This morning I was listening to a podcast called Freedom Seeker Chronicles. At the end of each episode the host says, “Fly free my friends!” as a way to encourage her listeners to follow their hearts.

As I celebrate my 55th birthday today, I’m reflecting on the past twelve months as I get ready to orbit yet another year around the sun.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Gidget and my new book I’m writing. With it on my mind so much, I often have what I think are my best thoughts, early in the morning, as I sit at my vanity getting ready for the day.

Today when the host said “Fly free my friends!”  it occurred to me to the real teaching of dogs related to this saying. How often when a pet (or person) passes we say, “fly free.”  With well meaning of course, as we believe that when a being has passed they are free of pain and struggle. No more constraints of worry or burden must they carry any longer.

As I reflect on this half-way point in 2018, I could have never predicted it being as pivotal as it was in my personal growth. Gidget was so poignant in helping me take a leap of faith I never thought I would. And as I simmered in “fly free”  I realized that for me, the true teaching from our dear dog friends, is to learn to fly free while we still walk this earth.

We have a choice as to how we will work with what we perceive as a burden. Is there a teaching within that burden that we aren’t seeing? Could it be that by understanding this we could be set free while living in this human body?

While perhaps we may not always be 100% free as we are human after all, Gidget did help me understand that every time we are willing to look deep within ourselves, and dig to the root of what may be causing our pain, that we can more often than not, find clarity in a perspective we may not have otherwise known had we only lingered on the surface of our feelings.

And when we do, we are able to set ourselves free just a little more.

Fly free my friends from me and G!

XO,

Barbara