I got several messages this morning relating to my soul and to the rumored softening of  same. One wished me a Merry Christmas, it was from Florida and the sender observed that it was clear that Simon and Red has “softened my soul” in recent years. Another, just seconds later from Oregon,  made the same observation only a different analysis: “your soul seems to have been softened after you met Maria.” Still another observed – this one from Nebraska in my Post Office Box 205 – that I seemed more human and likeable after the deaths of Izzy and Rose, “two losses that seemed to open you up.”

One of the fascinating things about our new connective technology are these analytical messages – I get them daily – telling me how I have changed, and what has changed me. Psychoanalysis, like advice, flows freely on the Internet.  To me, they are curious messages, almost always good-meaning. For one thing they always come from people I have never met, never from people I know, and secondly, they never ask me why I have changed, if I have changed at all. They tell me. Perhaps they do know these things, someone reading my blog for a long time might well have earned a pretty clear sense of my life, my readers often seem ahead of me when it comes to me.

But the messages rarely agree on the causes of my supposed metamorphosis  – Maria is the number one vote getter, followed by Simon and lately Red.  (Orson, Rose and Elvis have gotten a lot of supporters.) There is a widespread belief that animals can do that, that they can transform human souls in a heartbeat, and that mine have. We give them more power all the time. Minnie is getting some votes lately, many cat lovers believe the experience of saving a cat, rather than putting one down proves I am evolving as a worthy human and softening as a soul. And about time.

We all, of course, see what we need to see and what we want to see. We all see our world through our own prisms. This business of changing one’s soul is complex, though, it would be hard for me – if anyone is interested what I think – to accept this nominations of the magical helper, human or animal, who changed Jon Katz – that would be me. I thing change is very difficult, much more complicated than people think it is, most people do not even attempt it, and I can understand why. It is a long and painful haul.

I don’t believe, if I am being truthful, that I have changed in the way many people seem to think. I wish it were as easy as loving a donkey or, for that matter, a human.

I did not, in my mind, change because Maria appeared or because Simon and Red did.

I changed because I wanted to change, was ready to change, was open to change, and worked very hard at it. I saw therapist after therapist, took pill after pill, found one counselor after another, meditated until I could recognize the sound of passing trucks, was sleepless for months on end. I never quit on changing, on being healthier, I never will.

That is what made it possible for me to love Maria, to love and help heal Simon, to take Karen Thompson’s word that God wanted me to have Red and accept him, to choose to rehabilitate Minnie the barn cat rather than take the farmer’s way and shoot or euthanize her.  If that is what people mean by “softening my soul,” then that is how it happened. It would be condescending for me to say Maria changed – and she has changed as much or more than me –  because of me or Frieda. Or that I changed because of a border collie from Northern Ireland.

Maria and I both had hard and troubled hearts when we met, we both have worked very hard, hand in hand and together, day and night, for years and years, to change, to live differently, to soften our souls, if you will. We both know this work will never be done, one of us will die doing it with the other.  This is way too much freight to put on a simple donkey or a dog, this idea they can reach into an unwilling psyche and alter it by their existence. That’s the neat story, the easy one, the 99 cent story on Amazon.

I have worked too long, suffered way too much, swam in rivers of worry and sorrow,  to give this soul business to someone else, even to someone as wonderful as Maria, as big-hearted as Simon or as wonderful a creature as Red. We write our own stories, choose our own destiny, take responsibility for our souls. I will not award mine to anyone else or turn my work over to anyone else. That didn’t work out for me.The therapists call it co-dependence, this giving of pieces of yourself to others, this simple salvation. Souls, I think, do not soften, they grow and evolve, they do not become something else, they become what they were meant to be, created to be, destined to be. They are in many ways hard and cold as diamonds and crystals, as resistant to change.

On my wall is a photograph of a four-year-old me with my beautiful but already troubled mother, there is so much love and happiness in this photograph, I found it only recently, the boy is so happy, so at ease, it helped me to see who I was born to be, who I really am. Just looking at it brings me back to who I was before I became something else, I can talk to that boy, I am  inside of his head. I can’t say if my soul is softened or not, I have changed in many ways, but it isn’t for me to say how, there is a lot of work to do on me. My life will have to speak for itself.

More than anything, I have learned that I am responsible for me, I will live the kind of life I choose to life. My soul will be what I make of it, what I want it to be, how hard I am willing to work and for how long. I can’t soften anyone else’s soul, no one else can soften mine.  Simon and Red didn’t give it to me, and they can’t take it away. Not even Maria could do that.