Meet Montana: When Love Is Hungry, It Hides Itself In Rescue
Part 1 of Story 3
Five days after we rescued the Columbia Falls cats, one of them died.
I had named her Garnett. As if a name could hold a little dignity around suffering. As if naming could turn an outcome.
She was found dead that morning in the cage-free shed the cats now called home.
Garnett had been very sick, yes, and likely had FIV. Those facts make it very easy to deflect any responsibility in her death.
But when I tell you that Montana will teach you how to see reality as it is, I mean Montana will teach you how to see reality as it is, and show you, if you're willing to learn, that if you're going to fight reality, you better make sure your energy is cleanly powered and not sneakily driven by something deeper. Otherwise, it is guaranteed to backfire in profound, inescapable ways.
Garnett would have likely not lived much longer had she been left outside. Everyone wanted me to latch onto that story so that none of us involved in the rescue had to be looked at under the microscope.
But I will share what my mind concluded immediately, and what I still, a year later, feel to be true: the stress of having food removed for days in order to get these cats trapped, then the stress of transporting them 90 minutes away, then the stress of suddenly living indoors with no significant free space to roam or separate from other colony members that were not friends, paired with the non circulating air that in hindsight I should have freaking thought about and gotten them an air purifier for because air quality is so critical for cats with FIV, and the now life that felt like a cage inside the four walls that kept her from the only place she had ever known - the outdoors - caused this sweet cat to die in a place that was scary and unfamiliar, and that was my burden to bear.
If left outside, at least she would have had her comforts and her dignity. And her sovereignty, which was snatched from her existence when I decided I knew what was best for another living being.
That morning, I felt Montana speak again in the only language it ever uses:
Consequence.
Reality.
No story.
Montana taught me that rescue can be projection. And projection can kill.
So the line between compassion and distortion is thinner than we admit.
Before I tell you the quick and dirty of this cat rescue story, let me back up.
I have a particular relationship with love that is inconvenient to explain in modern language.
Love, in my first-principles understanding, is not a verb you reserve for a boyfriend, or a noun you assign to a marriage. Love is the current that powers life itself. The universal force that builds galaxies and moves cells. The thing that shows up in a sunset so beautiful it makes you cry, because something in you recognizes something true.
I became open to nature in 2016 on my first solo trip, sitting on the sand facing the Atlantic Ocean at Indian Harbor Beach, Florida.
I had interrupted a pattern I'd been living inside for years: "I want to travel… but I need to wait until I have a boyfriend."
That one choice, to go anyway, cracked my life open. It signaled something to the universe that felt cosmic and simple at the same time:
Jenn is HERE.
And on that beach, fully inhabited by me, not an idea of myself built for someone else's approval, I felt the ocean love me back. I've written about it before: "everything that ever had lived and everything that ever would live" was there. In the waves. In the air. In the figure-eight exchange between my love toward it and its love returning to me.
It was deep. And it changed me.
So, nature has since that moment changed my perspective on love.
The seeing of reality, therefore, is to witness love. And our capacity to see reality as it is without arguing against it is a measure of our ability to offer unconditional love.
Which is why, in month two of being in Montana, when I saw the colony of cats that had been left behind after the homeowner moved, something in me went into emergency.
I could see how allowing reality would be honoring of the cats, their resilience, and likely untapped potential. It would also avoid assuming we know what they're thinking.
But I also could see twenty-one cats. Sick cats. Cold cats. Cats with no heat, or food, or water. The things they had grown accustomed to.
You remember Jason, right? The guy I walked River's Edge with in my fourth week here, the one who told me: "Montanans will watch you struggle and struggle. And only when it becomes clear you're going to drown will they rescue you."
That day, he offered me another piece of Montana wisdom:
"These are Montana cats, Jenn. They're hardcore. They don't want to be babied. They want to be respected for their ability to survive."
He said it with the same tone he used to describe the people here: respectfully, cleanly, without pity.
And then he gave me the local directive:
Do not feed them.
Do not interfere.
Leave them be.
It was beautiful, honestly. A coherent worldview shaped by a land that forces people to grow up quickly.
But there was one problem.
My mind couldn't accept the premise.
Because the one thing nobody was saying, but my nervous system kept screaming, was this:
Those cats weren't true ferals.
They'd been fed regularly by the homeowner. Given water. Given shelter. Even a heated shed in winter. Many had been dumped by humans at some point, which means they had been domesticated, and once domesticated, animals become our responsibility.
So to me, "leave them be" wasn't a neutral stance. It wasn't loving reality to leave them, although by my own definition, it would seem that way.
To leave them felt like conditional love disguised as philosophy.
