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| Roxy's best side |
I may be partial, but popular
opinion holds that the Shiba Inu is a very cute dog! There is no denying this,
as everyone who comes into contact with Roxy will attest.
Their faces must have been
the inspiration for stuffed teddy bears, soft ears, eyes that
seem to be highlighted with eyeliner and a luxurious thick coat of fur. Add in the way they wag their hips when
walking and it’s impossible to resist their beauty and charm.
However, their curly tail,
perfectly lifted into a spiral, gives you complete access to a view I have come
to find curiously ornamental, but not without a bit of resistance, the little
black Shiba Inu anus.
My mother was the first
person to point out the prominence of Roxy’s anus. She likened it to a target,
making her hand into a mock gun, which she then shot in the direction of said
target. “Bull’s eye!”
Roxy is a sesame-colored
Shiba, but her anus is circled by white fur, then reddish fur further out. It’s
definitely part of the Shiba look, but not a part of Roxy’s look I fell in love
with at first sight. In the beginning that little lifted tail and full view
anus were something I tried to overlook, sympathize with, but mostly had to
endure.
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| Roxy's backside |
However, after a couple of
years and many adventures, including removing some stitches from her healing
heinie, I came to find this unusual part of Roxy truly part of her charm. I now
believe that the Shiba Inu has one of the cutest puppy posteriors on the
planet!
Throughout our lives we
witness considerable change. As the world changes around us, we adapt. Some
people adapt faster then others. We acclimate in a variety of ways. We learn,
we grow, we transform.
Sometimes what we once
thought of as right, now seems wrong, something we liked, now we dislike,
something we thought important, now strikes us as inconsequential, and visa
versa. Opinions change, expectations change, feelings change, sometimes for
better, sometimes for worse.
Change is the only constant,
so it would seem.
What happens first? Does
something change and then we adapt, or do our thoughts change and then our
world adapts? Maybe, it’s a little of both?
It should be obvious that the
quickest way to change the world is to change how we look at it, but there is
much resistance to this concept. We humans like a good fight.
Most of us would rather try
and change the circumstance, not realizing that the circumstance might change
more easily if we first accept.
The easiest change we can
make may be in how we see things.
Think of the quote by Oscar
Wilde, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” or
one from Carlos Castaneda, “We either make ourselves miserable or we make
ourselves happy. The amount of work is
the same.”
Then there is one of my
favorite quotes from William Shakespeare, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking
makes it so.”
Let’s not forget the serenity
prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the
courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Each of these wise
proclamations, point to perception being the key that opens the door to
understanding.
