Of People, Dogs and Stories

 

My sweet friend, Chica.

 

 

Sitting under the autumn sky, I listen: to the distant voices of children at play, the steady drone of a small airplane overhead, the whistling chatter of woodland birds, and the faint rasp of oak and poplar leaves as they cling, dying, to the limbs of their mother trees.   



I watch my dog, her posture alert as, with fixed gaze, she guards her small fenced domain.  With ears erect, she sits motionless, attentive to what, I don’t know.  

“Chica, what are you thinking?” I ask.  


She turns and looks at me with one eye raised and her head cocked as if to ask,

                        “Thinking?  What’s that?”

 

“Maybe you’re not thinking,” I say.  “Maybe that’s not what dogs do.”    

 

I close my eyes and try to enter Chica’s canine mind.  Hmmm.  Maybe her brain activity isn’t so much what we would call ‘thinking’’ as it is continuously reacting to the stimuli in her environment, especially the rich sensory input from her superior nose and ears.  




Sometimes I envy Chica, she who does not worry and over think everything the way I do; she who has no memory of an unhappy childhood; she who knows nothing of remorse or regret; she who is not plagued by the knowledge of inevitable loss and death; she who, with no sense of future or past, tells no stories, neither her own or anyone else’s.


I suppose that’s the primary difference between us humans and the rest of the beasts: we are the creators and tellers of stories while they, who dwell in the eternal present, are not.  


I’d like to be free of some of the stories that have been niggling at my brain for over sixty years now, but some stories replay forever and not all have happy endings.  

 

 

As always, I ask you to share Dogwood Daughter.  I'm an indie artist with no advertising other than word of mouth from kind people like you.  Thank you. Martha Maria  


 

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