Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation, please visit Tarabrock.com. Namstay. Welcome welcome friends. I hope you're entering this new year in good spirits.

So I thought I'd start with a story that I love. A woman tells about an old tired looking dog who

wanders into her yard and he has a collar but he doesn't have tags he looks well fed and

clean so she figures he has a home but he follows her into the house down the

hall and falls asleep on her couch and her dogs don't seem to mind.

He seems like a good dog, so she lets him sleep.

An hour later, he goes to the door, she lets him out, and the next day he's back.

Resumes his position on the couch, takes a nap for an hour, goes home, and this goes on for

several weeks.

So she gets curious and she pins a note to his collar

and she writes, you know, every afternoon your dog comes to my house

for a nap.

I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you.

The next day he arrives with a different note pinned to his collar and it reads this.

It says he lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come tomorrow?

Ah, so what draws me to that is such that feeling of welcome of assumed community and

belonging you know we often would watch our dog, Jonathan and I would be in the same room with her and that would be when she got really contented, mellow happy.

She could settle in.

She's a packed creature and you could feel her nervous system relaxing

when we were all together.

She was at home.

...