I don’t read very many books about faith. And I don’t listen to very many sermons about faith. I’ve not known exactly why for some time, or at least until lunch yesterday. Those books were fine (I may have even written one or two) but they didn’t seem to be very applicable to my life. And it’s never actually helped me to “work on my spirituality or my relationship with Jesus” either. What has helped me is finding myself lost in the woods and calling out to God, looking for wisdom in the scriptures. Yesterday, at lunch, my friend David mentioned he’d spent some time in Colorado with the guys at Ransomed Heart. David used to work with them and went back to hang out with them for a weekend in the mountains. He mentioned that one of the guys reminded him that spirituality was not a context. I asked David what the guy meant, and Dave said what he meant was that you learn about God while learning to fly a plane or raising a child or planting crops in a field. It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking [...]

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While I’m working on another project, my dog Lucy has taken over the blog. I should be back blogging a few times next week. Until then, I’m hoping you and your dogs will enjoy Lucy’s perspective on life. I can tell by the way Don puts on his socks whether or not he is getting ready for work or whether we are going for a walk. His head is down when he’s getting ready to write. His head is up when we are going for a walk. That’s how you know. I lay in bed until he puts on his socks. From the time he gets up in the morning to the time he puts on his socks can take half an hour, which is fine with me. I sleep late. I roll over on my back and put my paws in the air and feel the wind from the ceiling fan against my belly. I love my belly. I love my body when I know it’s there. I don’t always know it’s there. Sometimes when people pet my hind end I remember I have a body but other than that I don’t think about it, unless of course there [...]

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The carpets were like grasses and the cold concrete floor was like river rock. The moon through the windows at night was like an alien eye, and the couches were like bounce houses. The plants were like forests, and you could get behind them in the corner by the wall and lay on your back and look up through the canopy out the window and you might as well have been born in a jungle. There were furry, bouncy, rolling animals that moved like magic across the floor, rolling fast up to walls then bouncing back toward you when they attacked. I went nuts over them. I wasn’t scared at all on maybe the second time I saw them. I’d chase them down, my feet moving faster than my body across the slippery floor, then I’d catch them in my mouth and they’d play dead. They are dastardly, lying critters. I’d back up and bark and tell them to roll off but they were afraid of me. Don would pick them up and they’d jump from his hands fast as lightning and bounce like mad things off the walls and furniture. Don and I could hunt them for hours until [...]

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For the next several blog entries, my dog Lucy will be taking over. She will also be answering questions in the comments. I’ll check back in soon after I’ve completed a project that needs focus. Thanks so much for understanding. Best, Don. If the kitchen I came from was the world, where Don lived was the cosmos, or bigger than the cosmos, it was all the material that existed and there was no boundary to it. There were walls in the house but you had to walk forever to find them, and there were turns you could make that went to other turns and other turns that looked like the ones you’d made before. And there was furniture as big as elephants separating it all. He had a cage and he’d put me in the cage. He put a new bed in the cage and some toys and that was fine, but I’d see his shadow out in the cosmos and I wanted to be with him so I’d cry till he came over and sat next to the cage and talked to me. The first time we went on an adventure we went down the street. I go there [...]

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09Jul, 2010

Hello My Name is Lucy

For the next several blog entries, my dog Lucy will be taking over. She will also be answering questions in the comments. I’ll check back in soon after I’ve completed a project that needs focus. Thanks so much for understanding. Best, Don. I came from a litter of Labs and I was the only brown one. My brothers were all black, and we lived in the woods by waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge. We lived in a cabin and we lived in the kitchen of the cabin. We lived on a blanket in the kitchen at first, and then when my mother left we lived on a towel, me and my brothers. We slept mostly, all together like one animal, as though we were still my mother. We became my mothers parts when we were hungry, and went out across the tile floors toward the food, which sat a cold earth away next to a silver bowl of water. There was a board that kept us in the kitchen but it didn’t matter. The kitchen was the whole world and there wasn’t a map to the world. It smelled like wood and cats, like water from the creeks, like [...]

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