Rocking the body, I breathe.
Shivers begin to flow through me, electrifying. Warm.
Bless me, Ancestors, as I flow my way home. Blend me with your wisdom and grace. Allow me your swiftness, your sharpness. Show me what Resilience really means.
Fill me with your fire, your unquenchable thirst for what is right, good and true.
Show me how to better care for self so that I may be better prepared to care for others.
Grant me your transmutational Power.
Teach me.
Only by looking deeply into ourself can we begin to understand those outside ourself.
Begin from childhood and move up into the latter years. Experience in your mind the joys, the hurts and everything in between as though it were happening now.
If there was anger, fear, sadness and love, remember it, like you first remembered it. Feel it fully, and then release it.
This process of “making room for the next best thing” is a tough journey! Release of that we have built around ourself, to solidify our thoughts about ourself, are difficult, to say the least and quite painful and even life threatening to say the worst. Most of us will feel polarities of joy and suffering and all in between as we work it out.
Digging deep we will find that which we fear, and probably not all of it for a very, very long time. Trauma helps us get there quicker but it also causes us to build pretty thick barriers in our emotional and mental bodies.
Without this deep personal work, we are not fit to view another in any negative manner.
As we come near the other side we begin to see ourself in others.
Those who are suffering remind us of when we might have suffered. Perhaps we buried pain so deep and cannot face another in suffering for the personal pain it brings us. Or maybe we sometimes are cold, like maybe some tell us we are.
Taking responsibility for our words and actions is critical for the future of our togetherness. Yet one step further is required – we must take responsibility for our thoughts.
ALL action stems from thought.
If we fail to control our thought forms, we may not be capable of controlling our impulses. If we are incapable of controlling our impulses, we are not fit for the coming society.
Harsh? Not really when you view the larger picture.
People need to get control of their minds.
Stop blaming others and start being solution providers.
Step up.
Be that which you need.
And then share it.
He came in yesterday. It always seems like the same story. I know you take one look at him and think I’m talking about mange, but I’m not.
We took a sample of his blood and timed how long it took for the sample to clot. It is supposed to take no more than about 5 minutes. It took 17…
What does that mean?
It means, like many other animals that live off of rodents, this young fox likely has rodenticide poisoning. There are studies being done to test the connection between mange and rat poison. It is believed that when an animal is compromised with rat poison, they are more susceptible to mange.
I’m not a scientist.
I’m not a biologist.
What I am is a wildlife rehabilitator.
Like others in my profession, I am the one these animals are brought to when they are poisoned and in need of help.
I am not a doctor – not in any subject.
What I am is an intelligent human being that has witnessed , first hand, the suffering and death rodenticide has brought on MANY of our birds of prey, foxes, opossums, raccoons and other predators that normally help us control the rodent population.
This MUST STOP.
PLEASE READ this article by Laura Kiesel and PARTICIPATE in the poll. So far the poll’s results are not working in this foxes favor…
The time for change is NOW.
I don’t know if we can save this guy but we are going to do everything we can.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/23/metro/should-massachusetts-ban-use-poison-rodent-control/
Bless all kind hearts, no matter outward appearances. Love is a language most of us speak.
AN AMERICAN BIKER GANG DESTROYED DOG FIGHT RINGS AND SAVED ANIMALS FROM CRUEL OWNERS
“Some people like to think of us as superheroes. The truth is, we are super animal lovers (and protectors). Through the years, and through many caseloads, obstacles, and downright challenges, we remain strong and dedicated to our mission.”
Most of the time, abusers are people that have similar features: they’re insecure, impulsive and ruthless because of problems at home or in their relationships.
The organization believes that animal abuse is only the first step for such people. Later, because they feel like they cannot be punished, they become more secure, and they can abuse someone else like a kid, a woman, or an older adult. This is why it is so essential to prevent all cases of animal abuse.
There’s a book about every accomplishment that Rescue Ink has made. It is called Rescue Ink: How Ten Guys Saved Countless Dogs and Cats, Twelve Horses, Five Pigs, One Duck, and a Few Turtles.
How we treat the most vulnerable among us (Including the self) is a testament to our character and our trustworthiness.
Let us be kind to ourselves. Let us be kind to one another. Let us be kind to ALL life.
Proper care never stems from a place of fear.
Breathe.
Release.
Images gratefully borrowed from Unsplash.com
Need and Necessity: Night and day exist within the very same moment. Creation and destruction wear the same face. You only see one or the other because you are not seeing the whole. What you may see as harmful, another may believe to be good. All is based upon perception. In nature, all occurs according to need and necessity not right and wrong. Ask yourself – Is there a genuine need to act? Is change necessary for your continued wellbeing and happiness? If the answer is yes, then act. If the answer is no, then do not.
