Lucky to Be Alive: Take It from a Dog

 — from Wendy  E. Shepard    —

Lucky, a San Juan Island dog, is the subject of this love story

Lucky to be Alive: A Love Story is based on the true story of Lucky, a Border Collie, who roamed free in San Juan Valley for ten years before joining our family – or rather, before adopting us as his pack.

Lucky was in love with life, no matter what it brought. Comparing him, with great compassion, to the human species, which seemed at the time to have lost its will to live as it polluted the air, land, and water so necessary to its survival, I wanted to discover what it was that kept Lucky alive for 18 ½ years…and why human beings weren’t in love with life.

Two constants in life on Earth are that everything is different and everything changes; Lucky accepted whatever was, while the human species fought both change and differences, turning them into sources of fear and conflict instead of wonder.

Such is the philosophical basis of the tale; what will help us to treasure the very things we fear so that we can enjoy life Together? Lucky to be Alive: A Love Story became a fictional narrative poem that reads like prose. Its rhythms change with the seasons of life, and its wisdom and imagery belongs to Nature.

Author Wendy E. Shepard will be 75 on her next birthday; for the past 21 years, as a resident on San Juan Island, she’s been a journalist, playwright, and poet. Prior to that she graduated from Radcliffe College, focusing on dramatic literature, and from the Bank Street College of Education, where she studied creative human development.

There followed years in television and theater production, of administering arts education programs – in public schools, then as philanthropic advisor in the arts to corporate foundations, then as vice president of two colleges – Bard College and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Her next book, a series of nature columns entitled Walking With Nature, is scheduled to be published next spring.