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Integrating species and cultures


Lucky - our beach dog

We are getting ready to head back to Canada. We have been in Costa Rica six months building our dream to have a house on the ocean in Costa Rica. It's been quite the process..

It was a process of cultural adaption and integration.

We were outsiders tasked with integrating into a new community and culture. We sub-consciously wanted to do it differently than what we have seen happen in Vancouver which wasn't terribly successful if you ask me. We talked about it a few times but this wasn't our primary focus. Our primary focus was getting our respective jobs done (Ian's job was to get the house built and mine was to start a new job - working online helping companies build better cultures). With everything we do, we have a common goal to have fun so it needed to include having a kazillion laughs along the way. In the end, we achieved both goals. We experienced huge learning curves. Learning how to use Spanish translation apps, letting big-city Canadian habits and expectations morph into something more culturally appropriate, picking up a few words of Spanish, etc.

The most interesting part of our time here has been be-friending a beach dog (playa pero in Spanish). It all started one day when Ian was sitting on the beach and felt something moving on his right leg. He jumped a bit (because you never know what critters are hanging out near you when you are in the tropics). He saw this cute black and white dog looking up at him..smiling his doggy smile. Ian petted him and went back to his business dreaming the house into existence. The days went on and I started hearing about this dog quite often.

The dog looked a bit skinny so we bought some dog food and put it in a bowl outside. Then slowly over the next few weeks the dog started spending more and more time inside the teeny tiny apartment we were living in. Then one day, it all changed. There were many construction workers working on our house ripping out termite-infested boards, bat-infested walls etc. One day one construction worker heard a yelping sound. It was Lucky getting attacked by two or three of the neighbour dogs. This gentle soul jumped off the second floor of our house, intuitively picked up a coconut (they are everywhere here) and threw it at the dogs (malo peros). I don't think he hit them, but they ran away in a flash. They left quite the bite marks on the dog and he couldn't walk. He was carried into the house and eventually received veterinarian treatment. I think it was at this point that he started sleeping on the bed with us as we felt so sorry for him.

There were three other attacks like this. In between them, we worked with the owner of the dogs and organized a castration clinic for all four dogs. We thought this would solve all the problems. It didn't. It certainly reduced them but we still have to be constantly vigilant about not allowing those dogs on the property. We are used to it now and we manage it and it doesn't cause us a lot of anxiety. It is just a fact of life that we deal with, much like Vancouverites looking to find a place to rent have to accept on some level that prices have doubled in the last ten years.

It's been an interesting trying to "train" a beach dog. They go where they want to go and in many ways it is a good life for them. They have a type of freedom that most humans do not, so we felt this needed to honour that, as we both value freedom highly and are working to increase our own freedom. Chasing motorcyles is a fatal flaw that some beach dogs have. It is very dangerous both for the people riding the motorcycles and the dogs, so we had to start to train him on that. We still aren't there yet, but we are working on it. He comes when he is called with the Spanish word "venga" most times these days. It took us awhile to realize we needed to give him commands in Spanish rather than English. Duh... sounds silly in retrospect but it was an "ah hah" moment at the time.

The last decision we had to make was whether or not to bring him back to Canada. Our friends and family seem to have grown quite fond of him and really wanted us to bring him back. We live in a small condo in Vancouver these days, so we didn't have any illusion that we would be bringing the dog back for the dogs best interest. He runs the beach for hours every day now so hanging out on the couch at home would not be nearly as much fun for him. He is a medium sized dog and would not be able to travel in the cabin with us and would end up in cargo. We just didn't think he would do very well there, so we decided to leave him here and have some locals stay in our house and look after him.

The whole process of trying to understand this culture and how to deal with Lucky had me asking myself cosmically inspired existential questions. How do dogs communicate with each other? Is the morphogenic field that Rupert Sheldrake describes real? If so, do different species communicate on different frequencies? Do the dogs and birds influence each other? Lucky doesn't bark at birds but barks at squirrels and loves to dig for crabs. We have many birds at our place and we have started to interact with them. Sometimes they sit on the tree in front of our place and stare at us with piercing eyes not flinching an eyelid. Is it just my imagination or has the increase in the number of birds at our place grown exponentially since the day I started acknowledging them as components of consciousness?

My belief system and life experiences have me convinced that there is life on other planets. Another belief I have is that the Earth is undergoing a profound shift and one of the paradigm shifts is that more and more humans will start communicating with species from other planets. Believe it or not, I actually have friends who are doing this so this isn't speculation for me, it is a reality.

Since I have spent much of my life as a systems analyst and process improvement professional, I always what to know how. How will these things happen? What happens first, what are the data points etc. What are the attributes of the souls doing this? I keep wondering what it would be like to be a benevolent extraterrestrial wanting to communicate with me. They would be in a role similar to our role with Lucky. We want to respect his free will yet in some ways it is better for him that he obeys us because we have a broader view and in many cases more knowledge (e.g. chasing motorcycles is dangerous for both the dog chaser and the human being chased).

For the extraterrestrials it must be an exercise in patience and observation and study. What is "normal" in this culture, how can I make contact without totally crushing the life of the human who will likely be ridiculed if and when they tell their story? Which human should I choose to make contact with that can both handle it and has a high likelihood of being a good galactic brother / ambassador? So many questions... not many answers... What do you think ? What would you do if you were a benevolent extraterrestrial wanting to make contact with heart-centred humans? What is a good example of different cultures coming together and creating something better for both cultures?


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