Today is “Giving Tuesday.”
Every nonprofit on Earth will ask you to stand up for something good.
But Tabby’s Place challenges you to sit down for someone great.
Greatness is as greatness does. It does not lie in titles or triumphs, size or splendor. Actually, it does not lie at all.
It sits.
At Tabby’s Place, you will find greatness perched in a candy dish, or outstretched on a camera bag. She occupies clementine boxes, printer cartridge boxes, boxes big enough for bison, and boxes small enough for salamanders.
She looks like a small cat, frosted in candy bar colors and festooned with a tail as short as a thumbs-up.
Greatness comes in humble packages.
But Rori is determined to unbox every gift this life can offer. This is a project so ambitious, so revolutionary, it requires total dedication to … sitting.
When you sit, you can feel the world hold you safe in its palm.
Rori is no longer running. She came to us at the end of a breathless chase. An awful injury could have stolen her innocence, but she kept going.
She was called “incontinent” and “unadoptable,” but she remembered her name. She lost most of her tail, but kept just enough to make a “thumbs-up.”
She came to Tabby’s Place, and she took her seat in safety.
She need not look over her shoulder to see if some “hopeless situation” is in hot pursuit.
And now, Rori sits.
When you have come so close to the end, everything looks like a beginning. Rori is not going to miss her chance to taste it all.
Rori sits so she can thank it all — the boxes and the crates, the keyboards and the bubble wrap, every surface of this beautiful world that saved her life.
She sits in peace.
And she scoots over to make a place for you. Isn’t it all too wonderful to imagine? Rori is alive, and you are alive, and it all could have been different.
This ordinary Tuesday is too great to take for granted.
Today is your day to sit in greatness.
Your gift will give the next Rori rest from fear. Tabby’s Place is the nest for cats with no place to land.
And you are the gentle, the generous, and the great who make this possible.
Please sit down and donate this Giving Tuesday. Rori recommends putting a Fritos bag, or a pizza box, or a paperback copy of Eat, Pray, Love on your chair first. Sit and feel the greatness of your own safe place in the world.
Just don’t sit out the chance to give to someone small who needs you.
You can even sponsor Rori herself, and sit with her every month.
Happy Giving Tuesday, great ones.