no apologies....no recriminations....respect for every effort.

there is an innocence in living/sharing side by side, paw in hand, with animals. we share the bed, whatever is in the fridge, the space, we share body heat on cold nights. yesterday, tomorrow, the rest of the world is somewhere else. when i live with them, i am part of them....here. now.
i understand this.

the world is so huge..it's issues so overwhelming...orphaned chlidren starving to death, young girls and boys sold into sexual slavery, wars that kill babies, oceans so full of garbage that it becomes almost another continent, an ozone layer toxic and dying because everyone drives a car. we have global warming with glaciers melting and we have super bugs resisitent to antibiotics plaguing the sick in our hospitals. we have deforestation, landfills larger than cities, leaking oil sands plants, and outbreaks killer of virus's and flu's that wipe out villages.

and somewhere in that whole mess that we call our world are millions and millions of discarded, neglected and abused animals.

where do you start?
if you buy a tunic in vancouver, a small child in india is working in horrible conditions. buy a pair of runners in toronto and a sweet gentle cow was tortured. drive your car to the market and a polar bear cub drowns, sit in front of the fire on christmas night and there is one less tree in the forest. renovate your kitchen and put in granite counter tops, give your finacee a diamond engagement ring, put in a new driveway or garden path and another scoop of earth and rock were dug out of an already too deeply mined and scarred earth. overuse one area and create land of dust, change the landscape once too much and create a land of floods. wear rubber boots and poison the air so now many have trouble breathing. and then there are the street drugs that rob their victims of life, gangs who slay children in school yards, women who are stoned to death in the name of religon, violent criminals, genocides that bury helpless humans in mass graves.

how can one single person possibly fix all of that?

bottom line? you can't.

i think all we can each do individually is try to make whatever changes we can. we can't do it all but we can do somethings.
i can spend my life sharing what i have with a few hundred unwanted animals. someone else can work at getting our oceans clean. some will go to far lands to give starving orphans shelter, education and medical care, others may teach the illiterate to read, comfort the shut in's, volunteer to drive an elderly person 20 miles for their cancer treatment. people can be big brothers and sisters to children alone in the world, coach sports teams to keep kids off the streets, build safe playgrounds and parks in the inner cities. some will advocate for the weak, work to change laws, to restore the dignity and hope for conquered aborignal first nations.

we do not live in a world of "one" problem. we do not live in a world of "one" solution either.
we live in a complex and overwhelming with problems world.

i found my helping niche...i nurse and support sick, injured and vulnerable people and i nurse and support old, sick, and unwanted animals.

i can't fix it all..i can't even wrap my mind around the endless need of it all.
but in my small willing way...i can do something and i do. just like lot's of other people do.

maybe instead of pointing fingers to further our personal favorite issues we can celebrate our differences that fan out to touch even more possibly fixable issues.