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 staring at the keyboard, the characters’ invisible fingers were really the ones striking the keys, and I was a mere translator of their need 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 yearned to resurface through my quill would not always be adapted for young readers, even if the adventures were happening in cats’ dreams. Some human experiences entail pain, heartbreak, violence, treason, and cruelty. The kind even adults are not always 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 endeavor, 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 website’s blog section. One of my favorite ways to reCORNect with myself and others is definitely through creative writing.
I want to thank you, dear reader, very ‘meow‘ch so, 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!
Of Cats and Corn
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 though, 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 sarted to describe such blows as Spirit shocking her into remembering.
When her cat got lost in that field, its cereal, corn, left a mark on Nannie’s psyche, for a reason, then, only known to Mystery. The first ‘corn strike,’ before the loss of Nic Nac, 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. It was as though, while riding a Black Shetland pony amidst very tall corn stalks, time stood still or ran backwards, disorienting the little girl who, for a while, wondered whEN and where she was. That happened 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.
Throughout her life, Nannie has lived near borders, where battles have marked both the physical and emotional landscape. Maybe that is why she always felt drawn to tell stories that addressed conflicts. Walking through the headstones of Henri-Chapelle cemetery 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 Nannie had undertaken with her dad across that cornfield was a quest for all the New Mexican victims lying there, to list them in an annex of her dissertation.
As Nannie interviewed her life facts, she started realizing that the mini shocks to her system described thus far were all related to corn, the miraculous plant first born from the womb of the Americas. That is part of why ReCORNection came to mind to name this website.
Upon further interrogating the past, and if memory serves her correctly, Nannie remembered that Nic Nac’s disappearance happened in 1978, when seven-year-old Nannie spent the summer in Vence, southern France. There she would find avenues of expression through drawing, writing poetry, making clay cats, as shown on a picture above. She also got to wear the wooden cat pendant she shows above too, since it was a special amulet for the Dreamtime Cats.
The pendant was created 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 the British writer D.H. Lawrence died, at ‘Villa Robermond,’ with his fellow writer friend Aldous Huxley at his bedside. First buried in Vence, Lawrence’s ashes would be taken to his ranch in Northern New Mexico, a land adored by Nannie, which made her wonder if she was inadvertently following writer ghosts to go full circle with something deep and ancient that still needed to be fully grasped… The way to grasp Spirit breadcrumbs was mostly through writing stories first…
All that Nannie knew when she started to see patterns in her life was that it felt good to write stories with cat protagonists born and vanished in maize, and inspired by the life stories of writers whose paths had crossed hers, decades before her time. 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 and the start of another. While it was time for the cat to discover the whole wide world for herself, choosing to vanish in the heart of a cornfield, Nannie was meant to live new adventures programmed by her soul long before she was born in order to teach her parts of the Mystery when the time was right.
More than once Nic-Nac’s spirit 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’s voice, retaking for a while the storytelling endeavor left somewhere in her psyche…
(Wikipedia Image perfect to illustrate Nannie’s mental universe!)
