candelori graziano
gatto
Yeah, that’s right — a kitten. And yeah, a cute kitten. Which is redundant, but yeah, here’s a photograph of a cute kitten. It could just as easily have been a puppy.
It’s not about the kitten — or the puppy that isn’t pictured. It’s not about cute. It’s about sweetness. It’s about being a sap. It’s about the willingness to acknowledge that you’re a sap. That all of us have the capacity for being sappy.
In the 18th century some clever Scots soul observed a person grinning at a cute kitten (or possibly a puppy) and noted the sudden similarity between that person’s skull and sapwood (the soft wood that lies between the roughness of the bark and the sturdiness of heartwood), and said “Dude, you are totally a saphead.”*
It’s not an insult. Sap is what keeps the plant alive; it’s what allows the plant to grow and thrive. We are all of us, universally, saps about something. Right now it’s a kitten. It could have been a puppy. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that regardless of what’s happening in the world — storms, civil wars, terrorism, earthquakes, political corruption, bigotry, willful ignorance, greed — there are always kittens and puppies. There’s always room for sappiness.
You just have to be willing to give into it. Or, even better, embrace it.**
* Not an exact quote.
** Embrace the sappiness, not the kitten; the kitten might scratch your eyes out.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