Or perhaps, better said, a reality escaped through story: "they're feral. Leave them be." That would have been easier.
But that wasn't reality, in my perspective. They weren't ferals. We had to correct the story based on first principles and handle things from truth, not philosophy or delusion or escapism or convenience.
So, for four months they became my absolute mission.
And, staying in that constant state of trying to save innocent beings after having been abandoned eroded my ability to hold onto logic, and I was very much aware of my emotional takeover.
The only time I was logical was when I was building relationships: agencies, shelters, Humane Society, rescues. I needed someone to see them differently.
I needed someone to agree with me that they weren't "feral," because that one word was the reason they kept being denied help.
It was tragic. Over and over again:
No.
No.
No.
No.
Here is the part where things get uncomfortable for me to admit, because it exposes my lens more than it exposes the cats.
My capacity for love has always been huge.
And my experience of humans, especially some of the most important humans in my life, has been love with conditions attached.
Love when I was easy. Love when I performed. Love when I stayed small and manageable and agreeable.
Most of all, love when I abandoned my sovereignty for their lived story of reality so that life could keep them from seeing what was too painful to face.
And when I stopped being willing to contort to reality designed by a single person's narrative, I was disposed. Over and over through childhood and adulthood.
If only I had been willing to accept the story that they were feral, rather than the one I was seeing that had evidence to the contrary, the one that nuance reveals.
If only I could have just walked away from those cats because it was inconvenient, expensive, emotionally exhausting, difficult, or because they hissed and didn't want affection and would never let me come close.
That would have been easier.
But then I would have been joining the club I hate most: the club of people who love only when it's easy.
And here's the part that perhaps is the saddest, in my opinion. So clear in hindsight, but so powerfully hidden last year.
If you stripped the words of my pleas down to their energetic essence, my argument for reality that these cats weren't feral, you would have heard something else entirely.
A plea made by present-day Jenn on behalf of family-of-origin Jenn.
To a system that loved her when she performed, and disposed of her when she chose herself.
And she chose herself because the only other option was to conform to a non truthful reality dictated by the ruler. And that didn't allow for sovereignty. And Jenn bringing light to that made Jenn inconvenient.
They were so comfortable leaving her.
To fend for herself.
To pretend she didn't exist.
To call her feral.
I had the remnants of a story, as it turns out, and the power behind my rescue efforts was being supplied sneakily by this lifelong wound still without its salve.
Dang it.
As it turns out, I was not as healed as I thought I had been.
And those cats showed up to reveal that.
Life as an experiment. Wanting to see what inside of me is still with distortion. Taught through nothing other than cats. Non feral cats.
One of which is sitting in front of me, cuddled up in the pink fuzzy throw on my boucle chair.
I tell her often, if I'd known you were going to end up with me, I'd have gotten you sooner from those cold, outdoor nights. I'm so sorry, my sweet girl, that you had to survive your first 4 months that way.
We found a rescue. We trapped 21 cats (22 if you count the one I kept). I built a website. In a week we raised $2,700 for vet care.
And then Garnett died.
And the lens cracked.
And I was left not knowing what reality had actually ever been in this case. I could not see it clearly, nor know if I ever had.
I am not anti-rescue.
People rescue all the time with clean energy. It is magnificent. It is coherent. It is love in action that doesn't hijack sovereignty. It is help that knows how to hold itself. It is help that stays contained and non-reactive even when the stakes are high.
Rescue can be clean. Rescue can be right.
And I still believe those cats needed rescuing.
But in my case, there was an agenda beneath my agenda that was at the time less conscious. Less touchable. I could feel it, but didn't understand it.
The agenda was to heal the wound within me and the cats became the proxy.
Unconsciously, of course. But the unconscious rules our days, like it or not.
That's what made my energy not clean. Not wrong. Not malicious.
Just hungry underneath the care. Old hunger.
The kind that wants to undo history.
The kind that wants a different ending.
The kind that wants to finally prove that unconditional love exists somewhere, because it didn't exist where it should have.
And when love is hungry, it hides itself in rescue.
It borrows the costume of goodness and it becomes harder to see where care ends and projection begins.
What wasn't clean in the cat rescue was the energy.
Mine.
And, devastatingly, as it turned out, the rescue organization's energy too.
Her wound didn't translate into hunger. It translated into interpreting reality incorrectly due to a hyper sensitivity to perceived slights. Control was used to protect herself, and to ensure her narrative reigned supreme. Any and all perceived slights, therefore, were deflected outward. The consequences of her misread of reality were never owned, but rather, spewed outward using another story as its catapult.
And I felt it the moment I raised the concern that Garnett may have died because we failed to monitor and anticipate what the cats needed once they were in a new environment.
