photo credit: e³°°°

Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.

— Eskimo Proverb

Today, we got a new kitten.  Actually, we didn’t choose to get a kitten.  He (unnamed at this point) seems to have gotten separated from his mother, possibly by a coyote.  One of the neighbors heard him crying early this morning because he had climbed into the nice, warm engine compartment of a nearby car.  After trying to get him to leave the car by turning on the engine, they finally had to sound the horn to get him to give up his “safe” place.

Sometimes, when you need a writing inspiration, God provides.  Here is this darling kitten, so small we’re not sure that we won’t have to bottle feed him, and he is a great illustration of much of what we focused on this week.

Talk about not wanting to change.  He had found himself a warm, albeit messy place to stay and even with the engine being turned on, he didn’t want to leave his new home.  Last night was the coldest night this fall and he was lost.  Now that he is safely indoors, (that’s the human perspective) he finds a corner and calls to his mother at the top of his lungs.  Soon, as he becomes acclimated to his surroundings, he will not want to leave here either.  The good news is that this is a good place for him and he won’t become the coyote or hawk’s next meal.

Change comes hard to many of us.  To help out, The Happy Guy gives us five steps to help us through making changes.  They include getting back on the right path, getting ready, starting, celebrating milestones, and savoring success.  To demonstrate how it works, he takes a light-hearted approach to shaving his beard. (I presume he wanted to shave it anyway.)

photo credit: nicsuzor

At the End of His Rope – He Took a Nap

Today has been traumatic for this poor kitten.  He has been “rescued” from a big, smelly, though warm engine.  He was passed from neighbor to neighbor… and it’s all been just a bit too much for him.  So, he has chosen to do what we all should do when we get too tired or too overwhelmed.  He slept.

According to Mark Stibich, Ph.D. in Top 10 Health Benefits of a Good Night’s Sleep, sleep can make us smarter, healthier, skinnier and improve our memories.  It helps us to repair both mentally and physically.

Time Warp

With an artist’s eye, Ellie described the beauty that can be found in the brokenness around us.  Then, later in the week, she wrote about how grieving can trick her into “forgetting” reality.  Despite the pain, we have to conclude that both of these are part of the design of life.  It is only as we age that we realize that we are all broken, that there is no “perfection.”  (BTW, this kitten has a bend in his tail, don’t know if he was injured or born that way.)

Perhaps the difference between aging gracefully and “refusing” to age is our ability to integrate pain and suffering into our world view while maintaining an attitude of hopefulness.  Reverend Jim Wallis says that “hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.”  It sounds to me a lot like what we’ve been talking about.  We tend to get what we expect.  When we filter the “facts” through a filter of hope, they look and feel differently than they do when we filter them through hopelessness.

A Return to Hope

Because it was the responsible thing to do, we took the kitten for his first vet visit.  We learned several things while we were there:

• My vet is as wonderful as I thought she was.  She spent 45 minutes bonding with the kitten, making sure there were no major problems, and educating us on how to “domesticate” him.  (He’s considered semi-feral and initially did not like people – no doubt his mother told him stories about how horrible we all are.)
• My neighbor is not skilled at determining kitten gender (We’d been calling him her all day.)  There is no shame in this.  She’d never tried to check out the back end of a frightened, claws extended kitten before.  I wouldn’t have gotten real close either.
• Kittens can be weaned at 4 weeks and this little guy is about 5 weeks old.
• He weighed all of 1 pound 6 ounces.  He would have probably starved to death if he hadn’t been rescued.
• We need to keep him separated from my other cat until he can be tested for feline leukemia.
• Wet cat food STINKS something awful!

photo credit: Kpjas

In the end, he is a hopeful addition.  He is a baby and babies usually bring hope into the house.  Everything fascinates him and he has an opinion on everything.  (You’d think he were my natural born son.)  If he keeps talking at this rate, soon no one will be able to get a word in edgewise.

You may remember that we lost one of our cats about three months ago.  She just stopped, don’t know why.  We hadn’t decided to “replace” her but sometimes these decisions are made for us.  So we step forward in gratitude and hope on this new adventure.  As a friend of mine often says, “This little kitty just won the kitty lottery.”  Let’s hope we did too.