“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.” ― Milan Kundera

I had a very challenging past few days. My body, you see, wasn’t up to cooperating with my normal task listing of the day. In my mind, I had a million and one things sitting right there and waiting to be done. And in my heart, I realized there was another great story to be told.

I first noticed the wobbly weakness as I made my way up from the couch, and into my kitchen. In those few short steps, I found myself breathless and with one knee to the floor―my faithful companion, Nudnick, sniffing anxiously at my face.

In these past few months, my little puppy has learned well to adapt his pace to my most frustrating limitations―accepting me on each of my good days and bad, and not ever once pausing to offer his judgement.

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.’

“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.” ― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

You see, if it weren’t for my puppy waiting always patiently right here―I might have just lost my way forever back to ‘upright.’

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 brown packages.

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