[Oe List ...] A short meditation on new life

[Sunny Walker]

As a more recent dog owner/adorer (from long-term cat lover), this really
touched me. Thank you for sharing. May the memories continue to sustain you.

To future Boxers in your life,
Sunny

On Mon, Mar 3, 2025, 5:02 PM David Dunn via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
wrote:

> 
>
>
> *Tiny Animals*
>
>
>
>
> I bring four Animal Crackers with me into the study, pick one up and say
> softly to BuDa-behind-my-eye, “BuDa, this is a tiny hippopotamus.” I offer
> it carefully to the air. I pick up another Animal Cracker and speak
> confidentially to BuDa-in-my-memory as if revealing a secret between us,
> “BuDa, this is a tiny rhinoceros.” I love watching his keen anticipation.
>
>
> He takes each Animal Cracker gently into his mouth and chews it with
> relish. He knows that I usually offer just two; he hesitates briefly, just
> in case there is a third, then lies down at my feet. By now I am heart
> broken and my tears well up and out and down my cheek.
>
>
> Yet I give thanks to the Creator of dogs and humans, especially brindle
> Boxers who remind me of the Boxer named Gretchen of my childhood, who died
> chasing a car when I was in fourth grade. She disappeared one day without a
> trace. It was the only time I remember my mother crying. I don't remember
> crying, but perhaps my heart has remembered the deep, unattended sadness.
>
>
> I have wanted to own a Boxer for many years; unfinished heart work might
> have been calling for attention. So I give thanks to the Creator of human
> emotions, tear glands, the 14,000-year evolution of the human-dog
> partnership, and BuDa, our barely-young-adult Boxer who died of a broken
> heart—a congenital heart disease that left him weak and breathless—on
> January 11, 2025. Sadly, sometimes evolution veers off on mortal tangents.
> It’s a known thing among Boxers.
>
>
> Thankfully, evolution’s main mission is to find paths that allow all that
> is to change: for lava to become land, for green leaves to create oxygen,
> for animals to survive the chaos of evolving and for human beings, the
> ability to see when it’s time to evolve. When the familiar beloved dies, a
> broken heart can open to something like light that changes us. Plants
> reflexively turn toward the light. For human beings, darkness reveals a
> grand paradox: darkness becomes light and light reveals the way of being
> made new.
>
>
> I give thanks to the Holy Mysterious Creator for the efficacy of this tiny
> ritual that has brought tears to my eyes, memories to my mind, life and
> depth to my heart and the conviction that I can become the one I have
> always yearned to be.
>
>
>
>
> David
>
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>
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>
>
> —
>
> David Dunn
> Creative Companion/Personal Publishing
>
>
> [image: DMD email sig photo small-Nov2012.jpg]
>
>
>
> 720-314-5991
> dmdunn1 at gmail.com
> Skype: dmirror
>
>
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