This weekend I am in Park City, Utah. Upon arrival, my dad warned me there has been some animal activity, which I am used to after spending bits of this life in Utah. Moose, deer, marmots, and all sorts of other small mammals and birds are familiar and sweet. The mountain is their home, after all, first.
I wasn’t expecting a family of mountain lions living under our deck.
Tiptoe to the back door. Smoosh face on glass. There, just like my small house cat, is a feline on its back paw-paws, hands wrapped about the edge of the patio chair, gnawing on the frame. Sitting pretty and quiet just beside the baby, protective mom looks on into the snowstorm, as through trying to assess when to put a pause on play and a play on hunting.
Over the next day, we watched each other through the glass. I put my hand up on the cold window and said “hi baby” as the kit played peekaboo with me under the table.
Big awe and big fright. These are mighty large hunting cats with a kill under the deck. These are leaping up a six foot boulder is no problemo kitties. But when I gave Department of Wildlife Resources a call they said just wait and see. Just let them be. “They won’t aggress, you’re not their style.”
Whose place is whose, anyways? These cats are likely hanging out by the barbecue because of more construction and building that destroyed their usual hillside cave. So now they traipse from mountain home to mountain home, just trying to find a place out of the blowing snow. Sweet hiders. Sweet survivors.
When the big bang went boom and the universe made cats, were all kinds of cats made at the same time? Because as I look these sweet strong big cats in the face, I can’t help but miss Snaggle, my busted stinky renal disease perfect trash cat at home. Toes curled, curious, shaking a fake mouse toy by the tail just like the lion cub shakes whatever furry mangled dinner they have under the deck.
At one point, when the mommy lion and one of the babies were out for a stroll, I sat at the back door. The young one left behind was calling to them. Small squeaks calling into the silent snow, “Here I am, here I am, don’t forget about me, I’m here. It’s me.”
We are all more the same than we are different. The wild cats and the house cats. The cubs and the pups and the baby humans. Curious. Wired to explore and play. Craving care. Hoping someone will remember we’re here and won’t forget about us to move onto the next great adventure.
Cats, force me into reflection. Shove me into awe. Take me to the place where I am reminded that this is an animal’s home first and I am both more and less animal than my mind allows me to remember when bopping about my day. While my cat makes me feel big, like a provider, these cats make me feel small and humble, a similar feeling to standing at the edge of the ocean.
I’m at the edge of you, earth. I’m at the edge of you, animal.
The cats left at 11 PM last night, all in a row, mom and two young ones in tow. Onto the next shelter, the next kill, the next wild edge of being alive. And here I am, missing them already.
This week I’m reading The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. It’s a work of beautiful, careful mixing of the awe of particle physics, quarks and dark matter, and how the development of our knowledge of the Universe can be decolonized and shape shifted to a deeper understanding of how we are all made of the same material. We, as a people, as trees, as animals, are all the same.
“Us? We are weird, completely abnormal. I don’t just mean physicists. I mean all of us, including Sequoiodeae (the redwood tree family), our entire planet, and our whole solar system. Space is mostly empty, and the parts that are not empty seem to be mostly filled with a kind of matter that is invisible to us. We haven’t figured out whether there is a way to touch it; we don’t know if it’s one kind of particle or eleven hundred different kinds.”
In a world where there’s so much we don’t understand, it’s a gift of abnormality to be the parts we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel. It’s a gift to be queering space and time just as Prescod-Weinstein queers particle physics.
I’m allowing this reminder of how many things had to go right for all of us to be here, now, on earth, in this solar system, all at the same time. For all the ways I reel at the tenderness, for how much it hurts to feel moments of loss, confusion, fear, and the unknown, I find simultaneous comfort in what a blessing it is to feel at all.
We’re here with the big cats. And that’s a fucking miracle.