devotion

"He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog.

You are his life, his love, his leader.

He will be yours faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart.

You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion."

- Unknown

Or, in the words of a prayer found in a church bulletin:

"Lord, make me the kind of person my dog thinks I am."

And, in case you were wondering, here's what Kazan and Beowulf were so interested in this morning:

Profound thanks to my friend Jeannie for reminding me of a quotation that so beautifully ties together these dogs, birds, trees and me!  It's from "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin. The wizard Ged is brought back from the brink of death by his little pet otak.  "Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees."