How Warm & Fuzzy Can Be Potent Medicine

Sometimes our healers show up in the most unexpected places.

Several years back, I found myself grieving deeply after suddenly losing our 6-year old yellow lab, Zak, to cancer. I knew I needed to heal and was searching desperately in all the conventional nooks and crannies, but to no avail.

I’m sure you’ve been there, to some degree. You don’t need to be on this planet for long before you experience loss of some sort. We look around for something, anything, to help fill that hole, to help us feel complete again. And sometimes we give up even looking because we’ve grown so discouraged and apathetic.

Fortunately, healing doesn’t require our looking in order for it to quietly enter our lives and begin to work its magic.

Out of nowhere, something mundane and ordinary happens.

And there it is.

Or rather, there it was. Because often, we don’t even know our healing has begun until we’re whole enough to recognize it.

My healer came into my life in the form of a 14# bundle of fuzzy-faced love. And there I was, thinking she was just a puppy. Silly me!

And little did I know I was about to embark on a healing journey that would guide me out of the depths of despair and lead me dancing into the sunshine.

The cure that helped bring light back into my life was discovering the joy of fostering rescue animals, in my case dogs.

I’m thinking about this today because my first guest post has just been published on that very topic. It’s about The Rich Rewards of Fostering Dogs, and you can read about my healer Kelsey, as well as Rosie whom I also mention in my entry below.

It just so happens that the healing I experienced through fostering is touched upon in a few short journal entries I have from those days (I’ve kept diaries for 42 years now).  I decided to illustrate a bit of my experience by sharing them with you.

Here they are, and I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Black journal with cover photo of Zak's grave

That was the last entry in the black diary.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that the healing juncture I’m telling you about happened in the junction between two diaries #26 and #27?

From the black and gloomy to the colorful and bright.

This was a major turn in the road for me.

So you see how remarkable the healing power of fostering animals can be? Not only do you get to experience the open heart I refer to in my guest post, but getting out of ourselves and being of service has great value, too.

And somewhere in that mix is where the healing occurs.

Note: Many thanks to Barbara Barth of Confessions Of The Unfaithful Widow for inviting me to guest post and share a little of what I know about the joys of fostering dogs. Visit her blog and also check out the gorgeous premier edition of her online dog magazine Writer With Dogs. It’s amazing! (Pssst: This is the only time it will be free, so hurry!)

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