This From Cesar Millan today

“Animals don’t follow unstable pack leaders; only humans promote, follow, and praise instability.”  The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan

Need I say more ?

Damn Proust

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
— Marcel Proust

And discovering it we are. We can’t help it. People tested like never before–all together and very alone. I think about national challenges we’ve faced in the past—WWII, Vietnam. Wars that tested our strength but brought us together regardless on which side of the fence you landed (Vietnam). Today’s wars feels out of our control–someone else making decisions for who knows what. Resigned, apathetic–we are realizing what governments gone wild can and will do. And we sit watching our reality shows, waiting fr the season to end. Feeling out of control and very much like the country on the playground that nobody wants to play with anymore.

What of this war? THESE wars….

In many ways it feels like we fight our own war psychologically, altho we are in the economic war all together. It’s hard to miss. We all know multiple people who have lost their jobs the past year or so–some still looking for work. We take care of ourselves because when a storm is brewing there only so many people that fit into the storm cellar, right? RIGHT? Hmmmm. We sit in our offices like cattle in a pen, hoping we are not next up the ramp. We put our lives and dreams on hold and head down, forge ahead day to day, sometime hour to hour, coming up for a breath and remembering, for me—as I sit by the lake watching my dog lick the breeze, what it used to be like when things felt simplier. I smell cut grass in the wind, hear the mmmrrrrr of the motor, and think how much of my life I had before me, as I smelled that same cut grass as a 7 year old. Wondering what will I be. What WILL I be.

I sit here today asking the same question, feeling an urgency from so many directions. For a moment I feel so much is not in my hands…so many turns…major life events…. resting on the decisions and good will of others, and I am paralyzed….for a moment…..for a MOMENT. I think I will smell grass more, and sit against a tree and think about what I want to be when I grow up.

Be kind to someone today. Look them in the eyes and let them know it’s ok to be unsure and scared. Let them know they are not alone. Call your friends and make time for them.

and what about death? (Part I)

I’ve been studying metaphysics for quite some time. I love it when I come across a book, so profoundly simple in it’s explanation of life and death. We humans like to make things so hard for ourselves. Perhaps that’s the necessary path to discover ourselves for ourselves–it is in fact–or it wouldn’t be our experience. Through death there is life, and life, whether we acknowledge it or not, is a series of events and experiences along the way to our own inevitable deaths. This invitation hanging out there for each of us. Looming like a one way ticket to an undisclosed location. We can look away for a time, deny and distract, but eventually we are face to face, looking it in the eye.

I used to be afraid of hospitals. The stale smell of them, the idea of them, the pain and uncertainty that creeps through the hallways. The smell of death crawling out of the rooms where vacant stares gripped my guts and reminded me that I too could be those eyes staring from the bed, pleading for someone to take me out to anywhere….anywhere but there.

I successfully avoided hospitals, never a stitch or broken arm as a kid to pull me there, until my best friend (and I by her side), at 25 years of age, spent a week in a coma there before dying. I was no longer a hospital…or death… virgin. Soon after, I watched many friends die from AIDS over the next several years, and a hospital was a common place to be. Watching your friends die in their 20’s and 30’s has a profound effect on how you perceive death—and life. I am no longer afraid of it. In fact, I am more afraid of life at times truth be told.

And as I experience more deaths as I live life and meet people along my way, I see more and more how small we really are in the all of it. The universe is a wide wonder, all of us making up the whole like drops of water in an ocean, and I am no longer full of myself. I am the I that is WE, nothing more, nothing less. I enjoy the sunshine on my face like the flower that stretches to the sky, taking no thought in it’s existence. Joining in wonderful manifestation of Being…..delighting in the Uni-verse–the explosion of life that creates itself everyday, regardless the human things we do to twart it.

NEXT POST: An excerpt regarding death from the book “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein.

The True Hero is Flawed

The True Hero is Flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether she can triumph, but whether she can overcome obstacles–preferably of her own making–in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.

–Excerpt from the book “The Art of Racing in The Rain” by Garth Stein

Woman bites pit bull attacking her pet

Kudos Amy! Amy Rice is a courageous, loving, artist friend of mine from Minneapolis, MN. She was out walking her dog Ella the other day when a pit bull, unprovoked, came running out of nowhere and attacked Ella. Today it’s on the home page of CNN.com.

Watch this video.

Dog paws and corn chips

did you ever notice that dogs paws smell like corn chips…really, they do.