Time to Reflect: Have you been rushing along, living from one moment to the next without thought or care? Have you failed to notice and acknowledge all that you have achieved and accomplished? Stop. Take a moment to pause and reflect upon all that has happened and all that is happening. See how you have grown. See all you have succeeded in accomplishing. Acknowledge and delight in your journey and understand how it has played a part in creating the you who lives in the present.
Show That You Care: Do not distance yourself from life and those around you. Reach out. Ask for help or support if you have need. Or, if someone within your circle is in need of care and support then give it without hesitation or question. A trouble shared is a burden halved. Now is not the time to withdraw and be alone, nor is it time to leave another in need. Be aware. Be caring. Be compassionate. Reach out and be a friend and allow others to be a friend to you.
Time to Ground: We all experience moments in our lives when we feel confused, unfocused and surrounded by chaos and turmoil. These moments are often unavoidable, as are the lessons the moments can impart. But how you respond to them is a choice only you can make. Take a deep breath and a moment to pause and reconnect with Gaia and nature. Seek the silence of the void within whilst your spirit spirals downward to anchor itself like an ancient tree root in the cleansing embrace of the earth beneath you.
Share Your Thoughts: You have hopes, dreams, goals and ideas. Do not guard your ideas jealously nor keep them locked within for fear that another may steal them or offer ridicule instead of support. It is time to share your vision. Tell Great Spirit and Gaia of your dreams and hopes so they may send you what you need. Speak of your dreams to others. Connect with those who share your goals and hopes for they may be able to help you realize your dreams sooner.
Challenge Your Perception: You cannot challenge an outdated perception or one born from a lack of understanding if you are unwilling to put aside your feelings and beliefs and embrace another’s point of view. To do so makes you aware of the whole and stands you up on high where you can see that both parties involved in a dispute can act against an injustice. Both can be right, both can be wrong, and what one may perceive to be harmful, may be seen as both healing and beneficial by the other.
Change is Unavoidable: Every second of every day you undergo change. Your perception is altered by what you see, feel and experience from one moment to the next. Your body ages and moves closer to death with every breath. Autumn will always come to end the bounty of Summer, and the new hope of Spring will always follow the Winter. Change is all around you. Do not let your fear bind you to the past and prevent you from enjoying your present and future. Stop fighting. You cannot resist the inevitable so choose instead to embrace it with acceptance and peace.
Embrace the Masculine: Within ourselves there are two aspects to our nature – the masculine and the feminine. Here in the present, you need to embrace the Masculine aspect of your nature and let it guide your steps. Now is time to be assertive, to act with authority, and stand up for both yourself and your truths. Fight for what you believe in. Do not allow others to tell you that you must not, or cannot. But remember, whilst you allow your masculine self to be dominant, you need to temper your assertiveness and determination with gentleness and compassion.
See Yourself in Nature: You are born of man and woman, but humanity is born of the natural world. Now it is time to reconnect. Look out into the natural world. Explore your world and you will see who you are. Peel away all judgement and dogma born of man and see your truest nature mirrored in the beautiful world around you. See that your emotions are like the weather, and that your senses reach into the sky and earth like the branches and roots of the trees. See yourself in nature and nature within yourself.
Let Go of the Old: Are you holding on to beliefs and notions that no longer serve you? Are you blocking your own growth and forward momentum because you fear to end a chapter in your life? It is time to release all that you hold onto that no longer serves. It is time to say goodbye to all that no longer has a place or purpose in your life. It’s time to have an emotional, or physical, spring clean. It’s time to let go of the past so you can be open to what the future may bring.
Know You Belong: You have place. You have purpose. You are special. Do not change who you are just so others might accept you. Do not dishonor your truths by allowing someone else to tell you who you must be. Change made just so you fit the expectations or social criteria of a clique or group does not honor you. You do not need to change in order to belong. You are a blessed child of Gaia and Great Spirit and belong simply because you are.
Love that You are Different: You have strengths and weaknesses and both are worthy of love. Know them, honor them, and do not heed those who tell you that you must change in order to fulfill their expectation of you. You will never be who others expect you to be. You can only be the unique individual you are meant to be. Love that you are different for it is your differences, and loving those differences, that make you truly beautiful.
“I am Gaia. I am the daughter of Great Spirit, who is the Source of All. I am both magical and divine, as is all which I create. I am the Great Mother. I am your mother, and you, beautiful soul, are a physical manifestation of my love.”
