KateThoughts

I have a dog, now.

I am a very far distance away from being the person my dog thinks I am. Yes, I know it's a cliche'...and it's still the best words I can think of, too.

I found this in this blog post at Aging Gratefully

Rev. Stephen V. Sprinkle, Ph.D.: 

The Souls of Our Dogs: A Valentine's Day Tribute to Our Best Friends

February 14, 2013 13:04:43

No treatise on the soul ever taught me as much as my dog, Winston. What a happy irony! I am a theologian being patiently tutored on friendship, loyalty, and love by a brown-brindle English bulldog. It seems only mete and good to pay tribute to the soulfulness of humanity's best companions on Saint Valentine's Day. For many of us, our dogs are the epitome of love incarnate.

Since our species, Homo sapiens, and our domestic dogs, Canis lupus familiaris, have shared a partnership through the good times and bad befalling the human race for better than 35,000 years, we have had ample time to learn many of the answers to life's deepest questions from them. "Who are my neighbors, and how am I to relate to them?"
Dogs have demonstrated unfailing help in time of need: herding our flocks, hunting alongside us, using their superior senses to warn us of dangers we could neither see nor hear, and watching over us while we slept. "Are we alone in the universe?" Dogs have shown us unstinting loyalty and companionship, offering us warmth to ward off the chill of the void, nuzzling us time and again out of our existential angst with their cool, damp noses--peering into our souls with their unfathomably rich brown, and blue, and hazel eyes. In the bargain, they have won a dependable source of food, shelter, and companionship from us. Little wonder, then, that the earliest elevation of dogs to the status of persons in prehistory took place by burying our faithful friends alongside us in human graves as early as 14,000 years ago.

My bulldog, Winston, knows nothing of these things intellectually. But I am convinced that he possesses all the best hallmarks of his race instinctually. He does not care about my ethnicity or race or gender or sexual orientation, whether I am rich or poor, whether I occupy the clifftop of my theological guild, or inhabit a more modest spot near the bottom of it. All that matters to him is that I am his human, and the joy with which he greets me at the door, flews all aflutter, and toenails skittering across the floor in his ritual dance of hello lets me know that I am home, and all is well. For to the world I may be only a single person. But to this bulldog, I am the world.

The ancient Romans believed that a great she-wolf (a lupus) suckled Romulus and Remus in her cave-den, the Lupercal, along with her own pups. True or not, her gentler great-grand-pups and we humans have been mutually caring for one another long enough for us to know that something of the best within us emerges in the company of the single species on earth who will be faithful to us to the last beat of their hearts.

Pagan Roman priests, the Luperci, and the Christian bishops who succeeded them argued theology to a fault, as the petty wrangling over the festival of the she-wolf, the Lupercalia, and the Feast of Saint Valentine demonstrates. Which was the correct god of the Lupercalia: Faunus or Inuus, Mars, Juno, or Bacchus? What rendition of the Holy Trinity proved orthodox enough to consecrate Valentine's martyrdom and make him a bona fide saint? But the dogs of then and now, Winston's kindred, fetched love away from abstraction and made acts of love obvious in each generation until this very Saint Valentine's Day. For us humans willing to learn from our dogs, it was never the finer points of dogma that counted a biscuit--the celebration of love and companionship is all that ever counts in life: canine, human, and divine.

So, do dogs have souls? When they die, do all dogs go to heaven, as the animated film of the same name suggests? I may remain agnostic about the obscure points of such a theology, but I am not undecided that, as St. Francis of Assisi prayed, all our pets manifest the beauty of creation and the holy joys of lives wholeheartedly lived. Prepare your best Saint Valentine's Day cards for them, then: our pets are our sisters and our brothers, and they call us to be better people and better stewards of creation than we are now.

Winston sighs as he nestles at my feet while I write. He looks up at me with his harlequin face, half white and half black, the yen and the yang in fur and wrinkles and underbite. Theologically, I wish I had something "profound" with which to conclude this post. All I can manage is a cliché I cannot better no matter how I try. In my life, I only wish I could be half as good a person as my dog believes that I am. Happy Saint Valentine's Day, Winston, you soulful dog, to you all your kin!  

