I readily admit that I am an odd human being. A lot of times, my mind is lost in thought and contemplation, and more than a few times, I become transfixed by animals. I am a hard person to know, because my mind is drawn deeper into those forces than is typical for a member of my species.
I suppose these are the traits of someone who wishes to write about animals, but they are also the traits of an oddball. And I’ve always been an oddball.
I grew up in rural West Virginia, where things were meant to be a certain way, and I never fit the mold very well. I tried to be Christian through my youth and early adulthood, but slowly, I began to realize that I couldn’t be a Christian and be honest with myself.
I came to worship nature, the rocks, the trees, and the animals, and I realized I didn’t need a faith imported Palestine by way of the Roman Empire and the Anglo-Germanic Reformation to understand the world.
Add that problem with the simple fact that my worldview has drifted to the left as I’ve matured, and I now know that I am fully estranged from the land in which I was born. Fundamentalist religion, xenophobia, and fossil fuel worship have generally pushed the people of this forgotten Eastern Outback towards the right.
In so many ways, I am unmoored, adrift.
But dogs are always going to ground me, though. Their magic is that they exist somewhere between the untouchable animal world and our very contrived civilization. They are the conduit through which I can be connected to that which is organically evolved and that which is domesticated.
I live with more than a few of them now, a motley crew of German shepherds and sighthounds.
Not one of them is a golden retriever, as odd as that now seems. I have come to the conclusion that my love for that breed comes from my relationship with one individual that was totally atypical for the breed, and she was certainly atypical for what people want to produce in the breed. People want them to be easier to keep, lower drive creatures with lots of bone.
That golden flame has burned out in my desires. It will still haunt my psyche, but I have finally let it go.
My writings on other wildlife stem from my dog connection. I go to their to closest wild kin, the gray wolf complex and then out to the whole dog family. Then the whole order Carnivora reaches my conscience, and it is but short step before I begin to consider the rest of the Animal Kingdom.
And in short while, I am considering my own station as an insignificant being, a fluttering avatar of carbon in a banal part of the universe. This insignificant being, one with just enough gray matter to question existence, is brought into the deepest humility.
I suppose I do have a religion now. It is mystical materialism, and my ethics are some form of progressive secular humanism.
And the dogs brought me here. This oddball person who never could fit in a land where conformity is the greatest desideratum now questions in his unmoored existence. But in my unmooring, I am strangely grounded in my own insignificance, as is revealed in the nature of dogs and the rest of nonhumanity.
As someone would could never fit in where I grew up either (for different reasons), I truly understand this. I am someone who actively rebels against the very idea of faking my way through some empty life to impress people who ultimately will never really understand me or wish for my happiness. Such selfish souls have no place in my world. The real, the humble, the hard-done-by, and the dogs and their people- those are my/our people <3 Life is too short for fake people, selfish people, or wasting time on a pretend afterlife that doesn't exist.
“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night.
But Ah! My foes, and Oh! my friends!
It gives a lovely light!”
—First Fig
from Figs From Thistles
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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“You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding just as it should.”
—from The Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
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“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
“We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
—Carl Sagan
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I suppose I can fit in anywhere, which seems odd because I’ve always felt like a loner. Being a chameleon has its advantages, I suppose. My religion is music and poetry, my church is my bare feet against the earth, and my familiar, the first one, was that very first German shepherd, who could have hurt me but chose to captivate me instead with her beautiful eyes.