spirit flows thru -- Alison Rittger's spiritual reflections on finding the holy in the daily
 
PictureHappy New Year 2016 / Flickr
Awake from his New Year’s nap, Foxiebeau could see his one and only sipping tap water from a paper cup, water she’d measured with the eight-ounce measuring glass kept next to the one-cup Keurig. The methodical nature of her current water consumption, her counting the swallows as she downed each cup looked to Foxie’s untrained eyes like a habit in the making. Moreover, she was marking small straight lines on a discarded envelope. He could only suspect his one and only of embarking on a New Year’s resolution without telling him.

Suddenly competitive, he felt an urge to set some intention for 2016, although only a few times in the past year could he recall falling short of ideal pet behavior. Growling at sounds and reactivity toward other dogs or pant cuffs in a hurry was too far out of his control for correction. A Chihuahua mix, especially a rescue, had to play the genetic cards dealt him. Or so he had overheard.

However, it soon became even more alarming to Foxiebeau to notice that he was now appearing in wwwspiritflowsthru.com in the third animal singular. No longer in the “first animal” pronoun, “I,” he had been replaced by an omniscient narrator! At least he could be cheered that whoever was now in charge rarely referred to him by the generic “dog.” With a sigh, he recalled how his commission to blog had, in fact, begun as an act of rescue. His one and only said she felt mired in her own “non-sense” (her word) and sought a perspective slightly different from her own. That she had been rescued by her much loved dog was just good luck.

But how explain this further distancing? Did his one and only see it as an improvement that Foxie had been demoted from first animal singular to third animal singular? Wouldn’t this change of narrator affect her place in the chain of command? Would being seen from a greater distance rather than directly from a devoted pet’s perspective, which is how it had been until today, make her lose agency? Sure, a more extensive vocabulary would be in play, but Foxie wondered if that was a good thing. And he wondered if his one and only wasn’t pulling an Olive Kittredge on herself. Oh how he wished to reclaim his first animal singular point of view and rescue her once again! But who knew when or if that could happen? After all, he was no Saint Bernard, or was he? 





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