It’s a circle of life thing.
I’ve been writing quite a bit in the last few weeks about new beginnings, about seeds pulled from their origin to fall and prosper on new ground. About the need to prepare yourself in all that you do, so that when opportunity plucks you from the place where you’ve grown comfortable, you’re ready to prosper and find the blessings waiting in the new place where you land.
At the end of it all, the time of the reaper comes. The winter descends, and your time in this life comes to an end. Hopefully, when that moment arrives, you’ll look warmly at the many opportunities that you were able to seize, and have few regrets over fertile ground you missed out of fear or uncertainty. You’ll smile as you move from this life that you’ve lived as the gift it’s been, and embrace the transformation into something much larger.
Early last week, I mourned the passing a year ago of a dog that was among the dearest and most devoted friends I’ve ever had. Colin and I hunted many fields together, until his eyes and ears failed him, and it became too risky to take him into the field any longer. I strive to be half the man he thought I was, and I hope to have a tiny fraction of the devotion he showed toward me. He lived many years past his prime, and in his final months I carried him up and down stairs. In the end, he suffered a stroke one day while sitting in my office, and I held him in my arms as I helped him pass from this life onward.
Colin never missed a chance to hunt. There’s no doubt in my mind that he could read my thoughts most days, and knew before I ever went to the gun cabinet when it was that we were going to the field to hunt. His enthusiasm for the thing he was born to do – find, point, and retrieve birds – defined every moment of every day for him. I have no idea how the mind of a dog works, but I can tell you that if they have any capacity for thought and reflection, he had no regrets at ever missing an opportunity, at ever passing up the chance to revel in Creation.
I took a friend hunting once. He watched Colin leap from the back of the truck, canvas the field like a fiend possessed for any scent of feather, pound through the thickest of brush in the hopes of finding a hiding place, never ready to stop. He shook his head over and over, saying he’d never seen such obsession and absorption in the joy of a task in his life as the experience of watching Colin succumb to the complete rapture of the hunt.
At that moment when I leave this life – hopefully someday far in the future – I hope to look back over my life, and be satisfied that I succumbed completely to the rapture of the many moments that the path of life presented to me. I hope that I’m satisfied that I allowed myself to obsess over and allow myself to be absorbed in the joys and blessings that surround me with every step.
I was reminded of mortality again at the end of last week, but that’ll need to wait until my next post. For today, I’m remembering my friend Colin, and wishing him happy hunting in that next place where he’s become…
