I got up this morning with a new thought about Spirit coming.

I will be picking him up when he is seven weeks old near the end of June.

The thought was that he will be my last dog.

A very simple thought uncluttered by emotion. Sort of like, oh, the sun has come up already ……  and more like something I know, not just something I think. Something obvious.

This feels like a shift within me.

When my last Golden Retriever,Chile, showed up, I wondered which one of us would leave this reality first. That was a first time thought for me too. Well, Chili suddenly left on June 23, 2011.  

Now, with this dog, it is different again. If my intuition is correct, there will be no other dog for me after Spirit. He will be my last partner along the trails, fields and woods we will explore together.

So what? one might say.

Nothing monumental and yet monumental at the same time. We all die. Nothing interesting about this. But, what might we do about the quality of our living? A much more interesting question.

The quality of our living is deeply affected by how conscious we are of the preciousness of life, by our capacity to be in a space of Appreciation.

If Spirit is to be my last dog, then he is offering me an opportunity to embrace the limited number of minutes we will have together more consciously and at a feeling level too. We may not know how many minutes there will be but we do know they can be counted – they are not infinite.

This insight changes everything.

God, this dog is talking to me already and he has not quite been born yet.

But, soon.