Have you ever noticed that many of us (including, sometimes, me… and possibly you as well…) have lost the enthusiasm and sense of expectation we used to have? Do you ever get the sense that we make the motions required to get from one day to the next without much enjoyment?
I don’t believe this is the way it’s supposed to be. I think God created a world full of sights, sounds, and smells that are meant to delight us. He didn’t create us to simply survive. He said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly”. (John 10:10)
A friend of mine shared a book with me. It’s called The Tao of Maggie: The Sound of One Hound Barking, Bill Stanton. The bulk of the book consists of pictures of basset hounds along with a quip or quote. But what I found most intriguing was the introduction to the book, written from the viewpoint of the dog. It sounds rather off-beat at first, but hang in there – the dog has some good points:
Drool is the sticky slobber of life. It is far more than just the drip that slowly moves from mouth to floor. And it is not just the by-product of a complex cooling mechanism that kicks into gear on a hot August afternoon. Drool, for me, is the symptom of a brain burning with keen anticipation. It is when we know what we want so badly that the little glands in the mouth start to seriously overachieve. The brain churns and the body takes action.
Case in point: the out-of-reach box.
On the third shelf of an elevated kitchen cupboard sits an opened box of small dog treats. The box has been open for a day and the smells emanating from it have been driving me to distraction. I smell. I drool. I think. I take action… I weep.
I point my nose at the box behind the door and I produce a rhythmic low-level mournful yelp punctuated by my special ultrasonic weeping lament – a finely calculated combination of sounds that has been proven to get results time and time again.
After a short while or a long while, a human comes and does the right thing – the cupboard door is opened, the treat withdrawn from the box and placed in my waiting mouth. It’s the drooling that is the first manifestation of desire and the preface to action. If you are drooling, the blood is coursing through the body, the eyes are focused, the muscles are alerted, and the mind is following a plan of action with an iron will. To truly live is to drool.
Maybe it’s time for us to drool now and then – what do you think?
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