Day 17: object lessons from our animals

I.

By the time puppy Sadie arrived at our house, our elderly mutt Jazz was way too decrepit to jump into the car without help. So Sadie somehow decided that dogs must always need help to get into the backseat of a car. She can do spectacular flying leaps to catch her tennis ball in mid-air, she can hurdle a four foot retaining wall with ease. But she absolutely will not jump eighteen inches to get into the car.

II.

We have a two-foot chicken wire fence that surrounds our strawberry patch to keep the chickens out. The strawberries are long gone, but the fence is still there. Yesterday one of our chickens got into the strawberry patch. The only way she could have gotten in there is to flap around and hop/fly over the fence, but once she was in there, apparently she couldn't figure out how to flap her wings and hop/fly back out. I noticed she was trapped when I went down to gather eggs, but she wouldn't let me help her out. So I was going to get Doug to help me with it when he got home, but then I forgot.

Doug went down to shut the chickens in last night and didn't notice that she was missing, so when I got down there today, she was still out in the strawberry patch, having spent the night out there. Even with me chasing her around and shooing her up and out of the fence, she couldn't figure out how to do it. Sam finally helped me trap her when he got home from school and we released her to hang out in her usual spots.

So the moral of the story is..... how easily we are trapped by limitations that exist only in our heads. We get habituated to thinking I can't do that, or people like me don't do things like that, or whatever our own particular version is.

Hmmmm. now that I'm typing this, it's occurring to me that my particular version is Nothing I've done is worth anything. (see yesterday's post.) It's all in my head, just as it was all in the chicken's head that she couldn't get out of the strawberry patch, and it's all in Sadie's head that she can't jump into the backseat of the car.

ah, the things we learn from our pets.

p.s. a few of you went to the same kind of church I did-- while I was writing this I remembered there used to be a series of Sunday school lessons about a town populated by birds. I thought it might be Martinsville, but Google knows of no such thing. Anybody have clearer memories than me?