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This is Fruitycake. 🐾

There are places on this mountain where you can feel very alone. I know that sounds dramatic, and fortunately being dramatic is one of my strongest qualifications, but it is true. You can walk far enough into the woods here that you cannot see another house or hear a car. Sometimes you cannot even hear my persons talking, although I generally solve that problem by barking at something unnecessary. But lately, I have been thinking about what happens here when nobody is looking.

A leaf falls. Water moves underneath the rocks. A bird carries something from one tree to another. A tiny mushroom pushes through the dirt where absolutely nobody will take its picture. An olive drops onto the ground, a branch breaks and a seed gets stuck in somebody’s fur and receives free transportation halfway across the mountain. None of those things stops happening just because nobody sees it. The mountain does not require an audience.

I think persons forget this about themselves. You live in a world where everything seems to need proof—pictures, likes, comments, numbers, somebody noticing, somebody saying, “I saw what you did.” When those things do not happen, you can start wondering if what you are doing matters at all. Maybe you feel alone. Maybe you keep showing up for people who do not notice. Maybe you are working on something nobody understands yet. Maybe you are simply trying to get through a difficult season quietly, and because there is no applause for making it through Tuesday, you think it does not count.

But look at this mountain. Some of the most important things happening here are happening where nobody can see them. Roots are holding the hillside together underneath my paws. Water is finding its way through the earth. Fallen leaves are becoming tomorrow’s soil. Trees are making shade for creatures that will never know which tree gave it to them. Everything affects something else, even when nobody is watching. So do you.

Maybe that is also why we do not have to do everything in order for our lives to matter. A tree does not grow everywhere on this mountain. A stream does not water every piece of ground. One little olive tree cannot hold up the entire hillside, and even Fruitycake cannot personally supervise every suspicious noise in the Portofino mountains. I have tried. I have barked at birds, sticks, construction equipment, persons, things that moved, things that did not move and on at least one occasion an empty section of forest that I remain convinced was behaving suspiciously. At some point you have to accept your limitations. Mine apparently begin at “entire mountain security department.” Everything here has limits, yet everything still contributes something.

And suddenly today’s affirmation makes a little more sense to me: “Not everything is always possible, and that is okay.” Maybe accepting what we cannot do is not the opposite of making a difference. Maybe it is part of understanding where our difference can actually be made. There are paths on this mountain that simply end. Sometimes a tree falls across them, sometimes rain washes part of them away and sometimes the mountain becomes too steep. You can stand there wishing the path were different for as long as you want, but eventually you have to stop fighting the mountain and look around to see what is still possible.

My persons are learning this too. Persons seem to believe that if they try harder, work longer, sacrifice more and worry about something sufficiently at three o’clock in the morning, they can force every path to stay open. But sometimes you cannot. Sometimes you have given everything you reasonably can and the answer is still no, not this way, not right now. That does not turn everything you did before that moment into a failure.

“When one path closes, I will look gently for what remains available.” I especially like the word gently because persons are not always gentle with themselves when plans change. They immediately want another answer, another direction, another plan. But maybe you are allowed to stand at the end of a path for a little while. You can be sad that it ended. You can wish it had gone farther. You can even look backward at everything you passed along the way and wonder whether any of it mattered.

It did.

You have probably changed days you do not even remember. You have said something kind that somebody carried with them longer than you knew. You have helped someone without realizing how badly they needed help. You have loved an animal who understood that love even when nobody else saw it. You have made somebody laugh on a day when laughing felt impossible. Perhaps nobody told you, but that does not erase what happened.

There are old stone walls all over this mountain built by persons whose names I will never know. They stacked those stones long before Fruitycake arrived to inspect them, yet those walls are still holding up terraces beneath my paws. Those persons could not possibly have known that one day a rescue dog would walk across their work, but here I am. Maybe that is what a life is—leaving little things behind everywhere you go without ever knowing exactly where they will lead or who they will someday hold up.

And perhaps that is where the last part of today’s affirmation belongs: “Peace can begin when I stop fighting what cannot be changed today.” Not because what happened did not matter. Not because we suddenly stop caring. Not because we have figured out what comes next. Sometimes peace is simply admitting that this is as far as one path goes and trusting that everything we did while walking it still mattered.

So if you feel alone today, unseen or uncertain about where you are supposed to go next, remember something from this mountain place. Being unseen is not the same as being insignificant, and reaching the end of one path does not mean everything that happened along it was wasted. The roots underneath the ground are still holding up the trees, the water underneath the rocks is still finding another way downhill, and even when nobody is watching, you are still leaving something behind simply because you were here.

Maybe we can find another way too.

Fruitycake

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