He was just a common kitten.
No name, no mother, no letter of recommendation.
Just a tangle of tangerine fur, tearful eyes, and a hummingbird’s drumming heart.
Just a cluster of “commons.”
Unusual eyes were open that day. Someone saw the sprite on the street corner. What appeared to be a forlorn Doritos bag or a fallen lily was a living soul. There were fears and dreams and galaxies inside that orange orphan.
But the world is crammed with common kittens.
Cars and concerns fly around the corner. Everyone is breathless, impatient for importance. Fast trains are bound for glory. Common kittens are found too frequently to be interesting.
The hum of hope sounds old-fashioned, innocent, impish.
Love is always impish.
Love is never interested in “interesting.”
Love crowds into the commons and changes history.
And on the twenty-fourth of April in the year 2023, in the humble, whole-wheat town of Ringoes, history hurled a comet.
One fading kitten met one stubborn sanctuary, and everyone ran out into the commons to coo and cheer. Jeffrey, the singular starchild Jeffrey, was here. Today was his day. Today was our day. Today had waited millennia to arrive, and it was here with the kitten who looked like a lost Goldfish cracker.
The people of Tabby’s Place danced in the commons. Jeffrey was here!
His eyes wet with weariness, fiery fur prickling with ticks and fleas, Jeffrey was a common mess. One paw was in terrible pain; one hundred dreams had been dashed against the rocks.
One kitten, with nothing to recommend him except his one heart, would need many, many mercies.
But when you cross the threshold to Tabby’s Place, you enter a space as new as grace and as old-fashioned as friendship. Snuffling and shivery, unaccustomed to love, Jeffrey had just joined the commons.
Long before “common” meant “humdrum” or “dull,” it cooed of “the commons,” a term we never should have forgotten. Picture the green square at the center of an old city, where townspeople gather to gab and dance. Picture the great garden on the edge of town, where neighbors work shoulder-to-shoulder to plant peas and dreams.
A “commons” is a shared space, a hammock of relationships.
A “commons” is truth in time, me needing you and you needing me and none of us making it on our own.
Jeffrey would not make it without us, but neither would we make it without Jeffrey. This is the secret we’re trying to tell at Tabby’s Place: what makes us great is our need for each other. We’re only fully alive when we’re fully focused on the humming, humdrum heart in front of us. We’re only full-sized when our universe expands to the size of one cat.
We’re only as spectacular as the commons.
The world witnessed no spectacle on April 24th, nothing to rival King Charles’s coronation or Taco Bell’s Beefy Crunch renaissance. It was just a series of tiny mercies, hands joining to rescue one rumpled kitten. Dozens stopped their days to start real life for one real Jeffrey.
Busy people broke the schedule over their knees, choosing to tend Jeffrey’s fever.
Important people correctly defined “importance,” soaking Jeffrey’s painful paw and wrapping it in comforting gauze.
Selfless people said “no” to many things so they could say “yes” to Jeffrey’s yearning eyes: “yes, we will foster this burning-up, baffled, brilliant, be-lovable baby.”
Common people came together to make art.
It doesn’t always feel this way in the moment, of course. It feels like we’re finger-painting, bumbling forward, just doing the next right thing, one little thing at a time.
But the things line up like little brown sparrows and sing us our life’s song. We are common people, commoning the world towards compassion.
The art of “commoning” is making our life together.
The art of “commoning” is making the common kitten a king.
The art of “commoning” is making sure no one lives unloved.
This art is healing Jeffrey, mending his paw and befriending his fears and loving him until he knows he is lovable.
He is ensconced in a heavenly foster home. He is exquisite in every set of eyes.
He is the rarest thing under or over the stars: a creature loved for who he is, simply because he is.
This is our common cause at Tabby’s Place.
This is your calling, too, the one you answer like a light-force every time we cry out. You are Cherishing the Kittens. You are making sure your donations are matched (now through June 1st, that is).
You are doing common, unheralded heroics: reading the numbers off your credit card, taking the pulse of compassion, letting your heart beat fast at the sight of a single kitten.
You are giving, and you are giving life.
You are commoning with us.
You are hurling comets of love.
Arm in arm, hand in wounded paw, we are uncommoning the world.