A big and permanent new element for the blog: Dog Sharing.

In this work I do with animals, with my writing and blog and photography, I am grateful that I never stop learning. I can’t really help it. The death of curiosity is the first death in my mind. I want to know things.

Just as animals have evolved, awakened people evolve with them, they teach me so much and challenge me to be a better human, again and again.

I think it speaks to my many faults and flaws that it’s clear by now I’ll never get to where I really want to go, but the journey alone is worth it. I’m learning all the time, and if I am learning all the time, then I am growing and changing all the time.

I get to recover every day. That’s a big deal to me. I have so much to learn.

A week or so, I had this sudden burst of an idea:

why not start something called Dog Sharing, why not use the interactive tools available to me to not only share the lives of my animals and dogs, but ask the people who read my blog to share their animals and dogs and cats and birds and chickens (and ferrets?)  with me and hundreds of thousands of others.

More than 3,000 images later, I am still processing this thing I have unleashed.

I didn’t anticipate the joy and excitement this would bring, the opportunity I unwittingly created for people to share the experience of loving their dogs and animals with other people who love to do the same thing.

It was as if there were thousands of people out there just waiting for the invitations, the images just appear quickly and in a flowing river.

I very much love giving so many people that much pleasure in these jarring and contentious times. That’s sort of my work these days, doing good is a calling, not a job or a hobby.

Just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have offered anything like Dog Sharing, I would have thought it too sappy and emotionalizing, something beneath me. But the truth is, I was beneath it.

I love reading these posts, these comments, these personal stories and experiences, the incredible diversity of faces and emotions. How great to me to learn from this and see it in such rich detail. In these thousands of posts, not a single nasty or angry comment, it has been a pure festival of love.

And I love being so open to it.

I’m going to continue this regularly, focusing on pets like dogs and cats and birds perhaps, and the many ways to look at them. Puppies, older dogs, purebred dogs, therapy dogs, hunting dogs, working dogs, lap dogs, show dogs, and on and on. Cats too, the snake and rabbit people are already demanding a Sharing.

So this is just the beginning of something. I sure love to see these thousands of people streaming through my site, I love to see the images people are sharing. A great dialogue is underway, the best side of social media and the Internet. No labeling, no hating The Other, no left and right.

If they show up, jerks will be shown the gate. But creepy people don’t seem drawn to dog love.

I can’t imagine that trolls love their dogs.

I don’t want dogs to be the sole focus of my blog, I write about a lot of different things.

But dogs and animals are important to me, and obviously, to the people who read me. I get it. Dog Sharing is now a permanent part of my blog writing. Stay tuned.

I’m going to give it a brief rest, and pick it up Dog Sharing a day or two.  Bird people, be patient. All you need to do to join this party is jump in with an image and a Facebook account and my Facebook Page.

(Photo above by Maria Wulf)