It was in that moment that I realized something about human beings: We always care. Even when we don’t care, or don’t want to care, or we’ve been broken beyond the capability of caring
We always do. It’s our ultimate infallibility.
Take a moment tomorrow to care 🌷Help someone out.
BY KAREN GALATZ | MAY 1, 2019
“A Jew with a dog? It’s either not a Jew or it’s not a dog.”
— Yiddish proverb
I heard these words uttered on the Israeli TV show “Shtisel,” but they hit home, just as if they had been uttered in my very own house.
I grew up in a dog-less household. As a child, I was afraid of dogs and instinctively believed they were dirty, wrong to have inside a house. No one taught me this. I did not live in a religiously observant household. I just “knew” dogs were no-goodniks.
But in that moment of watching “Shtisel,” I realized I had unwittingly inherited cultural and religious teachings that even my own nonobservant parents might not have realized they had passed down to me.
In the “Shtisel” episode, a young ultra-Orthodox student, expelled from his yeshiva for hiding a small, adorable stray dog, arrives awash in tears — pup in his arms — at his grandfather’s apartment. The grandfather, a big, hulking man, is horrified at the sight of this “unclean” animal, and vigorously supports the yeshiva’s position. It is in that scene he recites the proverb about “A Jew with a dog … is either not a Jew or not a dog.”
To understand the religious and cultural context for Jewish attitudes about dogs, I spoke to Rabbi Yoni Regev of Oakland’s Reform Temple Sinai.
“There certainly seems to be a deep ambivalence, going back to the Book of Exodus,” Regev said.
While there are no express prohibitions against keeping dogs as pets, there are multiple references to them as unclean and undesirable, he explained.
“Within the ultra-Orthodox community, there is this notion that dogs are synonymous with pigs, ritually unclean even though they are not specifically called out as such,” he added.
In the Torah and the Book of Prophets, dogs are spoken of unkindly several times. Foul-tempered, barking dogs scare off beggars,which prevents those within the homes from performing the mitzvah of giving tzedakah. Also, concerns are voiced that dogs can cause women to miscarry.
And in modern times, the use of dogs by Hitler’s SS during the Holocaust led to additional negative associations.
But I knew none of this growing up.
My two oldest brothers, 18 and 21 years older than I, both had dogs in their own homes. While I adored my brothers, I viewed their pets with distain and disapproval. It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem Jewish.
I also contacted Jo-Ellen Pozner, assistant professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, to discuss the foundation of my judgmental childhood views.
“Culture determines norms. We learn by observing others and by receiving feedback about how we’re behaving,” said Pozner, a faculty scholar at the university’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “‘Make eye contact. Be polite.’ There are phrases or reactions or ancillary behaviors that we don’t process consciously, but we absorb them because we see our parents or grandparents do them.”
She added: “What’s interesting about Judaism is that many people say, ‘I’m not religious, I’m not observant.’ They mean that religion is not an overt intentional habit. But what also makes you a Jew is certain norms and attitudes and beliefs about the way the world works, and those are transmitted as cultural values.”
My non-Jewish husband loves dogs. He grew up with a wire-haired terrier named Poco, and to this day speaks wistfully about him. But throughout our courtship, Jon never expressed a desire for another pet.
However, once we had children, dog drama quickly ensued. The first thing my children in tandem asked for was a dog. This, I blame on their non-Jewish genes.
For 10 years, the highly (maternal) allergic genes of one child prevented pet ownership. Eventually, however, the siblings and their father wore me down with a cunning age-old stratagem (i.e., lie) – “We’ll get an outdoordog. We’ll never bring the dog in the house.”
We lived in Las Vegas at the time, so this seemed a formula for animal sunstroke and abuse. But they built a solar-powered air-conditioned doghouse, and so, we got the outdoor dog.
Instantly the sneaking and scheming began. When my back was turned, in came the dog. Before I knew it, the dog, Lady Shakespeare by name, was sleeping on the floor by the children’s beds. Then the dog was in one of the children’s beds. I cringed and groaned, but I’d see their happy (and somehow non-allergic) faces, and I caved. We had an indoor dog.
I had to admit it. Shakespeare, a 3-year-old rescue black Labrador Retriever, was sweet. When you’d come home, she would vault three-feet straight up in the air for joy, ears flopping wildly, and our “coming home” could consist of something as simple as stepping back into the house from getting the mail. Who could resist such unadulterated love?
The children claim they saw me kiss Shakespeare twice on the top of her head. They were wrong. I kissed her three times.
