Before we get started, this is Fruitycake with an important Tuesday announcement. If you have been reading our little pieces of life from this mountain, please don’t wait another day to join us on Patreon. The complete weekday blog and my audio blog are there, along with the extra things we create for the persons and dogs who have stayed beside us through all these changes. It is only $5 a month, and right now that support truly helps us keep writing, creating and helping real rescue dogs be seen. Come over today and stay with us: www.patreon.com/2travelingdogsrescue

Now. We have a leopard.

Sort of.

This is Fruitycake. Yesterday, while conducting my regular inspection of this mountain place—which mostly consists of smelling things Girl Person would prefer I did not smell—and then peeing on said items, we met one of the most spectacular creatures we have seen here lately. He was long. He was spotted and striped. He was slimy. And he was moving across the trail with the confidence of someone who had absolutely nowhere important to be. I liked him already.  Who needs a schedule? 

He was a leopard slug.  Yes, I know you’re shocked that I got right to the point.  Obviously, a creature this magnificent could not simply be called Slug, so I have named him Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo. It sounds like he owns an Italian fashion house, which feels appropriate. His fall collection is mostly mucus.  It’s the new luxury that you didn’t know you needed.  

Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo was not in a hurry. This is probably fortunate because slugs are not particularly equipped for hurrying. But he was going somewhere, millimeter by determined millimeter, making his own road as he went. And that is actually quite literal. Slugs produce mucus that helps them glide over rough ground while protecting their very soft bodies. I know you’re also shocked I am full of knowledge like this.  It’s because I’m full of pizza and pizza makes extra brain cells.  

Mr. Leopardo does not sit underneath an ivy leaf waiting for someone to build him a sidewalk. He makes what he needs and keeps going.

Girl Person and I stood there watching him, and I started thinking that perhaps Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo had shown up specifically for Tuesday’s blog because today’s affirmation is October 6 | I Will Make Something Instead Of Only Consuming Things.

TODAY’S AFFIRMATION: I have ideas worth bringing into the world. Today I will spend a little less time taking things in and a little more time making, cooking, writing, fixing, growing or creating.

And Mr. Leopardo, my friends, is a maker. Admittedly, what he was making was slime. Nobody said creativity had to be glamorous.

There is something wonderful about an animal that literally creates the thing it needs to move forward. Maybe we need more of that. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives consuming. We scroll through what other people created. We watch their videos, read their words, look at their houses, compare their lives to ours and sometimes accidentally spend forty-seven minutes watching a person organize a refrigerator we do not own. Dogs do not understand this behavior. We would simply open the refrigerator. And clean it out accordingly.  

Consuming things isn’t necessarily bad. We need stories and music and ideas and information. Sometimes seeing what somebody else has made inspires us to make something ourselves. The problem comes when we spend so much time looking at everyone else’s paths that we forget we are capable of making one. And you are!!! What are you not making the world is missing out on?! 

And apparently Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo has been doing much more around this mountain than leaving shiny highways behind him. Slugs are part of the cleanup crew in an ecosystem like ours. Many eat fungi, fallen leaves and decaying plant material, helping break things down and return nutrients to the soil. They are also part of the food web for other creatures. What looks to us like one enormous, inconveniently located blob on the trail is actually participating in the life of this mountain.

He takes what is finished and helps turn it into something that can begin again.

I like that, especially right now.

There are a lot of endings and beginnings mixed together at the rustico. We are waiting and wondering about the sale. We are trying to imagine a future we cannot quite see yet. Rain is coming. Colder weather is coming. There are decisions about chopping wood, buying pellets, getting supplies up this mountain and preparing to stay while simultaneously trying to prepare to leave. It would be very easy to spend every hour consuming possibilities and worrying about every single one of them. And socks.  We need socks.  Well, the persons do.  It’s all this!!! 

But worrying does not make anything.

So perhaps Tuesday does not require us to solve the entire future. Maybe Tuesday only asks us to make one thing. Write a page. Cook a meal. Fix something that has been sitting broken. Grow something. Draw something terrible and enjoy doing it anyway. Terrible art is my favorite kind!!! It’s an art form in itself! Send the email you have been putting off. Make a shelter dog’s story into a post that somebody might finally notice. Take a handful of ingredients that do not look particularly promising and turn them into dinner. Make something where there was nothing before.

That is really what we have tried to do for years with 2 Traveling Dogs. A shelter dog sitting unnoticed somewhere is not content. That dog is a life. But we can take that dog’s story and make something from it—a blog, a photograph, a video or a This Is…Me post—and perhaps put that story in front of the one person who was supposed to see it. Creation does not have to be enormous to matter. Sometimes making one small thing changes one very big thing.

A slug can help change a forest one decomposing leaf at a time. A person can change a dog’s life one post at a time. And a dog can apparently write a blog while contributing absolutely nothing to the household chores. We all have our gifts.

So today I am going to spend a little less time worrying about what might be coming down this mountain and a little more time making something while I am still standing on it. Girl Person can write. Boy Person can fix something. I can continue my important work of supervising both of them and making certain that the “cooking” portion of today’s affirmation is taken extremely seriously.

And Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo? He will keep making his road. Slowly. Quietly. Without comparing it to anybody else’s and without needing to know exactly where it ends before he begins.

Maybe that is the lesson our very slow new neighbor left us with this Tuesday: you do not always have to find the road forward. Sometimes you make it as you go.

Preferably with less slime.

This is Fruitycake. I have ideas worth bringing into the world. Most of them involve pizza. Actually, there is no maybe about it.

Fruitycake 

P.S. We really need your help this week. Bad rain is coming, and there are supplies we urgently need to get up to the rustico before the weather makes an already difficult trip up this mountain even harder. Groceries, necessities and preparations for the wet and colder weather cannot keep being postponed. If you have been meaning to help us, this is a week when it would make an immediate difference. Necessities and direct support: www.tinyurl.com/2tdnecessities. Patreon is $5 a month and gives you the complete weekday blogs and audio blogs: www.patreon.com/2travelingdogsrescue.

You can also support our This Is…Me project by sponsoring the story of a real rescue dog.

Sponsor a post this week here http://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/Q56YEJJTKXY96

Every sponsorship gives us another opportunity to create something that matters: a story that helps a dog who might otherwise disappear into an endless feed become seen, believed and rescued. Shelters and rescues that would like to submit a dog for consideration can contact us at rachael@2travelingdogs.com. Thank you for helping us continue to make things that matter—even when life feels uncertain, the rain is coming and Mr. Leopardo DiSlimo is apparently the only one around here who already knows exactly how to make his own road.