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Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. –Mark Twain

You just have to forgive all the time. Worth it, though.

Practicing what I preach, here's Irma...

Secret Warning: He ran quickly with a sound like raindrops & left his handwriting in all the secret places. I found this one underneath the big yellow rock in the garden. It said this: watch out for the little black dog. It can smell when you've had hot dogs.

– Brian Andreas

Irma is old, deaf, blind in one eye and inefficient in the other. She can however smell and wag. All you need in a dog, really.

Rescue dogma...

They scrub up quite nicely. Sometimes the best things in life are just waiting for us on the side of a highway in South Carolina, hungry, dirty, lonely and scared. Biscuit now lives in Washington D.C. where she is a source of joy, frequent laughter, unconditional love and reasons to go outside.

Lazy afternoon, lake house, Maine...

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm dreaming of Maine today. There, I'd dream of Charleston. That's just how it is. Life is not supposed to make sense; it took a long time to figure that out.

Happy trails.

A peony photograph today...

Peonies. Wow.

Weblog? Whyblog? and Trompe l'oeil...

"I've had some of my best conversations with strangers, she said, because they have no idea who they're dealing with." Brian Andreas, Traveling Light

"I started blogging when Peter got sick, as a way of relieving my sorrow and do something with myself at night." The World According to Chuck

"The morning pages were my pastime, something to do instead of staring at the mountain all the time. The mountain, a humpbacked marvel different in every weather, raised more questions than I did... What did it– or anything– mean? I asked page after page, morning after morning." – Julia Cameron, The Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Why not.

Cleaning fish for waiting fans, and bliss...

I don't think it's just a matter of having less to clean up. There's a wink-and-nod relationship between fishermen and pelicans.

Bliss arises when one is in harmony with “what is”.
- wahiduddin

Music bath...

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Amen!

Technorati tags susan lucas photography photographer photograph music

Stars

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth. – Robert Southey

On tickling rats, and dog justice...

This  Time Magazine Article referred by the Barking blog brings up issues of animal emotion, communication and ethics. 

"At Bowling Green State University in Kentucky, psychologist  and  distinguished professor Jack Panksepp  [Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions] is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics to describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals do experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panksepp discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or morality, however, so Panskepp is reluctant to comment about those qualities. But he does accept that some animals have strict rules of behavior. "Cockroaches probably don't have a sense of justice," says Panskepp. But dogs and rats, which are social animals, clearly do."

Nevada researcher Patricia Simonet of Sierra Nevada College  believes dogs make a specific noise during play that is distinctive from other sounds made during passive or aggressive confrontation. Simonet describes the sound as a breathy exhalation that sounds to a human ear like a dog's regular panting. However, when the frequency of the "laugh" was analysed, it was found to have a far broader range of frequencies than a regular pant.

RBP demonstrates that in addition to joy, sadness, anger and fear, he feels boredom, frustration, humor, empathy, generosity and pride. Not to mention loyalty, unconditional love, and an affinity for napping and licking one's private parts. He chuckled over that, in the way he does. Just letting you know.