There is a cat in my mind, if the whole world were a cat...

Last week, during a conversation, a professor of mine who is an artist asked: "Do you have children?"

"I have a son," I say, and my mother adds, "and a daughter..."

With that smile that appears on my face every time I think of her, I explain, "my cat," adding, "she is 5 years old, she had just been rescued from a chimney, she was a two-month-old baby when I took her into my arms."

Today, I am reading news about a commercial. A commercial prepared for Mother's Day was found objectionable and removed from broadcast. The reason given was that the commercial "damaged" the concept of family. I also think of mothers who live outside the family environment consisting of a mother, father, and child... 

Out of curiosity, we watch the commercial as a family. We see nothing but maternal compassion and love.

In the commercial, which begins with a woman asking another woman looking at vacuum cleaners in a store, "You're a mother, I suppose?", there are two women, a dog, and a vacuum cleaner. 

One of the women presents motherhood by talking about her school-age children; upon the "motherhood" question directed at her, the other woman thinks of her dog, whom she calls "my little son," and sees a child's mischief in her dog; it is clear she loves her dog like her child.

This is a vacuum cleaner commercial; it takes the concept of "motherhood" beyond a physiological state and expands it with the most fundamental feelings and associations belonging to the concept, such as protection, compassion, and love, and continues to exalt these feelings: "You become a mother when you carry someone in your heart for a lifetime." In other words, you do not have to give birth. I take it a step further; thinking of men who provide mothering alongside fathering to their children...

Then I want to ask; have you ever loved, protected, looked after, approached with compassion, and mothered a living being other than a human?

Well, have you never seen people who have included a cat, a dog, a rabbit, or a bird in their family? 

What do you owe this distance between you and animals to?

Or were you afraid, like me? Can love and fear stand side by side? 

They did. I was frightened by a cat when I was a child, and it took me exactly 39 years to be able to touch another cat. 

When I overcame this strange fear, I began to ask how it could be possible for a person who is not afraid of cats not to make room for an animal in their home...

I understood those who, like me, want to share this feeling with someone else who has the same excitement, with the thrill of having just adopted a living being in the middle of their lives, when I added a cat to my family.

Those mothers, those fathers, talk about their "pups" that they watch with amazement as if they were describing the first steps of their newborn babies, showing each other all kinds of photos and sharing how much they love them...

They meet in love...

Even when everywhere is blood, everywhere is war, they can do this.

Loving is still like a miracle. 

Or have you never loved a cat, or a living being other than a human, or even an inanimate object?

Did two women meeting in their love for animals harm motherhood and the family? Do you think the institution of family is so weak that it will be destroyed by the conversation of two women? 

Or does the family shrink instead of grow when you put another soul from outside the human species into it?

The commercial, especially this commercial, is exactly my area of expertise: I could have looked at the event from three different hats as a mother, a cat mom, and an academic interested in advertising. 

I stayed inside the middle hat today: A cat mom. I took them all into it, I wore my hats on top of each other.

Now I ask those who made the "objectionable" decision, from under which hat did you look?

Recently, I had decided to review my article titled "Should We Become a Little More Animalistic?", which I wrote from the heart but, with the same heart, found a bit harsh before publishing. Let's call it self-censorship...

When the subject is survival, which animal causes harm beyond the need for survival to nature or another?

Suddenly, "mothers"(!) who leave their newborn babies in bags in the trash or alive in elevator shafts come to my mind.

When reaching into the triangle of nature, animal, and human; I know there are those between the lines who will quickly list a few reference animals to make human cruelty and various atrocities of today belong to nature and therefore legitimate. 

I also went for a stroll in the animal kingdom:

There were those around like hyenas who reached for the prey and labor of other living beings. It was certainly beyond the need to satisfy their hunger, just like a fox strangling chickens in a coop and throwing them aside.

Clearly; the cunning of a fox and the physical space of a hyena were quite narrow compared to that of a human. 

With the great advances within revolutionary and evolutionary cycles, the physical and mental boundaries of humans have almost disappeared, and in the end, the "small" human within this "great" system has come to live for "more" of everything. 

I wonder, did humans label the fox as cunning because they likened it to themselves, moving away from other animals and their "natural" needs?

Looking from very far away, this short period in the story of humanity seems unimportant and temporary. However, it is also certain that; even our need to glance at the wild to justify human nature is enough to show where and in what state humanity still is, despite the time that has passed.

Today, isn't the human even more savage than the most predatory animal? 

I recognize those who say, "So much so that, sometimes even more than the most savage humans history has known..." not by their voices, but by their withdrawal into their own corners, their silence.

Even in the small traffic of our daily lives, we encounter such people that I say, if only we became a little more animalistic, if only we learned a little bit of animal nature.

Some of you say, "What kind of talk is this!" Humans are above everything (!). Humans are the "noblest of creatures"!...

I live with a cat, and while watching her, I rethink living; I learn so much about life. Most of all, I want the deep peace of the cat who surrenders herself to the warmth and light of the sun.

And for everyone who is tired in the world under "our sun," who has seen the day end under the sun, and who has lost hope...

As I thought when saying "Should we become a little more animalistic?"; it seems we would cause less harm to each other, to other species, and to nature if we returned to animal conscience, to animal nature.

In the war that human reason wages with conscience, when conscience loses, the human also loses their reason.

In the face of the savagery that collectively slaughtered animals in 2024, I greet all living beings, with or without legs, and nature, with the lines I included in my painting and poetry exhibition titled "A Street Cat":

there is a cat in my mind

if the whole world were a cat

I used to be afraid of cats

now I am afraid of humans