It does matter that you’re still here.
It does matter what you do.
It matters, even when matters feel so far out of your hands that you want to hide under 100,000 “I Voted” stickers and wait for deliverance from anywhere at all.
Your will is free and strong, even when it feels shackled by scaredness and secrets the future won’t tell.
Everything you do is part of everything in a grand, strange tapestry, wild threads of cats and people and psalms and poems and promises across space and time.
Do not give in to despair.
Do not believe the lie that nothing new can come from your very own hands and hopes and choices, tiny and brave and seen only by your own watery eyes.
Make the cats proud.
Make the choice to make much of how much you matter.
Even tomorrow. Especially tomorrow.
Even when it all makes you feel very small and young and tender, in the good way and the lonely way.
We are all longing helplessly for “precedented times” today. It’s not just the election, or the pandemic, or the thousand tiny battles that would have quietly crashed through even an ordinary year. It’s all of it, and something more than it, and it’s up to us — children that we are — to let it make us better rather than brutal, tender rather than terrible.
Whatever happens.
I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s not my place to tell you what particular “breaking news” I’d like to see on my ticker.
But I know that you and I hold this together, in our tiny trembly hands: hope.
If you’re reading these words and loving these cats, you are my friend, my brother, my sister, my dear one.
If you’re here, you matter to me. And whatever happens tomorrow, that will not change one iota.
Whatever happens tomorrow, we’re all still going to be scared. Come Wednesday, we’ll all have to “do it afraid” again. What matters most is that we do it together, a band of grubby little kittens squeezing each other’s mitts tight.
You may helm aircraft carriers or multinational corporations or a family. You may have letters after your name. You may go into the fields or the operating room or the Big City every day. Me, I work at a cat sanctuary and I love.
The truth is, we all still feel like kids. The truth is, we are. The greatest lie the grown-ups gave us was that we would ever feel adult.
But nothing matters more than a child driven by love.
We are small beasties in an old sandbox, with the unending calling to build a civilization of love. Here. Now.
Feel your weight and your worth, kittens.
This weird little kid, and approximately 110 cats, are cheering you on.
Wonderful, Angela! It doesn’t matter what your heart and head tell you is the correct vote for you, it just matters that you thought about it with love and you did vote. It matters to the cats that you be at peace with yourself – and if not, they will offer soft fur and purrs to calm you.