Rescue Journal

i have one real talent in life...

Carol  ·  Mar. 7, 2010

the ability to recognise, acknowledge and participate in pain and suffering. the animals do well here for one very simple reason..i am not afraid of who they are inside...my caring is not dependent upon their worthiness in my judgement or the vision of how they "should" be in my eyes...my caring is only dependent on their actual being alive. and i will find a way to connect with them so they feel they are truly valued and loved despite themselves.

so many of our animals come in because they were not liked, not valued because of the challenges they presented. they lived in a circle of endless frustration, resentment and active dislike. dogs like phoebe, difficult in the extreme suffered the ultima.te abandonment by bring dropped off in the dead of the night outside the spca. dogs like rose, beaten and battered because for some reason they frustrated the family they lived with. dogs like daffy duck, who's assumed frustrating behaviors were not "doggy dementia" but oxygen deprivation from cardiac disease. people who put their old and restless dog or cat down in the basement, out in the yard, without any compassion or recognition that those midnight wanderings or yowlings, disturbing human sleep, might be a symptom of confusion from not only pain, or poor vision but from their helplessness against increasing negative resentful feelings surrounding them each day.

if you are not valued, if you are not loved, if your own family dismisses or resents your behaviors as too much, too problematic....how do you feel good inside? we all feel frustrated at times..but that is our personal issue, not the fault of the one suffering beside us.

i give them back their goodness, i tell them they are just fine..i might get mad when they act like moronic dipsticks and bite my feet but five minutes later, i truly love them again and all is fine.

we live in an imperfect world...we are imperfect humans..my expectation is that the animals who come into our care will naturally be imperfect too.

the animals do well in this atmosphere because then they are free of being suffocated by negative energy.

there is an old poster out there that is very long, about raising well adjusted children...it basically says, children become who we tell them they are.

well the same is true for our animals....if we tell them they are safe, they are fine, they are lovable..that is who they believe they are...tell them they are difficult, too much work, a continual headache to deal with and that is who else they can become too.

they believe what we tell them...we need to understand this so we don't make them into someone unhappy who they wouldn't really be if they didn't believe.

i read somewhere once that true compassion was the ability to fully participate in suffering without an easy fix, without a perfect answer or solution, without a time line for suffering to end... just the ability to feel the suffering of someone else and freely accept it.
once you truly feel the suffering of another, that is where solutions are found because now you understand that suffering and where it really comes from.

currently working on a full understanding of the suffering of griffin...it is not the biting that is the problem, it is his pain and fear inside him.

Comments

Mauro Salles

Thanks, Carol!!! This is precious => "the freedom of opportunity to help as best as i can".

Carol

more tears, more anger, more absolute rage then i have now...more dreams of heroism and righting wrongs and slaying wrong doers and dragons.

i was less reasonable, more emotional, more unwilling to see the pain or roadblocks in human lives that contribute to the pain and roadblocks for animals.

i saw everything in black and white...now it is mostly grey and grey is harder to find the right and wrong in so i think harder and try to see better than i used to.

but my sadness is deeper and less superficial because it is bigger than just the animals, it is for people too.

but this is all normal..it is all a part of aging...it is pretty hard not to grow as you get older...the more you see, the more you grow so do the real sadnesses around you.

sheila is going to post soon about her trip to india...we had an interesting conversation about it on the phone...i don't think i would have understood what she saw in my 20's or 30's..but as she discribed it, i could so see it in my 50's.

all of us, human and animal are just trying to somehow survive. and the sad fact is...for some of us it is easier than others.
back when i first started in rescue..i did not realize how blessed i was to actually be able to do this ....i totally get it now. god smoothed the road for me so i had the freedom of opportunity to help as best as i can.

Mauro Salles

You open and properly exposes the main reason that prevents me from totally expressing what I feel when an old animal dies, especially a dog, after suffering for most of his life. They did exactly NOTHING against us and their true nature, as well as ours, is benign. But often we, humans, destroy it and impose on these poor beings traumas that can not always overcome. I can not cope with it, my fault, and my "escaping formula" is memories, music, videos ... Let me ask you something: how was your beginning in rescuing these "boys" and "girls"?