“You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.” – Bob Marley

 

Our puppy Fate is eight months old, she is not allowed on sofas or chairs, nor has she ever sat still in my lap or Maria’s, at least not for more than a few seconds. She is an affectionate dog, but also intense and busy, restless and almost always moving. Today, for the first time in her young life, she wriggled her way up onto Maria’s lap, sat their quietly in the sunlight streaking through the window,  and then reached her head up to touch noses, the way she often shows her love.

I didn’t have my camera handy and didn’t dare to go find it. When I get up out of my chair Fate rushes to the door hoping to get to the sheep – but I remembered my Iphone and caught this image of pure love.

The biologists tell us that dogs – unlike almost every other species – have thrived among human beings because they have adapted to us, they have learned how to love us and to show us the emotions that cause us to protect and care for them, rather than slaughter and mistreat them, as we have done to much of the animal world.

Animals have opened the door of love for me. Not too many years ago, I had given up on love, and I believed love had given up on me. I had lost faith. I saw that part of my life as over.

I was living a loveless love, I thought love was beyond me, I was living alone, and in great distress. I was  prepared to never really feel or see it again, apart from the great love I felt and feel for my daughter.

I did not understand that I was looking for love when I came to the country, left my family and life behind me, began to write about my life with animals. I called Lenore the Love Dog, a therapist told me that Lenore kept love alive for me, she was the channel that showed what I really wanted. I was living in a remote village called West Hebron, a beautiful place but the kind of place you move to when you are hiding from love, there is really no way to find it there.

I was not prepared to find it living down the road, then working in the Studio Barn across from my farmhouse. It was right across the street. I think I was finally so broken that my resistance to love, my fear of it, my flight from it, had finally collapsed along with the rest of my defenses against the world.

Finally, I was open to it, when I had no strength or will to keep it away any longer.

We accept the love we believe we deserve and are worthy of. Love cannot find us if we do not open ourselves up to it. If you look around you, you will see that every kind of human can find love – large and small, healthy and sick, old and young, loud and shy, people of every faith and color, successful or failed.

Dr. Seuss wrote that you know you are in love when you can’t fall asleep because the reality is suddenly better than your dreams.

Once in my life I had found someone who changed the direction of my life and turned my world around. I told her things I have never told another soul, she wanted to hear every world. I told her of my pain and sorrow, my hopes for the future, dreams that will never come to be, the things I have always hoped to achieve, the things I knew I would never achieve. I told her of the worst things I had done, and she saw instead the best things buried inside of me.  I was not embarrassed to cry with her, or to see her tears flow. We shared one another’s panic and pain, and in such trust, we learned how to laugh again, we learned what safety really was.

This came to mind watching Fate crawl into Maria’s lap and seeing the loving bond that has deepened between them. Animals have done this for me, they kept love alive for me until I could find it for myself with another human being. I love them for what they are, but even more, I love them for bringing to me to people.

I learned to never give up on love, not at any stage in life, not at any point in life. I believe with all of my heart that life is waiting for us right across the street if we open our hearts and souls to it.

I know this, because it happened to me.