~http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/blackberry/p.html?id=2667424

A rambling game of "What If"

When I fell into retirement eight years ago (age 58), I didn’t know that it was happening. I thought I was taking some time off to finish some schooling and then begin a new career. The time from then to now has been a bit of a ramble: fits and starts, exploration and insploration, all of it interesting, some of it hard, all of it …transformative.

If, or when, I thought about retirement at all, it was first a desire to escape the corporate madness and then to go more slooowwwwwly.

Now I find there are not enough hours in the day for all I’m drawn to do. Sometimes I follow where my impulses lead me; sometimes I stick to the game plan. And now I’m coming to like both, judge neither, and be wherever I am in the moment.

This morning, I was wandering some blogs I read regularly and came across this post at Synch-ro-ni-zing that made me think. Ruth often does. She doesn’t know me yet, because I’ve been lurking there and haven’t commented yet. She mentioned another blog post that I fully intended to go read…but when I found a comment from the writer in question I was compelled to click over to her post immediately. Lovely You writes at The Good In You. So now I’m lurking in the background of two blogs fairly new to me and find that I am now compelled to work on some thoughts I’ve been having for awhile now…

First: Thanks Ruth and Lovely You for today’s inspiration; for the crystal clarity of your written words; and for the beauty of those parts you allow us to see.

So, on to the game of What If.

My journey has brought me to this place today where I consider that All Is Well. I consider that the thought might be actually and literally true.
The trail to that conclusion goes something like this:

·        What if there really is only one god? An energy that pervades and is all, and is in me, too? (and in you, and in that rock, and in weather, etc…)?

·        What if God is good – only good? And those things that look bad to me are only indications of a separation from that energy – and not really real, since god is everything and All is Well?

·        What if the circumstances a/o events in the world that seem not good, are only illusions manifested as contrast so that I can learn from them about how to stay connected to the only one good god?

·        What if it is true that thoughts and words and focus have energy of their own?

·        What if those things to which I give my attention get bigger or more intense?

·        What if I can change my personal world by where, how, and upon what I focus my attention and my intention?

·        What if the collective we can change the entire physical world by where, how, and upon what we focus our attention and our intention?

And here are a few observations about the world ‘as it is’.
We are being fed a completely disproportionate amount of bad news thru various media: TV news and pharmaceutical and insurance ads, preachers, peers, etc. Where are the stories of the everyday lives and loves of US?  We are being led strongly into fear by these same groups who want to sell us things, or save us; who want us to feel powerless to change anything without relying on them or their products.
In my little world, my own experimentation has proven to me that I can affect the quality of my life by shifting my focus to the positive; and by seeing all people and things and circumstances as they really exist in the mind of god - as perfect.

By creating and holding this vision, I do transform myself and my environment. It seems a clear and compelling vision that can, and does, really impact the whole planet.  And to see the world ‘as it is’ in the news, for example, is to add to the energy that maintains the suffering we think is real.

For example: (and I wouldn’t, in other circumstance than this blog, even bring up this subject)
The Gulf oil spill. I am not able to go there and walk the beaches and actually make physical changes in what is happening there. Nor do I have the energy to stay here and collect hair or hay and send it for the reclamation efforts.
For me to then hold it in my mind, and brood on it, or see it as disaster, or feel grief, or lament out loud about the whys and wherefores only serves to feed more energy into the thing itself. To listen to the countless hours of such lamenting on ‘news’ programs does the same thing.

I think it is my purpose to see a bigger picture: to see a planet that has taken care of itself for millennia, and will survive and thrive. I think I must watch my words and my mind and heart to transform all of them to positive loving things that uplift. To be sad or angry about things I am totally unable to affect is to add energy to them and does not transform;

There is a phrase in one of the comments, “My heart is now likely to break, from fullness though, not from sadness.”; and I would suggest that just changing from ‘likely to break’ to ‘overflowing with’ might transform the hearts involved, including mine.

I’m new (in some ways) to thoughts like these. I’m sure they will evolve as I continue to explore. And the evidence in my own life suggests that I’m on the right track – at least for me – at least for now.

I found this poem in the sidebar of Ruth’s blog:
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry  

For all you Crackpots out there...I mean 'cracked pots'...I mean... well...

You’ve seen this before, I suspect. But it is a lovely story

 

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments.
But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do ha lf of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. 
'I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.' The old woman smiled, 'Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?'

'That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them.'
For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table.
Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.' 

Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding.
You've just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them.
 
Remember to smell the flowers on your side of the path!