Rescue Journal

finding yourself

Carol  ·  Jun. 6, 2009

we all get lost sometimes..not able to remember who we are or where we are going. sometimes it is a momentary thing that happens to all of us...i have lots of those "WTF...." kind of moments.

even when we think we are lost, we somehow know who we are and consistently go about the business of living. it is like we are programmed into ourselves and can still move onwards despite our current uncertainty.

that is because..we are who we are.

but sometimes, very rarely...for whatever reason...we aren't anyone. we spend our lives trying on this identity and that identity and never find any that really fit.

and then we are more than lost..because lost entails knowing at some point who and where you belong.

i think if we never had that sense of belonging somewhere, we just become life long refugees, always searching, never finding...eventually not even aware of the journey anymore.
our whole existence just becomes a pointless wandering between here and there...it holds no interest.
i have had a couple of dogs like that...raymond and now bj.

all living creatures have some awareness and certainty of self...we have to in order to not only survive, but to flourish.

but if life has never given you the opportunity to become someone..how can you know who you are?

people know i say mean things about the animals..sheila asked me about the dog who lived in the trunk of the car...jeremiah...i said he is fine, he is a little asshole. well.....he is. BUT he knows who he is and he's only an asshole sometimes, when things go his way, he way he likes them, he's actually quite sweet.

phoebe the hag, knows who she is too...and she's fine with it as long as i don't catch her at it..if i do, she just wishes she waited a bit til i wasn't looking. otherwise, occasional hagginess is fine with her.

but dogs like bj and raymond make me sad cuz they purposely just wander along, looking for that which they don't even know exists. so even when they run right smack into whtever it is that they really and truly need..they forget that this is what they were looking for cuz they can't recognise it anymore.

so what do you do to teach them, to seek out with purpose? to know when they find it that they want it?

you feed them.

you stuff that little mouth of theirs with some taste that shoots thru all of their anxiety, thru all of their uncertainty with a direct zing to the brain.

raymonds happy m&m pills, bj's love of ice cream.

sheena from big air photography/TDBCR..is THE "FOOD LADY"..that is her trademark (read her blog, it is highly entertaining)

and food as an item of interest to any dog is a pretty good tool to use.

people make huge changes in themselves and their lives if they meet with consistent positive things to reinforce that growth. it is that growth that eventually defines them..it is not just whatever outfit they are wearing on any given day...it is who they become when they are naked that tells their real story.

we ran out of time with raymond..his life was over before he had fully found himself. but he found some things that were happily consistent for him...m&m's, finding me when he thought he had forgotten...i can still see his face when i walked thru that gate and he knew i was home and he remembered that this made him happy.

i am hoping that we don't run out of time with bj...he knows he likes ice cream now and that it lives in the fridge, he knows he likes it when i walk into the room and stop to kiss his face.

we have to know that life is not forever and being who we are is not just a taken for granted gift. we have to accumulate and store the little things that give us joy and made us grow inside us, that eventually define us and give us some certainty of who we were.

Comments

Marla from South Dakota

Many, many of your blogs make me cry. This one certainly did, too. Thank you for the reminder about what life should really be about!

Deb Thomas

Kiefer and Clio have never gotten the concept of licking an ice cream cone. They both must get brutal brain freeze because they remove all of the ice cream, down to the cone, with one chomp.

Two fat women going through the MacDonalds pick-up window and ordering ten plain hamburgers is always good for a giggle, too.

We have a very hard time when we are eating at restaurants or at the homes of friends or relatives. We both invariably end up with way too much food since we regularly make allowances for ten more mouths.

What is more natural and satisfying than feeding those you love?

Chris T

Food is fundamental here too. I think Mabel lived so long because she loved food and we gave her everything she wanted. Same with Tucker - he lives for food, any food will do. I was able to bring Clio from a semi-feral state to an attention-seeking love bug with food. It took 2 years but it worked. Molly loves food too although she knew who she was when she got here! Gemma is coming around too - with food. One of the rituals of getting a new dog here is we go and get dairy queen ice cream cones. Seeing the bliss on their faces as they figure this out for the first time is so heart-warming. We never eat alone here, we always share.