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Alchemy of Meow
Essays on cats, consciousness, and the art of being human—with four unreliable narrators.
The meow that can be meowed is not the eternal meow.
Welcome.
This is a Substack about cats. It is also, somehow, a Substack about manifestation, wellness culture, the space between things, and the quiet question of what a life is for. The cats, who are currently penning (pawing?) the sacred scriptures of “Meow de Jing,” insisted.
I live with four of them: Newbery, Hugo, Nebula, and Caldecott, a.k.a. Callie. Together they appear to be conducting a long-term experiment on the feasibility of consciousness.
Newbery believes constant alertness is the only thing preventing catastrophe. She monitors invisible threats with the intensity of someone who has read too many internal memos from the universe.
Hugo behaves as though he has been appointed Ambassador to Everything. He is prepared to negotiate peace between hostile factions, including the vacuum cleaner, the concept of workdays, and occasionally the bathroom fixture.
Nebula moves with the calm assurance of someone who assumes reality is a service industry and she is a diamond member. Objects, furniture, and lesser beings are expected to arrange themselves accordingly.
Callie has refined the art of doing absolutely nothing into something approaching a spiritual technology. If stillness could file taxes, it would be him.
Living with them makes it difficult to maintain the human belief that we are the only creatures trying to understand existence. The cats clearly understand existence. They simply find it beneath comment.
If you’ve ever suspected the wellness industry has gone slightly feral—that the line between ancient wisdom and a $97 moon-cycle workbook is thinner than anyone wants to admit—you may find kindred company here. If you’ve also, on a hard night, looked at a cat and thought you know something I don’t, don’t you?, you may find that too. Both things are true at once. That’s sort of the whole project.
Alchemy of Meow began as a way of paying attention—to the cats, to the quieter parts of experience, to the small moments that appear trivial until you discover they are, in fact, the entire point.
Some posts are dispatches from the cats themselves, who have strong opinions about abundance, frequency, and somatic release. Some are essays from me—on grief, on the space between things, on what a cat is actually doing when it sits three feet away from you. (I was born in Tokyo, and Japanese ways of noticing find their way in whether I plan for them or not.) The register drifts. The cats remain.
If you are here, the universe may have beckoned you. It may be leading you to a spiritual awakening. Or to a hairball. Whichever fits your loftier ambitions.
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