Tag Archives: love of animals

Ludwig on Claire’s Crochet

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Ludwig on Claire’s Crochet.

This is my first “re-blogging” effort!  A dear blog-o-sphere friend wrote this beautiful poem about one of my beloved dachshunds, Ludwig.

Loving a dog is relatively new to me.  I often tell Ludwig that God sent him, and his younger sister Elsa, to me to teach me more about love.  For they have tapped into a “love muscle” that lay dormant for much of my life.  Oh, yes I always “loved” family, friends, and even the world.  But my love was always too measured.  But God has sent four puppies into my life to teach me about love in a less measured way—First, my wife Claire, second my first dachshund Sonya who is now deceased, third Ludwig, and then four years ago his sister Elsa.

And an important dimension of this love is merely paying attention to them, recognizing that they have needs, and that my first nature is to give most of my attention to my own needs.  These four puppies are teaching me to “get over myself” and I’m making progress.

So thanks “Inner Dialect” and also thanks Sandeep for sharing the same picture of Ludwig on your web site last week.  Sandeep announced to the world that Ludwig was seeking a beau and since then Ludwig has been very excited at the prospect.  The very next day after Sandeep’s post, I caught Ludwig in the bathroom primping before the mirror, sporting a pair of sexy sunglasses, and dashing Old Spice on his body.  I quietly backed out, hoping he didn’t see me, as i didn’t want to spoil his hopes of “getting lucky” after all these years!

I and Thou

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Martin Buber’s I and Thou is one of the pivotal books in my life.  I think it is one of the finest works in spiritual literature of the 20th century.  This book is about relationship and the infinite grace which is involved in establishing relationship, establishing connection with another person.  Buber writes of the “in-between”, what Deepak Chopra would call “the gap” which separates us all.  And, actually this “gap” separates us from all objects/persons in the world.  To have meaningful communication…or connection…with another human being, we must experience this “in-between” which always comes to our ego consciousness as a loss.  (I personally think that this experience is what “the judgment of god” is in Christian literature and tradition).  It is knowing our aloneness, our alienation from the rest of God’s creation.

Buber also apparently believed that animals have a soul, noting that this can be experienced when one gazes into the eyes of an animal.  I have two dachshunds and I can affirm this conviction.  Those beautiful little doggie eyes convey mystery and love, suggesting the presence of another soul.  Buber credits the animal with anxiety, the anxiety of becoming, “the stirring of the creature between realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk.  This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man.”

If I was more mature spiritually, I would become a vegetarian.  Any time I drive behind a Tyson chicken truck, I feel the need to take that leap of faith.  But, I don’t think I’m going to pull that off in this lifetime.