I was sitting at my desk when the word came: Duffy (Joan’s Golden Retriever) was outside but “acting very strangely.”

By the time I got to the front door, I could see him in the distance, head down, smelling his way along a trail of some sort, I supposed. So what was wrong with that?

Until I saw his head jerk up and snap around. His body seemed to pitch forward, and then tighten and tremble a bit. With one halting kind of leap, he seemed to lick at the sky in one final, fruitless effort. Then he fell back stock-still and waited for the ballet to start all over again.

By that time, I could hardly breathe just watching him. It must be a convulsion, I said. I had heard about dogs having seizures but I had never seen one—and I certainly did not know what to do about it if it were one….

I moved quietly and almost motionlessly toward him. I was almost behind him when I finally got a glimpse of what was going on: Duffy was smelling the flowers. Correction: Duffy was smelling the flowers and chasing the butterflies that were in them. When the butterfly moved, he jerked. When it flew around his head, he jumped. With the butterfly gone, he bent his head into the flowers again, took a long breath, and then waited for the next one to move….

Duffy had discovered what most people I knew had not: there are times in life when what we are doing that is out of the ordinary is far more important than what we should be doing of our ordinary little human things. It is at those moments that we sink into the elixir of life. We are suddenly more than ourselves and life is more than simply a canvas on which to do human things. We feel another part of ourselves and of the world come alive. We begin to feel the beauty within us….

To pursue beauty wherever and however it comes deepens our consciousness of beauty everywhere and anywhere. We begin to recognize beauty on the faces of the wise and patient elderly. We come to see beauty in the eyes of young foals alive with life and raring to go. We watch beauty break out of every living thing and suddenly realize the beauty we have found is now in us, too.

When we begin to recognize beauty, to see it all around us, it has done its work on us. Steeped in beauty, we have become beautiful ourselves. We are calm now, uplifted, enriched by the world around us, deepened in our sensitivities, our vision of the world more finely honed. We become the beauty we have come to see everywhere.

Once we begin to chase butterflies and smell flowers, nothing in the world can possibly be made to appear more valuable, more priceless, more precious. Then we, too, have become one with the universe, impervious to anything less, fearless in our pursuit of it.

—excerpts taken from Two Dogs and a Parrot: What Our Animal Friends Can Teach Us About Life by Joan Chittister (BlueBridge), the book that received 1st place in the recently announced 2016 Catholic Press Association Awards, in the category, Best Book by a Small Publisher. This was Joan Chittister’s 15th Book Award from the CPA.