I have had cats in and out of my life for as long as I can remember. I have never had one long enough for it to die of old age or “natural causes related to old age”. The strangeness of this isn’t entirely lost on me, though I didn’t really think this was strange until I started talking with more people and friends who also have cats – my experience seems to stand out a bit but I know I’m not the only cat steward that has seen one of the many lives cats lead pass through mine for however long a period of time before the wind or something else blows them right on to wherever it is they’re supposed to be next.
The furry specimen in the picture is my most recent adventure in the feline world, and one that I’ve never before dealt with because it’s not a cat that’s been prowling around my property, rather the property I’ve been tasked to care for over the last 5 weeks or so. Generally speaking, stray or feral cats are welcome wherever I am, but this little frisky babe has been around since shortly before I even came on to the scene and 2 of the other 3 cats that I’m caring for that are indoor/outdoor cats have all but beaten a hasty retreat from the house a couple weeks into the job (when I finally let them out since we’d made friends and they were yowling at the door to go).
Hence my dilemma.
I’d noticed the stray, who has been named “D” (for Doppelgänger), on the front porch helping itself to the food that’s out there for the other cats and that it has some kind of hacking cough that got me thinking that if it’s contagious that that wouldn’t bode well for the immune compromised older kitty that doesn’t ever stray too far from the house but that also eats from the same food dish as D. I called around to some local vets and such to ask if anyone had filed a lost cat report but was starting to think I’d need to either round up the residential cats or do something with this perp that was quickly making itself at home.
Well, rounding up the residential cats was not successful – hence the trap for catching whoever I could. The baby raccoon was not what I was hoping for, and it went straight back out into the wilderness!
This work was not something I was loving, to say the least, but it was born from love as I am a cat person as much as I am any other animal person so after trapping D I took it for chip scanning (no luck there) and have moved it into the barn into a much more roomy “studio” for holding with litter, food, water and all the bats it can longingly watch flying in and out of their ceiling perch above it.
The owners and I have been reaching out to shelters, friends with farms and the neighbors to ask after this little sweetie (and thankfully they’ll be back in a couple more days!) but in the meantime, I finally did see the residential girl cat that’s been MIA since I let her out almost 3 weeks ago. Perhaps she had been frightened away by D’s presence – I can’t know. But I’ve done what seems to be needed in this case and I would do so again given the same situation.
You may know at this point what today’s opportunity for loving your work is. Is there something that you feel or know needs tended to with your work that you’re not doing because there’s nothing on the surface of it that you love?
Perhaps zooming out to look at the whole picture to make sure there aren’t parts of it you’re ignoring because of something inside you that hasn’t quite embraced the reality of the situation.
Seize the chance today to love whatever it is in your work that may be challenging what your work actually IS. There will be plenty that presents to you in the course of your day that isn’t actually your work. Pause and ask, be honest – is the work yours but you’re trying to avoid it? Is it work that is someone else’s that they may need help with?
At the end of the day, our work is to love – as much as we can in whatever ways we can, however we can.
Off you go!
TimeSpaceOne 