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This is about an Australian Shepherd named Margie Marie. Except for her first five or so weeks, we had her for her life of thirteen and a half years. The following link is to a web page that has her life story, with several photos:
<http://home.austin.rr.com/rdo/margielife.htm>
What Margie taught me was severalfold:
* To question conventional thought about animals and their supposed limitations. Margie had a loving nature, and reacted to our moods. It was with her that I became convinced that animals could read our thoughts and establish a spiritual connection with humans.
* To trust my intuition that animals know much, much more than they are credited with knowing. The Jarrell Tornado incident, (described in her story) where Margie ran upstairs and barked at the sky at the same time a tragedy was happening 30 miles away, was an example of this; The way she took to riding in an elevator as if she'd been doing that all her life, when we wondered if it would freak her out, is another.
* That animals indeed have souls. In the months after she died, I had several dreams about her. The first one, when I was still grieving, was one in which her face, much larger than life size, was looking in at me from the other side of the window of the door to the back yard. This seems to be a rather literal dream in which she was "looking in on us" from "the other side". In other dreams, I was with her as she explored new territory, always with lush green grass as part of the landscape. She'd run here and there, very busy with whatever she was doing, and I was almost always more of an observer than a participant; there was not much interaction between the two of us in those dreams.
One dream, however, was memorable. In it, I had a translator that I held to my ear that converted her thoughts to English words. She said, "It was my plan to leave [physical life] when I did," and something to the effect that if she hadn't gotten the particular terminal disease, she would still have found a way to leave around that time.
* I have no doubt that she chose us as much as we chose her.
Dave | 