Yes, I am the master of this tree!
How much farther can I go?
Um, this is a bit of a stretch here . . .
Yikes, that's a long way down!
My cat, Catsun Pallet, recently got outside and raced across the front yard to her favorite tree, nimbly climbing straight up the trunk. She continued eagerly to climb from branch to branch.
Looking up at the top of the tree, she finally paused to consider her position. That's when she noticed it was a bit too much of a reach to continue up.
Shortly after that realization, she realized just how high she'd climbed, and wasn't sure how to get down.
What to do with a stuck cat?
While our neighborhood social media page is great for posting announcements of lost as well as found pets to reunite them with their owners, we don’t have a neighborhood cat rescue. If I lived in Washington State though, I could call Canopy Cat Rescue.
Started by two brothers-in-law in 2009 when they realized how difficult it was for people to find help for their cats who were stuck in trees, they rescue kitties in need. As professional arborists, they had all the knowledge and gear to climb up to any cat who found itself in a predicament much like Catsun had.
Rescuing up to 400 cats annually, Canopy Cat Rescue runs on donations, noting that the professional arborist fees to have someone come rescue a cat are too exorbitant for most people to afford.
I learned about Tom Otto and Shaun Sears’ off-hours rescues from the GreatBigStory YouTube channel which features great storytelling, often about people who are connecting with their communities like this.
What does cat rescue have to do with community?
When I read the Great Big Story description of Canopy Cat Rescue, “Working completely off donations, these two cat lovers are helping keep Seattle’s free-climbing felines grounded,” I realized we could learn a lot from their initiative.
Tom and Shaun saw a community problem they could use their special talents to assist with – stuck cats who desperately needed to be reunited with the ground . . . and their owners. What if we all did that?
Need for societal changes
When we think of all the ways the world needs to be a more connected place with more community, it can feel overwhelming.
We don’t even need to look at the research presented by Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community to know that community involvement and civic engagement had been drastically declining for decades.
Likewise, Johann Hari addresses the critical need for societal changes in Lost Connections, proposing the need to address our lack of connection with others, nature, purposeful work, good health, and all the other connections that make the human experience meaningful.
And, yet, in both works are a multitude of stories of individual people coming together with others to make a difference in creating community and improving life not just for themselves but for the others with whom we can connect.
A gift for clothing curation
One of my first encounters with someone using their individual gifts to benefit their community was a woman in a small town in Ohio. When she retired from her job as the town’s water meter reader, she volunteered as a crossing guard.
As the weather turned cold her first season, she noticed some children who didn’t have proper winter gear. So, that evening, she rummaged through her closet and gathered spare mittens and hats and offered them to children the next day. There were more children in need than she had spare items for so she asked some friends and neighbors if they had any items they could donate and word spread.
By the time I met her years later to interview her, she had become the local clearing house for donations. Townspeople brought her donated clothes, and she passed them out. One of the most remarkable aspects of her story was that she rarely kept items more than 24 hours before she found someone who needed just the size of clothing that had been donated.
She used her gifts of gathering, cleaning, and organizing clothing to benefit her community.
How individual changes impact societal ones
When an individual or two impacts others, entire movements can be initiated.
For example, Hank and John Green started their Vlogbrothers' YouTube channel in 2007 as an entertaining exercise for the brothers as well as bit of a social experiment. Today, it's impacting the eradication of Tuberculosis in significant ways through the Nerdfighteria community that was created.
So the question becomes not just what vast, sweeping changes need to be made to make our communities, but what can we do as an individual – or with another person or two – to make community wide impacts?
What are your abilities?
What special abilities come naturally to you that you might offer others?
Maybe you can’t be out climbing trees to rescue kitties or become the local clothing donation curator, but you might be able to share a meal with a neighbor once a week or host a book club at the local library. When many of these individual services happen, our communities become more connected, eventually having an ever-widening impact.
Social Seahorse Connections is your encouragement to see what individuals are doing to make the world a more connected place and take away a like action to bring the kind of joy to others that the cat rescuers bring to reunited felines and owners or that warm mittens on a cold day bring to a small child.
So what about Catsun?
As Catsun Pallet (her name is a play off of Jackson Pollock in case you were wondering) became more concerned about her predicament, I considered how I could assist.
Fortunately, I didn't need to contact Cat Canopy Rescue and was able to rescue her from her plight without incident. She hasn’t climbed a tree since that day and instead spends much of her time watching the outdoors from the comfort of her window hammock.
Golden Connection Challenge:
What talents and services can you offer to make your community more connected?