You Know The Killer Doesn’t Understand

Day 22

Where I live we have this big puppy Rottweiler. Odin. I hang out in the yard with him sometimes and there’s this bird he’s obsessed with. I have no way of knowing if it’s the exact same bird each time, but it doesn’t really matter. When he’s in bird mode he will not come in when I’m done being out. If there were video of him playing peek-a-boo around the large oak tree trunk trying to escape me when I try to grab his collar to force him to come in it would be an instant classic funny dog video. There’s literally zero chance I am quick or nimble enough to get him with that huge oak between us and he knows it. If I choose to go left or right to lunge, he just sprints into the open yard. I give up. He knows I will. And then he goes back to the bird. Because unlike me in these backyard shenanigans, he doesn’t give up.

It reminds me of the mantra I came up with for myself years ago when I really needed it. Some people say spirituality or other types of hocus-pocus are silly, and I guess there are times when I am skeptical of some things. All I know is that mine worked. Really worked. I’ve sliced about it in the past. In fact, I can probably look back one day on my different Marches of slicing and tell how my life was going based on if I had to remind myself of my mantra and it leaked into my slicing. The mantra is, simply, “patience and dedication”. Like the dog with the bird.

We’re here for a blip in the grand scheme. I know. And maybe that means all is insignificant and so we should just suck the marrow of this one shot we got and fly around the halls of our one conscious existence smashing into everything fragile and sturdy alike, taking no prisoners and having zero regrets. 

But maybe we should try to get it right. Like, right for us I mean. And maybe it’s ok that we don’t always know what that looks like. Patience and dedication. It doesn’t mean waiting for the world to happen to you. Waiting for universe to unfold as you do nothing. Because dedication. Find what you love and dedicate yourself. Maybe you fall short and maybe your dedication leads you up a tree to where you really belong. 

Odin hasn’t caught that bird. But I have seen dogs with birds in their mouths. Patience and dedication. 

“You asked to walk me home

But I had to carry you

And you pushed me in

And now my feet can’t touch the bottom of you”