I was ninety minutes away. I couldn't check on them daily. I also knew my impulses were intense and sometimes illogical, and I was trying to stay respectful to the rescue's competence. I was trying to soften myself. I was trying to be careful not to project.
But Garnett died.
And when I advocated for changes in care, changes I was willing to subsidize, I struck a chord in the unhealed part of her. It was received as personal attack rather than simply prioritizing the cats' care.
Toxicity arrived immediately.
Because of wounded people rescuing for reasons bigger than rescue.
I knew instantly: I'm out.
I don't do toxic. I don't do war. I don't do shouting matches disguised as mission. I'm not here to hold someone else's unhealed dynamics while mine are already flared and raw.
So I made a phone call to the other rescue, the one who was meant to take the cats after this initial pit stop at the first rescue, and I made sure she was still in.
She had clean energy.
It was beautiful. Healthy. Compassion contained. Controlled. Non-reactive.
Exactly what I couldn't be at the time, and knew it, and exactly what the other rescue couldn't be, but couldn't admit.
So I had to be the bad guy. The one who got the nasty public comments and the character bashing and the months later hate comments on public posts that had nothing to do with the cats.
And boy, do I know that pattern.
Triangulation at its best. Make sure the loud one controls the narrative about who the quiet one actually is.
Sigh.
I had actually managed to recreate the very dynamic that was core to my wound.
Holy moly, Montana. You are having your way with me alright. No buffer. Just cold, hard reality.
With every one of my distortions in plain sight for me to see.
Now, THAT'S love.
A year later, here is what Montana taught me in the most brutal, sacred way:
You can do the "right" thing with the wrong energy. And the wrong energy will corrupt the entire act.
This is the thin line we don't talk about enough:
The line between compassion and distortion.
The line between help and control.
The line between love and projection.
I projected my story onto those cats. I went to war so they wouldn't have to feel what I have felt.
But that wasn't reality, or maybe it was, and that's the part that's the most unrelenting: the continued lack of clarity because I altered reality and have to accept the consequence of the weight of that.
And I'm not sure that the cats are happier. I'm not sure I did the right thing. I very well could have taken their sovereignty away by seeing them as weak and in need of saving.
Or maybe I supported it.
I'll never know.
This is the danger of rewriting reality's story. You become the one responsible for all of the consequences that come as a result of your overwrite.
What's even more wild is that often, the part of a person that compels them to overwrite reality with their own story will also refuse to accept any fault, and when consequences come a knockin', another story about why those consequences belong to others must be constructed.
And the bigger danger is this: how few of us are healed. How many of us are walking around interpreting reality through wounded lenses and calling it truth. And insisting that others see it as truth, as well, usually at the expense of the actual reality where consensus can be found.
Wounded people do things with wounded energy and call it love. Or punishment. Or control. They organize entire lives around avoiding the feeling underneath.
But here’s what I believe now: I don’t think we actually have to “heal.” I think the obsession with healing is the very fallacy that keeps people identifying as broken. It turns wholeness into a destination, and the wound into a lifelong identity.
I think we only have to know ourselves. Bring into the light what’s been steering from the dark: the fear, the hunger, the hidden agenda. Make the unconscious conscious.
Because what is seen clearly can’t keep driving in secret.
In my experience, self-correction becomes universal correction at that point. Once something is exposed, it loses its power to harm anything outside of you. The distortion can’t recruit consequences anymore.
That’s the work. That’s the healing. That’s it.
378 days ago, I was without any sense of conclusion about whether what I did was right or wrong for those cats. I was forced to instead commit to being verdictless as promised in this Montana experiment.
I'd let the pain come when it wanted to come. I'd let the guilt surface when it needed to come up for air. I'd let the tears fall when they needed gravity. I'd be the vessel through which my conditioning and its consequences played out.
378 days.
Conclusionless.
Uncomfortably, painfully, conclusionless.
My goodness, does the mind want to conclude everything uncomfortable as fast as possible. And in the words of the great John Mayer, "I wonder about the outcome of a still, verdictless life. Am I living it right?"
What I can say for sure, however, is that insights - so many insights - have formed in my awareness. The pain of consequence, of having messed with reality, and insights. Earned insights.
I haven't been back to the River's Edge. It's a place that was inevitable to become painful for me: if I hadn't done anything with the cats, I'd have seen them alone and starving each time I visited. So I did what I did. And now I picture them miserable inside their cages cloaked in the hubris of human projection.
But it's a special place, and deserves all the glory it offers those who visit it.
The edge of the Flathead River, in Columbia Falls, Montana.
And speaking of the edge… (click for Part 2 - River's Edge Park)
1 comment
You’re amazing!