by Catherine Maven Copyright © 2005      What is it that we need most in our life? What have we searched for, suffered for, delighted in, lost or found ourselves in? That’s right!   Beer!             First, of course, we experienced "puppy-beer", that first taste of the forbidden, the heady discovery of needs and desires in ourselves that mere pop won’t quench. Puppy-beer is a bitter-sweet experience, the awkward satisfaction of a nebulous wish.   You’ll never forget your first beer.                Then, of course, the first flush of beer wears off, and you wonder what all the fuss was about. It seems anyone can have a beer, and sharing a beer means less to some people than to you. But when you try to give it up, when you try to go back to the days-before-beer, you find you can't. Something in you has changed. Beer had become a...

 by Catherine Maven, Copyright (c) 2001 The sun is glittering on the dark snow-laden pines as Paddlefoot the young otter climbs out of the den. She shivers with happiness at the  winter wonderland all around her, and her thick fur protects her from the biting cold. She can't wait to start playing! But first things first. She knows where there is a small waterfall that never freezes, which she loves to play in when it is summer. It is upstream from the entrance to the den, and she scampers along the bank until she reaches it, and then dives through the bubbling waters into the dim world beneath the ice. She has to dive deep, because the fish have all gone to the bottom of the river to sleep. It isn't that hard to see, because yesterday’s wind has blown the snow off to the far bank, so the ice is almost clear in the middle. And besides, Paddlefoot has keen eyesight! The slightest wiggle of a fishy tail is enough to guide her to breakfast, a fish half as big as she ...

This story was based on an event that occurred when I was a bank teller. After you read the story, I'll let you guess what happened. If you can't guess, message me and I'll tell you! A CHRISTMAS STORY by Catherine Maven copyright © 1997 I Twilight was falling as gently as the snowflakes that drifted through the late afternoon chill. One by one the houses began to light up until the street glowed like a downtown department store window. Walking home from the library in silence beside her older sister, Megan felt enwrapped in the lights, sensed them as warm, inviting, promising of delights; a tingle ran along her spine, and she hugged herself happily. The moment was ruined by her sister. "Look at the witch's house!" Kelly cried, pointing. "No lights for her!" The older girl laughed nervously. "Witches hate lights, don't they?" Megan looked through the dusk toward the darkened house. The windows at the front were never l...

Heroes by Catherine Maven 2018 Our innocence, which should be a treasure, can be destroyed or used against us and manipulated to make us the playthings of bullies. I have a saying: "The biggest bully wins." But the OTHER side of the story, for MOST of us, is that not only are we SURVIVORS, but we try NOT to let the abuse we have suffered destroy us or turn us into abusers of others. Those of us who have been abused, but who have NOT turned to alcohol or drugs or other addictions to distract us from our pain, are HEROES. Maybe they will never write us up in a magazine; maybe no eulogy will be spoken that says, "This person SHOULD have turned UGLY; she had every right to kill herself, to make excuses for hiding from love and life, to hurt others in the way she had been hurt. But instead, she CHOSE to put it behind, to offer from the GOOD heart NOT destroyed by other people's ugliness. She chose to offer LOVE instead of hate; chose to HELP instead of des...

FLYING BACKWARDS by Catherine Maven © 1998 & 2018 Have you ever watch a film of a bird flying backwards?  The motion, which seen in its natural direction, appears effortless, even graceful, is suddenly seen for the complex war against gravity that it really is.  What you had always taken for simple up-and-down motions turns out to be windmillish.  Have you seen swimmers doing the breast-stroke?  Insanely difficult, forcing their bodies up out of the water by the sheer strength of their arms pushing down against the dragging force of the water.  In reverse, birds flying looks like that. The wings arc backward in curves. The feathers along the bottom flay out, and it’s as though the bird is pushing away from something in horror and revulsion. You are suddenly very much aware that air, like water, is a medium through which the bird must travel, a force against which it must beat in order to defeat gravity. It makes me tired just thinking abo...

June 9, 1998 When I was a child on the farm, our bus-ride to school took over an hour in each direction.   When my best friend Patsy wasn't there, I would let my imagination take over, watching closely out the window as my imaginary friend, a pure white horse, galloped alongside the bus, majestically leaping fences, ditches, and the occasional house, and otherwise cavorting in the pure joy of motion that is a horse.   This horse stayed with me right through the hundreds of school bus rides till the end of high school, and even occasionally showed up to run delicately through city streets beside the bus I took to work or accompany me on long tedious car trips.   I never tried to understand the horse, just watched with awe and heart-surging joy as it leapt, trotted and cantered through the fields of my mundane world.   I once tried to draw it, once to paint it, but my clumsy hands could never capture the radiance of that powerful free spirit who somehow chose...

In the early 1990s, my (then) husband Dave and I participated in the Sufi ‘work’ in Hamilton with two men I remember only as Adnan and Harry. We did chanting, belly-dancing, drumming, and yes, the well-known whirling (the Sufis are the original ‘whirling dirvishes’). At first, it all just felt kind of silly, and I often asked myself why I was bothering. I had given up on religion, so why was I following teachers from a strange Islamic sect? Well, in terminology I’m borrowing from Buddhism, each of these activities was aimed at occupying the ‘monkey mind’, enabling one to (occasionally!) enter a trance-like state, so that the True Self might be heard. I had some interesting epiphanies over the two-year period of doing this work, but the experience I want to tell you about now happened as a result of a drumming meditation. I am never one to do things half-heartedly. If I commit to a practice, I do it with all my heart and soul.   So when we began the drumming circle, drumming v...