Danny [a big red Irish setter] was an unexpected birthday gift from a friend. …Dogs were…dogs, I figured. Wrong. Dogs do not come in “one size fits all.” Certainly not this one.
Danny was a total surprise to me, an absolute lexicon of lessons in life, the kinds of which I had never dreamed and was not expecting to learn. At least, not from a dog.
Which of course was the first spiritual lesson: Nothing and no one is exactly like anything else, no matter how much we may want them to be. The predictable is not what most pets bring us.
They bring us life, yes. They bring us love, often. But predictability? Don’t believe it.
This excerpt from the book Two Dogs and a Parrot by Joan Chittister is reprinted by permission of BlueBridge/United Tribes Media Inc.
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