Cats‘ Universe of Nathalie aka Nannie lives in these two stories:
Sunny Moon over the Alhambra (episode “0”)
& One Name, Many Souls
Check this page to reach the post-reading activities!
Why Cats?
Nannie, aka Nathalie, was born on April 14, 1971 in Verviers, Belgium. As far as she can remember, there were always cats around her. The first she-cat Nannie cried for was a black beauty who answered to the name “Nic-Nac”. In Belgium, “nic-nacs” are cookies in the shape of letters or gears, with a pastel-colored meringue “iced gem” on top. “Nic-nacs” were often found in Saint Nick‘s treat bag when he visited Nannie’s Belgian home on the night of December 5th. In Nannie’s dialect, Walloon, “Nic-nacs” have the exact same meaning as in English: “stuff”, trinket, bibelot or curio.
‘Curio‘usly enough, in the Walloon language, “losing one’s nic-nacs” means that you have ‘lost it’ or gone nuts… Maybe “Dj’aveûs pièrdou mès nic-nac” (“I had gone… ‘nick-nacks’”) when I started writing The Dreamtime Cats? Who is to say… One true loss during Nannie’s childhood was when Nic-Nac the cat, while fostered by a relative, decided to heed the call of the wild and vanish in a cornfield, never to return. Many years later, adult Nannie understood that the big gaping wound in the little girl’s heart may have had a specific purpose: that of remembrance, of things yet unknown buried deep down atavic layers of time. Ever since that A-Ha moment, Nannie has seen it as Spirit shocking her into remembering. When her cat got lost in that field corn left a mark on Nannie’s psyche, for a reason, then, only known to Mystery.
The first ‘corn strike’ in her life was when 4-year-old Nannie, from her tiny schoolyard in Belgium, let go of a balloon that magically landed in a Mexican milpa (cornfield,) an episode described in the ‘home/milpa’ section of this website. Another ‘corn event‘ in her childhood happened when she got briefly ‘swallowed’ by a vortex-like cornfield while riding a Black Shetland pony amidst tall stalks in Normandy, France, where her father had grown up after World War II…
Many an American reading the words ‘war’ and ‘Normandy’ will automatically form a thought association with the D-Day landings. Well now Nannie’s birthplace in Belgium, a crossroads between three countries, is also located right in the middle of important battlefields from that era, such as the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. In that region, cornfields surround the local Henri-Chapelle Cemetery, where almost 8,000 U.S. soldiers are buried. The burial grounds are dotted with countless white crosses and stars, throughout an eerily serene green landscape that guards their eternal sleep.
Walking through the headstones in search of specific names felt like attempting to pick, one by one, the pebbles on Hansel’s trail, the trail of sad stories of lives cut short to ‘rest’ so far away from home. The searching endeavor an adult Nannie had undertaken with her dad across that cornfield was a quest for all the New Mexican victims lying there.
Those mini shocks to the system were all related to corn, the miraculous plant first born from the womb of the Americas.
If memory serves us correctly, the feline disappearance must have happened in 1978, when Nannie was seven years old and spending the summer in Vence, southern France. She was finding new avenues of expression through drawing, writing poetry, making clay cats and wearing a wooden cat pendant (which Nannie still owns to this day and was a special amulet for the Dreamtime Cats). It was a creation by one of the ladies on vacation with other Belgian teachers’ families gathered on the school grounds of the late Célestin Freinet (15 October 1896 – 8 October 1966), noted French pedagogue whose teaching methods all those vacationers followed.
Many decades later, Nannie would learn that said Freinet school was less than five miles away from where D.H. Lawrence died, at ‘Villa Robermond,’ with Aldous Huxley at his bedside. First buried in Vence, Lawrence’s ashes would be taken to his ranch in New Mexico, making her wonder if she was inadvertently following writer ghosts to go full circle with something that still needed to be fully grasped…
Maybe Nic Nac the cat, back in 1978, had decided to teach her little hu-mom that seven, the little girl’s age when she lost her furry friend, meant the end of a cycle. It was time for the cat to discover the whole wide world for herself, choosing to vanish in the heart of a cornfield. Today Nic-Nac the cat has emerged from behind a corn stalk, wrapped in the mist of time, meowing at the door of Nathalie’s right brain. The “cookie gears” behind the she-cat name activated a mechanism in Nathalie’s mind to convince her to go back to those blessed times of childhood and reclaim her inner child, retaking the storytelling endeavor left somewhere in her psyche… What better way to “recoRnect” with such important activity than through children’s books, tapping into blissful creativity? “Tap” was the name of one of the two fiction doggies of Nannie’s favorite bedtime story. She liked it so much that she would not allow her mom to change one single word of it, repeating the story by heart if mommy “dared” to take a reader’s poetic license. Nannie also learned to read “ahead of time”, maybe using nic-nac letter cookies to copy the words deciphered in her very first book! Tap and his dog buddy Tip were born from the pen of Belgian author Raoul Cauvin, in 1971, the same year Nannie was born!
(Wikipedia Image perfect to illustrate Nannie’s mental universe!)
ReCORNectioN 