Our Beginning

She's here.  After thinking and planning and plotting and stressing for months, we are finally together and beginning our adventure.  I'm not sure yet what all our life together will entail, but I'm surer than sure that it will be special.  How do I know?  It's a feeling, a driving force, subtle and not-so-subtle nudging from Spirit, and it is finally meeting her and seeing that she is just like I thought she would be.  Courageous and happy and intelligent and beautiful.  She's exciting!

Why would I want to adopt a blind and deaf australian shepherd puppy?  So many reasons.  It is facinating to me to try and get into her mind, to try and comprehend her world.  It stretches me as a trainer to try and figure out how to comunicate to her what I want, and then try to entice her to want to do it. It will make me a better trainer. 

And it stretches me as a human to try and comprehend another species with extra-sensory perceptions grown out of necessity to compensate for the loss of the more readily accepted senses of sight and sound.  What does she sense, what does she feel?  While I don't believe I can ever really know completely or understand, I like the mind-expanding possibilities a life with a dog like this can do for me. 

And finally, it stretches me spiritually to listen to the lessons that I can learn from her.  I've already had so many, and we have just met.  Here's an example: 

On January 12 before I went to bed, I was thinking, "Am I crazy to want to adopt a blind/deaf dog?  Is this the right thing to do?"  I decided to do a bit of bibliomancy, but instead of randomly opening to a page in a book, I picked up my copy of "The Book of Awakening" by Mark Nepo, which has daily readings.  I opened to January 12, and asked for guidance.  The title of the day's page was "Seeing Into Darknesss," and it was a story about facing fears to overcome them.  I smiled at the appropriateness, then I realized that it was 12:15 a.m., so it was actually January 13.  So I looked at the January 13 page, which began with the following haiku:

A blind child
Guided by his mother
Admires the cherry blossoms.
                  --Kikakou

The writing that followed was a beautiful piece about understanding each other's blindness, and our own, and helping each other through struggles and stumbles in life.  Nepo wrote, " Who knows what a blind child sees of blossoms or songbirds?  Who knows what any of us sees from the privacy of our own blindness -- and, make no mistake, each of us is blind in a particular way, just as each of us is sighted uniquely."

I knew this was what I was being guided to do.

So here we are, a month later, and it's been a crazy week of firsts.  First car ride, first meeting with the other dogs, first time exploring the back yard, first trip to Petsmart, first trip to the vet, first snow. We are definitely on our way!