10/13/2023
Mark Twain once said “Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you should stay out and your dog would go in.” When I die, I hope I get to go where my dogs go.
A dog creates, transcribes, a new landscape for you. A dog like Zosia sharpens your joy of all the seasons, and for a while, sometimes a long while, such a dog seems capable, by herself alone, of holding time in place--of pinning it, and holding it taught. And then when she is gone, it is as if the world is taken away.
Because it really has.
Today I lost Zosia. The quiet, wise, gentle and sweet soul of my house, my life. You have not met Her? Oh, what a dog she was!
I adopted Her in 2012 to rehome her. I didn’t take Zosia home because we instantly liked each other. I also didn’t take Her home because I went looking for another dog. I took Her home out of pity
I took Her home out of pit for the humans who confide this larger-than-life soul to a tiny wire cage. I took Her home out of pity for humans who used her and when She no longer held value, discarded Her like an object, like a piece of trash.
You see, somehow all these unwanted dogs, they chose me when they arrived, to teach their next student-me. There must be a sign posted in dog-speak somewhere on my face that says “Good home for wayward dogs who are willing to teach new owner.” They all seem to find me. I give them a home, a safe place to live and in return, they teach me how to live MY life.
See, dogs are just this way. They are the angels that walk this earth amongst us―loving unconditionally, forgiving immediately and gifted with this miraculous gift of ‘knowing.’ But, most notably, they are the universal sentinels of our human spirits.
If we were to find these qualities in a human friend, we might cling tightly to them, forever and with all of our being. But when the universe offers these traits selflessly in a package called ‘dog’―we dismiss them as cute, and nothing more.
In some ways, I believe dogs to be the truest incarnation of ‘soul.’ Jefferey Moussaiferr Mass once said “Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment.”
You see, if it weren’t for my dogs waiting always patiently for me―I might have just lost my way forever back to ‘upright’ and ‘normal’.
How ironic, that in my stumbling I found just a ‘little insight?’ In that, sometimes the greatest heroes of all, are the ones who come cloaked in the smallest of fuzzy packages.
She may not have been the Black Shepherd I’ve always dreamt of. She was not the Alaskan Malamute nor a Great Dane, she wasnt a Doberman, nor a bulldog. She was not any of those dogs.
But, she was mine, and for almost 12 years- that has been more than enough.
Zosia was a good dog.
Zosia was my dog.
