Notes:
Our house is quiet at night, I seem to be hearing dog paws on the stairs, but the dog lies sprawled asleep on the floor next to the bed. Maybe I’m hearing the dog we had before the one we have now? I don’t think people linger on after death, but I wonder whether dogs do. And that we can hear them scuffling about for many years after they’re gone.
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
Photo of our Zeke on 11/17/14 (RIP).
She likes it best when everything is very, very quiet.
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
Photograph: Robert Bahou. “It is no secret that I am drawn to animals, as I find that they exhibit a truth uncommon in photographs of humans. A truth that can only exist if the camera’s presence is unknown, or in the case of animals, misunderstood. Animals don’t prepare themselves for a photograph the way people do, leaving them sharing a truly honest portion of who they are with the camera. This is why I decided to spend 2015 working on Animal Soul, which is now available for sale.” See more of his animal shots at his web site here.
A dog loves a person the way people love each other only while in the grip of new love: with intense, unwavering focus, attentive to every move the beloved makes, unaware of imperfections, desiring little more than to be close, to be entwined, to touch and touch and touch.
~ Margaret Renkl, from What it Means to Be Loved by a Dog (NY Times, June 18, 2018)
Photo: (via newthom)
Rain always follows the cattle
sniffing the air and huddling
in fields with their heads to the lee.
You will know that the weather is changing
when your sheep leave the pasture
too slowly, and your dogs lie about
and look tired; when the cat
turns her back to the fire,
washing her face…
~ Ted Kooser, from “How to Foretell a Change in the Weather” in Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, May 8, 2018)
Notes: Photo by AMJ STREETS with Cat Wash
I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
~Mary Oliver, “I Happened to Be Standing” from A Thousand Mornings
Notes: Poem Source: Thank you Make Believe Boutique. Photo: Seb Rogo
Sitting on my purple couch, working on my next book with my little dog sleeping next to me, I thought, Here am I, struggling along in my world, and there is the dog, dreaming in hers. Where are we both, really, as this little planet where we live, tucked away in an unimportant corner of an unknowable universe, spins on? This is what Henry Beston says in “The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod”: In a world older and more complete than ours, [animals] move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
~ Eleanor Lerman
Quote Source: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels Photo: Obsessed with Goldens
…
Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.
A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still…
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it…
A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds – his moment.
Surely the love of life is never-ending…
~ Adrienne Rich, from “To The Days” in Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995
Photo Gif: LivingStills
Complete relaxing never happened all at once. I found that it was a matter of at least five or ten minutes before the body would reach a profound repose. So I made a rule for myself, that as long as I felt an impulse to get up or turn over, then I had not lain long enough, but as soon as I felt I had never wanted to move again, then it was all right to get up at once. But I usually did not, I lay still for a little longer, lay still, while all the cells of my body came alive, like parched earth after rain. And then I discovered the most fitting end to my rest – a long cat-like stretch, which leaves one so at peace with the world, smooth and shining like wet sands, that it is worth indulging in deliberately, even when not prompted by a natural impulse.
~ Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own (First Published, 1934)
Notes:
Source: Paddington the Dog and Butler the Cat. BFF. Photos by ©Annie & Paddington (from Australia) (via Cats, Beavers & Ducks)
Returning to ourselves as material beings reminds us to place less emphasis on the flickering ticker tape of verbal commentary, and to focus instead on older, steadier, more grounded pleasures. It is helpful, perhaps, to think in terms of “coming to our senses,” reinhabiting ourselves as living, breathing creatures, not just a 3 pound brain tilted sideways above strained shoulders and neglected legs. A little ease, a little spaciousness. Such things aren’t casual.
Slowly we return to the immediate present, to the flowers on the table, to the cat’s soft fur. Time spreads out around us, a slow and rippling pool. There is time to watch and listen, time to remember. Our animal selves, so long ignored, settle back into the breathing landscape of the earth itself.
~ Christian McEwen, World Enough & Time
Notes: Quote – Thank you Make Believe Boutique. Photo – Mennyfox55
Live & Learn 
