I was out on the front lawn helping to dig a hole for our new Maple tree and l looked back over the fence and into the side yard and saw Bud sitting peacefully and contentedly on the grass.

This image touched me. Dogs are the optimists of the animal world, they inspire me all the time to push away from pessimists and pessimism. They are not haters, they never seek to diminish or divide.

Bud has had a long and hard journey from there to here, as Red did before he came to me. Bud has every reason to be wary and hostile to humans, he was cruelly mistreated and left for dead.

Yet when I see him opening up to our lives so peacefully and lovingly, I am reminded of one emotion I strongly believe dogs have: hope.

Bud never gave up on people, balked at a better life, withheld affection or trust. When a better life came, he embraced it, he never gave up hope or gives up the hope of finding that chipmunk in the stone wall, the groundhog in the hole in the pasture, that rabbit taunting him in the back pasture.

Fate never stops believing that we are always about to take her out to work – every time we stand up.

Bud almost certainly will never catch any of these speedy and wily creatures, but he never gives up hope, just as a border collie never gives up that work is just around the corner.

What good hearts dogs have, given a chance.  Some are damaged by bad breeding and bad people, but mostly, they never give up hope. They teach me so much.

I saw this quote from Anne Frank the other day from “The Diary Of A Young Girl.” She was a young woman who had every reason to be angry and dark about her life and the world around her:

“It’s really a wonder,” she wrote in her diary, “that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them because, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

It’s not for me to judge anything Anne Frank wrote, or compare it to my life in any way, but I believe the same thing about people and was moved to read her writing.

Like most of the people reading this, I am often challenged in to believe that people are really good at heart.  The daily onslaught of bad news suggests otherwise, and it has become a spiritual challenge to keep one’s faith in the human spirit.

I hear from a lot of people who seem angry and bitter, and I doubt any of them endured a fraction of what Anne Frank went through, hiding from the Nazi’s in her Amsterdam attic until she was captured and killed in a concentration camp.

I believe people are really good at heart also, especially since I found the Army Of Good, or perhaps they found me. Every day, people who want to do good contact me, offer to help, support this work, thank me for something I’ve written.

Ann, a longtime and especially thoughtful reader of the blog, wrote me this afternoon:

“I’m writing for three reasons,” she wrote. “The first is to thank you for the daily inspiration I derive from your blog.  The second is to thank you for inspiring me to write more about my daily life and to find the eternal messages within it.

The third is to ask if I can purchase an electronic version of the black and white photograph with your new vase and the word “heal.” Your black and white photography speaks strongly to me. I don’t want to print it out but I would like to post it on my Facebook page and it doesn’t seem fair to use your work without compensation.

We all need healing right now.  I find your work deeply healing.”

I don’t see myself the way other people see me, good or bad. I am not falsely modest, but I don’t ever really know how to handle a message like that, other than to be grateful for it, it’s sure nicer than the other kind. And how humbling to helping people to heal.

I suppose that when all is said and done, everything people say about me is true, at least to them. That’s a good way to look at it, I think.

Healing is important to me. I love that sign. And I hope to one day be the person Ann described in her e-mail, I’m not there yet.

My response to Anne was to send her a full resolution image of that “Heal” photograph, no charge, it will be perfect for her Facebook Page. And then I put the photo up for sale in case anyone else wants it, the prints can’t, alas, be free.

The bottom line for me is this. Hope is essential to my living, to give up hope will be the first death for me. Hope is healthy, it keeps me alive, engaged, and every day that I live in this world I am reminded that Anne Frank was wise beyond her words, wiser than me, decades older than her, but not as strong.

She was right. People are really good at heart.