can Spring be far behind?”
Shelley’s last line from “Ode to the West Wind” is quoted so often that its connection to the rest of the poem is generally lost. It has become cheapened to mean simply “All’s well that ends well” or “Don’t worry, everything will turn out fine.”
And so it may, but the darkness that is Winter is not to be ignored. The pain of loss and death are as real and as overwhelming as are the joy and hope of birth which we celebrate and desire and pursue. How easy it is to forget:
“As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”
Last week’s trip to evaluate the dozens of Rottweilers in the shelter -- and the frustrating developments since then -- certainly remind us of the rest of Shelley’s cries: their pain is our pain. The Winter of that suffering doesn’t just magically disappear, though so many folks don’t want to hear about it because it disturbs the comfort they find in ignorance and denial.
Its not our wish to be “Johnny BummerSeed”* and ruin everyone’s fun! It’s just that, in the circle of life, joy and sorrow are parts of the whole: we can’t have one without the other. But we often pretend that we can.
Most folks think of deserts as barren, parched and desolate and never see the brief explosion of ‘life’ anyway: we are surrounded daily with the comforts of ‘controlled environments’ and tend to avoid life’s deserts whenever possible. So perhaps the unusual - and sorely needed - rains that SoCal received early this year have made the Desert Wildflowers more abundant than usual. But their beauty could not be more intense.
Our trip to Joshua Tree National Park this week could not have been better timed. Nature’s gift of Life was as overwhelming as the horror of last week’s trip. It helped to wash away the smell of death, and to remind us that our efforts are worth the pain: We can’t ignore Winter, but Spring is sweeter because of it.
The disturbing photo at the end of last week’s story was not a Photoshop creation. (Rottweiler Rescue of Michigan shared that picture many years ago.) Ignoring the needs of Rescue will not make them go away. It only assures that the endings are predictably depressing.
Here is a ‘cute’ photo of a rescue dog who is having a happy ending thanks to folks who endure the horrors of Winter and drink in the beauty of Spring”.
Take time to smell the flowers!
*Thanks to our friend Helen for that quote!
“If Winter comes,
Thursday, March 20, 2008
