Miss Ear was the one who showed up first, regularly. Her ear was tipped, and so she became Miss Ear.
Then came Freddie—friendly and aloof all at the same time, a contradiction with whiskers.
Beige is, well, the color beige.
Harabuji arrived next. Grandpa in Korean. He moves with the careful dignity of age, slow and deliberate, as if every step costs something.
Then Grumpy, wearing perpetual disappointment like a coat he can’t shake off.
One pregnant cat came, ravenous and fearless. We named her Preggie. Days later, another pregnant one appeared, and we called her Beige Preggie because creativity has its limits.
More kept coming, sharpening our naming skills and softening something in us we didn’t know needed softening.
Slowly, we’ve grown attached to these cats. They’ve learned to beg with an art form all their own—looking up adoringly, staring at the orange food bowls for infinite time, then alternating their gaze to us for another infinite stretch. The performance is flawless. Our co-dependency, firmly established.
They are now woven into our morning ritual of gratitude. No, they don’t sit with us sharing our practice—but we’re grateful for their presence among us, for the way they remind us that showing up matters.
The Weight We Carry
It started as a simple request from our hosts: feed the cats. But somewhere between the first bowl and the hundredth, it became something else—our own small mission, a daily joy, and interestingly, a constant reminder that kindness nourishes the giver as much as the receiver.
Or maybe I’m just searching for a counterbalance to a hostile world.
Jeju is home to countless wild cats. Some have tipped ears marking them as spayed or neutered, others don’t. There seems to be some logic to the system, though we don’t fully understand it. What we do understand, watching them approach our door with careful, measured steps, is that these cats carry histories written in their wariness, in the language of those who have learned that humans can hurt.
You can see it in how they move—the way they bolt at sudden sounds, the distance they maintain even while eating ravenously, as if trust and hunger wage a constant war inside them. They weren’t always treated with kindness. Perhaps they never were. So they exist in this heartbreaking in-between: dependent on the very beings they’ve learned to fear, their lives suspended in the delicate balance between terror and the faint possibility of grace.
I struggle with this disparity—the comfort of our life here while wars rage elsewhere. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Now Iran. So much suffering while we photograph wildflowers abundant across Jeju’s fields, Hallasan rising majestic in the background, while we feed cats in our quiet corner of the world.
The guilt sits heavy some days. What accident of fate places us in this peaceful corner while others endure raining missiles? What invisible hand decides who gets a sunrise over volcanic slopes and who gets rubble and grief?
Yet the cats keep coming. And every time they do, they’re placing a small bet that the world can be different than their worst experiences taught them. That despite everything, there might be hands that don’t hurt, voices that don’t threaten, corners where trust is rewarded rather than punished.
Maybe that’s what we can offer this fractured world: the patient, persistent practice of showing up with open arms. Of creating small spaces where fear doesn’t have to win. Of amplifying kindness not because it fixes everything—it doesn’t—but because it’s the most defiant, hopeful gesture we know how to make.
Call me naïve, but I wish—how I wish—that opening our arms and finding ways to collaborate was chosen over bombing others, over the grinding machinery of greed and power.
The cats will come again tomorrow. We’ll feed them again. And in that simple exchange—their cautious hope meeting our steady care—we’ll all practice being a little less afraid, a little more trusting, a little more willing to believe that kindness still matters, that it counts for something in the cosmic ledger of what it means to be human together.
Even here. Even now. Even when the world feels too broken to mend.