When she died eight years after joining our clan, this Jew, now without a dog, cried nonstop.
https://www.jweekly.com/2019/05/01/jews-dont-own-dogs-says-who/
By Alan Mikhail July 27, 2017
Dogs in Islam, as they are in Rabbinic Judaism, are conventionally thought of as ritually impure. This idea taps into a long tradition that considers even the mere sight of a dog during prayer to have the power to nullify a pious Muslim’s supplications. Similar to many other mistakenly viewed aspects of Islamic history, today both most Muslims and non-Muslims think that Islam and dogs don’t mix.
There is, however, quite a different unknown strand of thinking about dogs in Islam, a long history of positive interactions between Muslims and dogs that goes back to the religion’s very beginnings. According to several authoritative accounts of his life and teachings, Prophet Muhammad himself prayed in the presence of dogs. Many of his cousins and companions, the world’s first Muslims, raised young puppies. In the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, the second holiest site in the world for Muslims after the Kaaba, dogs were regularly seen frolicking about during the prophet’s life and for centuries after as well.
It’s no surprise that the first Muslims had so many dogs. Most of them kept large flocks of sheep and goats, and dogs helped to manage and protect these other animals, preventing them from running away and scaring off would-be thieves and predators. Sheep and goats were these early Muslims’ food and capital, and dogs helped to protect these investments.
Canines were also crucial companions during hunting expeditions. Long before Islam, dogs were depicted in stone carvings from ancient Egypt and Iraq running alongside their human owners. Muslims continued this use of dogs.
As Islam spread throughout the Middle East and the world, it moved from being a religion of nomadic peoples to one centered in cities. Many of the world’s largest cities in the millennium between 700 and 1700 were Muslim cities. As they did in the countryside, in cities too dogs played vital roles. They of course continued to protect property and shoo away intruders, but in cities dogs served an even more important function—they ate garbage. From Damascus and Baghdad to Cairo and Istanbul, urban authorities supported dog populations as consumers of waste to keep city streets clean. Muslim leaders built watering troughs for dogs, many mosques threw out food for them, and butchers used them to keep away rats and other vermin. Humans who committed violence against urban canines were often punished. Muslim cities were much cleaner and more pleasant places with dogs than without them.
All of this meant that Muslims throughout the world were in regular daily contact with the many dogs in their midst. They recognized how useful canines were as guards and cleaning agents and, we can only presume, developed quite intimate relationships with them built around regular contact and the kind of affection bred from codependence.
Given this history, where then did the idea that Islam is only hostile to dogs come from? The short answer is disease. About two hundred years ago, ideas about contagion began to change. Still very far from what we would today recognize as germ theory, people in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere started to notice a correlation between outbreaks of plague, cholera, and malaria and the physical proximity of victims to places like cemeteries, garbage heaps, and swampy lakes. City planners and governments throughout the Middle East therefore started to excise these sources of disease from the increasingly crowded districts in which their people lived. As they collected and then pushed garbage outside city walls, they also unwittingly removed the dogs that ate this trash. Dogs used to keep streets clean. Now humans did.
The historic connections between dogs and trash did not serve the animal well. Not only was there simply less garbage to eat in cities, but the garbage that did remain was now seen as a threat to public hygiene and soon too were its canine consumers. Indeed, in just a few decades in the early nineteenth century, dogs came to be seen as both economically useless and hazardous to public health. The results? Several large-scale dog eradication campaigns, far fewer dogs in Middle Eastern cities, and a change in attitude toward the animal. No longer useful and productive urban residents, dogs were now seen as dangerous, disease-ridden, and expendable.
This relatively recent sea change in Muslim attitudes towards dogs explains the dominant view of the animal today. While of course opinions vary and the elite in many Muslim countries keep dogs as status symbols, the majority of Muslims see dogs as dirty, impure, sometimes even evil. As with so much in the Islamic past today, the history of dogs is thus misunderstood by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Most don’t know and many would likely not be open to the idea that dogs were treasured by the Prophet and millions of Muslims after him.
For those of us—Muslims or otherwise—whose most regular interaction with a living nonhuman animal is with a dog, the story of dogs in Islam offers another lesson as well. Humans did not always keep dogs for affection, love, or cuteness. For most of history, they were not pets. They were laborers, economic necessities, hunters, and street cleaners. Apart from dogs that sniff drugs, aid the blind, or chase criminals, very few of us today experience dogs as anything other than that joy that licks our face in the morning. However, throughout history they’ve been much more. Knowing this past not only gives us a fuller picture of the most ubiquitous nonhuman animal we welcome in our midst, but it also helps us to understand how our histories with other animals have shaped our current world.
Alan Mikhail, Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of The Animal in Ottoman Egypt and, most recently, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Environmental History.
This post first appeared on OUPBlog. They welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.
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