I LOVE liza.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth.” Mark Twain

Liza is truly just a dog. Yet such an extraordinary dog that in the span of her lifetime with me she has also been a bug, a duck, a horse, a pony, a wolf and a bear. Teddy and Polar bear. The first time we took her swimming as a puppy a lady witnessing the fun called her an albino alligator pawing through the surface of Lake Tahoe. A friend of mine even gifted her with a Native American name: Flies Far with Small Ears. And what tiny ears she has. Fuzzy like a duck, proud like a pony and fierce like a wolf. But just as sure as she is a dog, she is truly one of the sweetest, most gentle creatures alive.

Dog or pony – my love and affection for Liza transcends all of those shapes and we live each day in a place where our differences sincerely don’t matter.  As if my time shared with her connects directly to her soul and the being she is – not to the fact that she is a dog. And that kind of love blows hate entirely out of the water.

There is a real life story about an American trade ship captain whose ship is wrecked off the Moroccan coast of Africa in 1815. Captain James Riley and several members of his crew were sold as slaves to a tribe of Arabic nomads and roamed the entire stretch of the Sahara desert. Captain Riley and one other crew member actually survived to tell the story and you can read it recounted by a book called Skeletons of the Zahara by Dean King or you can read Riley’s own memoirs which were published in 1817, Authentic Narrative of the Loss of American Big Rig ‘Commerce’ .

The story in its entirety is extraordinary but it’s the unity that Captain Riley and his capture are able to find across a multitude of differences – language, race, religion – that inspires. Although they worshiped different Gods, they united in their love for a God. Their relationship as master and slave seeded a tiny little bit of …. trust for one other. And they were joined together by nothing other than that they both believed in something bigger than themselves – even if not the same thing. Wild! And it was that unspoken sense of trust that ultimately lead to Riley’s freedom in the end.

The impenetrability of Liza and I’s … sameness – feels like survival is possible. The great Sahara desert that is often a normal Tuesday has the occasional tree and is at times, breezy. But that sameness exists because of our differences. And although there is often very little water in the desert – that kind of love blows hate entirely out of the…