Guest post – reposted with permission from 2018
This post is dedicated to Walter
If the heart is the portal to eternal happiness then pets may be one of the Universe’s ways of pointing that out to us. The Universe leaves us messages to find and follow in its efforts to bring each of our souls to eternal peace. Some of us can find them… some of us can’t.
So few things in our physical world exude unconditional love and acceptance. However, pets do. Their desires are so pure and simple. They merely want food, shelter, and attention… not necessarily in that order.
Love… is not either-or. It isn’t something to use as a weapon or to be taken away if we don’t meet someone’s expectations. Such things which can be taken under certain conditions… isn’t love in its truest form.
Consider how pets are willing to endure hardship in the name of acceptance. They will tolerate beatings and abuse in the hopes of having one kind gesture from their owner. They don’t understand that they had done nothing wrong… that their owners can’t handle or accept unconditional love nor can give it.
Consider what it takes to love unconditionally. It takes acceptance and purest of heart. As people, we think about it, we dig into what we like and don’t like. We make judgments based on our personal opinions and then implement them. Pets… they just are. They just love.
We can learn a lot from that simple yet powerful idea!
Pets are therapeutic in so many ways. They help heal our broken hearts. They lay beside us when we are ill. They eagerly wait for us to arrive home after a long, hard day of labor – tails wagging, eyes a glaze with glee!
Pets are a buffer in a way, to the ills of the world, the anger and hatred that abounds here. To give in to the genuine adoration of a pet eases our stress, can help rejuvenate our spirit, had aid us in surviving this world as it is. Loving a pet from within our own hearts can also help us to be more compassionate to others in the world. Further, offering and feeling the simplicity of love in its natural state can alter the complexity that we think things have to be in order to “love.” We find, in following the paw-steps of these simple, loving creatures, that love, in and of itself, is in fact, simple.
Few things on this planet compare to the love and acceptance of a pet. If love is that doorway to eternal happiness, then there is no doubt at all that returning the love of a pet… and accepting the pet’s unconditional love, is the key to that door!