“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Richard Ahnert’s The Other Side captures that quiet ache of distance that defines so much of what it means to love. A cat sits on a swing in a snow-covered yard, gazing toward a small house aglow with lamplight. Inside the window, another cat sits its silhouette softened by the golden curtain, its warmth implied but unreachable. Between them stretches a field of snow and silence, the thin and tender line between belonging and solitude.
Ahnert’s genius lies in his restraint. The scene is not sentimental but contemplative. The composition invites us into a threshold space between domesticity and wildness, intimacy and isolation, the remembered and the unreachable. The swing, motionless in the cold, becomes a meditation on suspended love: the kind that cannot move forward, yet cannot disappear. It is both longing and peace, the still acceptance that not all warmth can be possessed.
Tonight, as I look at this painting on National Cat Day, the image feels especially close to my heart. The air outside has turned crisp; the first frost will not be far off. I think of Katy, the feral cat who has made my porch her home for the past three years. She is not mine, not in the way most people mean that word, but she belongs to my days and to the rhythm of my evenings. Every night she scratches gently at the window beside my chair, and every night I rise to fill her bowl. When I return home, she is waiting by the porch light: patient, expectant, familiar.
Two of my cats are her kittens, raised indoors and utterly content in their domestic ease. But Katy remains what she has always been: watchful, wary, free. I’ve tried to woo her closer, and she has allowed it at times, sometimes sitting near me as I smoke my pipe, sometimes brushing against the edge of my shoe. Yet she always stops short of letting me touch her. She knows the comfort I offer, but she also knows what it would cost her to accept it. And so, I have learned to love her as she is. I learned to love her on her own terms.
In this, I see Ahnert’s painting not just as metaphor but as mirror. The cat outside the window is not exiled, only self-determined. Its distance is not rejection but identity. The snow between us becomes the language of boundaries: a recognition that love can exist without enclosure. She has her feral house, warm against the cold; she has me, her constant presence; she has the freedom that makes her who she is.
There is a lesson in that: for how we care, and for how we love. We live in a culture that often confuses affection with ownership, compassion with control. Yet love, at its truest, requires the humility of letting another being remain themselves. It asks us to fill the bowl without asking for gratitude, to open the door without insisting it be walked through. To love Katy is to honor her boundaries as sacred; to see that my care need not conquer her freedom.
Philosophically, The Other Side becomes a meditation on the ethics of affection: the way love occupies the space between autonomy and belonging. It asks us to reimagine care not as possession but as presence. In phenomenological terms, it is a call to dwell with another being without erasing their difference. The act of love becomes the act of waiting, of showing up, of lighting the porch lamp against the dark.
And so, as fall deepens and the nights grow cold, I find myself worrying for her. I wonder if she stays warm enough, if she feels the bite of the frost. Yet beneath that worry is acceptance: she will live the way she must. She will cross that snowy yard or not. She will remain, as she always has, on the other side of the glass. She remains close enough to love, distant enough to remain herself.
Each evening, when I hear her soft scratch at the window and step out into the chill, I think again of Gibran’s words. Love directs our course. It leads us not to possession, but to reverence. Sometimes it calls us to open our homes; other times, simply to keep the porch light burning for the souls, wild or weary, who choose to stay just beyond the threshold.