My good friend Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star Equiculture. believes the horses talk to us all the time, and guide us and watch out for us. We kid about this because I have my own ideas about animals and people. I have always been drawn to the attachment side of things, not what the horses and dogs are telling me, but what my love for them and interest in them says about me and about others. It is the people that have drawn me to my writing, not just the animals.

Pamela loves the horses dearly, she is teaching me to open up to them, to hear them, to listen to them. It is hard work for me, I am getting there.

I have a good friend with an out-of-control dog, her dog goes after and hurts other dogs, breaks out of the house, refuses to come when called, lives in a state of chaos and confusion.  My friend sees the dog as a wonderful and free spirit, she can’t help but smile when the dog loses her way. It is so much easier to rationalize the life of a dog than do the hard work of training.

When I see this, I know – I have learned this the hard way – that the dog is a reflection of her. Dogs mirror us, those are the messages they most  often are sending: they love us, but they are showing us what we are like, what is broken inside of us. They are reminding us that we need to do the work on ourselves to be calm and centered so that our animals do the same. My breakthroughs in understanding animals came when I broke through to understand myself, to face the truth about myself.

It is easy to laugh and shout and wag our fingers at the dogs, much harder to see what they are really showing us and hear what they are really telling us: to have a better dog, you will have to be a better human being.

We get the dogs we need, in one way or another, they reflect us, our strengths, our shortcomings, our values, our needs. We get the dogs we deserve.

So for me, training a dog is about my spiritual and moral responsibility to do the work that needs to be done, on me, on the dog, so that we can live in the world together in peace and love and harmony. I never think it is cute when a dog is crazed or aggressive or out of control, I pray quietly for the soul of the dog and the human. It is a minority position for sure, one I rarely talk about. I owe this to my dogs, I ask a lot from them, they give me much in return.

How do you love a dog? I am thinking about this since the arrival of Fate, a dog Maria and I have come to love. She is a perpetual motion motion, curious, busy, restless. She has a wild and mischievous streak I have to be careful of, we each touch a crazy spark in the other, a wild streak. When we spot each other across a room, we make eye contact and all hell breaks loose.

I laugh every time I see her, and smile all of the other times, she came like a fury of joy after a grim and long, hard winter. Her purpose is to keep  us moving, laughing and learning, you cannot be in a funk for too long around this dog, she will not put up with it.

I love a dog with respect. She is not my child or my furbaby, she is not like me, she does not have my thoughts and words and feelings, she has her own, and it is my job to understand hers, not to project my own sorry stuff into her consciousness. She is not a reflection of me, she is Fate. We have a contract, we both will live together in love and dignity.

We we work together we are serious and work hard. No messing around, no distraction. I love to play with her, but I know it is not a good direction for her, it just cranks her up and brings up all of the stuff in her that needs to calm down and be focused and easy. I am teaching her (as is Maria) not to put her mouth on people, not to jump up on them, never to go on our furniture, never to eat or expect human food. So far, so good, she pays no attention to us while we eat.

There is one thing I have not been able to bring myself to do. When she comes into the house from Maria’s studio, she comes racing into my study, she leaps on poor gracious and generous Red, who puts up with it and then she comes racing across the room and leaps into my lap, her tail going, her eyes wide. She is trusting and joyous, if I didn’t catch her she would go flying across my lap and crash onto the floor. I do catch her and she wriggles up my chest and showers me with licks and then tries to chew on my nose or cheek until I pinch her on the nose and stop her.

This connects with the deepest part of me, two souls fusing in the same spirit, it is the point really, of human existence – connection. It is what every dog and every human being truly wants.

I love the affection in her, the spirit, the intense curiosity, the fearlessness of love inside of her. She loves everything in the world and wants to see it, smell it and know about it. She will relish her life every minute of it, she will challenge us to to the same.  When we go out to herd the sheep, she works in just the way I work – serious, focused, crazed by distractions and interruptions, mind and spirit racing.

When you learn  how to love a dog, you are really learning how to love a human.  One trainer told me that if there were a half dozen Labs in the well of the Senate, they would stop fighting and start playing with the dogs and obsessing about their behavior. They would, she said, learn what is important.

You are learning how to love, period. Once again, a dog has opened me up to love, taught me something about it, reminded me of how important it is in our lives.