I don’t know about you but some days we look around us and
wonder just what the heck mankind is doing.
It is easy to lose hope and to feel lost. We look around at the destruction of our
environment, the horrific ways many of the animals are mistreated or
disregarded. It is easy to see so much
that is negative. Great calamities
wrought by a changing climate, weather patterns reeking havoc all over the
world – floods, fires, mudslides, drought.
We seem to live in a world of great extremes.
Yet, the animals have been lovingly guiding us and filling
us with hope. How? Why?
Because they tell us that they see potential in the human heart that is
beyond anything we fully realize. Many
days when I personally lose faith and trust in humanity, my animals will
require me to look a little closer. If
anyone deserves the right to have lost faith in us humans, it is the animals. Yet, they haven’t. They still believe in opening hearts and
trusting. They still love
unconditionally and without judgment.
Those of you with animals in your lives know exactly what we mean. For many of us, we let animals in our hearts
far more deeply than other humans. I ask
people this question a lot. Why do we
let animals in so deeply? Inevitably
they answer, “Because we can trust them.
They love us for who we are. They
don’t judge us.”
Of course those answers are all true. But the animals have asked us to look even
deeper by asking us these questions – “Why not learn to love each other as we
love you? Why not believe in one another
as we believe in you? Why not trust each other, love each other, help each
other, believe in one another? Why do
you give up on each other?”
The animals have never separated themselves apart from
nature, the environment, the planet, or one another. They walk this earth knowing that all is
connected. It is humanity that has
ostracized itself, disconnected from, and all but forgotten that we are all One
and all connected and in this together.
But that can change. We are
awakening to something greater than we understand or comprehend. When the human heart opens and is allowed to
breathe of its true nature, we find our connection and Oneness with all. The rest of Nature hasn’t walked away from
us. We walked away from that Oneness
ourselves.
And the amazing thing is that all the rest of Nature is waiting
to welcome us back into the fold. In
spite of the havoc our indifference causes and has caused, there truly is no
separation other than what humanity has perceived of itself for the past
millennia. The animals are looking to us
to reach past our own inner pain and suffering and to remember the love and the
hope and the Oneness of Life. And, like
the loyal canine companion awaiting our return home, they prepare to welcome us
home with freedom and wild abandon of their hearts – celebrating that we are
all together again – whole.
With all the pain we cause them, often thinking that if they
can’t speak they must not feel it, or that they do not understand or are less
than humans, even with all of that, they still find hope and a reason to bestow
their unconditional love on our hearts and try to help us find our way
home. It's as if they try to show us the
best of who we are so that we can one day be the best that we can be and to remember
the truth of Life – that we are all One.
