Pet Project

A feral kitten, full of fear and hope, finds my camera lens…part of the Feral Cat Rescue Project – my pet project, so to speak.And this is my semi-annual mention of the fact that there is more to life than art…and more to me than these pages.

There used to be a saying, back when baby boomers thought they would live forever: It was something like, Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.

My philosophy, on the other hand, may be summed up as: Live love, die doing right, leave a better world. It’s not as catchy but it works for me.

Our time on earth is almost always shorter than we planned. We are here, we toil a bit, and they we are gone – like thousands of generations before us. It’s true; health problems sneak up on us, accidents are just around the corner, nothing is ever certain.

Sometimes the world seems like the loneliest place, even in a crowded room, because there is nobody inside our skin but ourselves, and there we are all alone. And that sense of isolation only widens as one gets older. Yet in all the cold emptiness of this vast universe, the one thing that we find that makes it all bearable is each other.

Know that there is something we can do.

One thing I do is work with feral and abandoned cats, feeding them, getting them spayed/neutered – and just generally trying to give them a better life. It isn’t much and mostly no one cares, but it’s a little tiny, immeasurably small way in which I try to make the world a better place.

There aren’t many Gandhis, Buddhas, or Jesus’s in the world, and frankly, we probably have enough of those anyway. What we need – what the world longs for – are more people willing to do the small things; working in the shadows, the alleys, the deserted farms, the empty home …. just little things that usually nobody notices. The rewards seem few – or none. What we’re talking about, after all, are just little things – yet they all come together to make the world a little tiny bit better. And every tiny bit of betterment is like a molecule in the sea of life. Enough of those little molecules changes the world.

Have you made the world a better place yet, today?

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I hope you’ll visit my pet project at feralkittens.org, if nothing else, just have a look at the kitties. Recording them is my way of helping their lives be real and meaningful for the world.