Life Is A Walk in the Dog Park

Lovely post, I walk my three Italian Greyhounds there occasionally because it is a beautiful and a well maintained park even though there are four other dog walking parks much closer to me such as Delta Park, Golden Harvest, Kingfisher and Erling Road.

You make a great point. And to keep it simple, stick to the visits - becoming ‘mother’ to either group means complications! Ha! But yes, my Fred is content with so little, it does bring me back to earth at times. :-)

Nice job. A little breath of fresh air, early in the morning.

Thanks,

DS

Hang in there, my friend. If there’s any way I can be supportive, feel free to email me. Hugs, Kathy

This shall pass, too.

The older I get, the more I understand that for me it is a matter of perspective. One day, everything is like a walk in the park, and the next day nothing is ever good enough. Objectively, nothing changes, just my way of looking at things.

I hope your complications will be resolved soon.

Great post. When I get stressed I always revert to nature and exercising outside. It is the only thing that helps. I think life is always complicated, that is for sure !

Your photos are beautiful! Wish we had a dog park around here. Walking with our dog is what I do when I’m stressed.

I often think this is why “be like a child” is good advice. A child’s mind is not filled with the future or the past, she simply enjoys the moment. And funny too, when you do that, things tend to work themselves out.

at the risk of sounding ancient… that park has been an incredible part of my life for years and years, as a student we’d go there with film school mates and make zany stuff, it was all wild grasslands… the city either had too little money or was deliberately not developing it. Then when my kids were born 30 yrs ago we went there for picnic parties, still mostly veld grass, then in early nineties we got another dog.. so began regular walks. The middle dam was built just before then and over time from just a few dog walkers, and I mean a few, like five or six of us on a busy afternoon it grew and grew, until one day I counted twenty five cars parked in the parking lot on Orange rd! Imagine? At first I was resentful (mea culpa), that the serenity and sense of solitude was ending but people kept turning up and celebrating the fact of this marvellous place. Model airplane people, kite flyers, Church groups, runners, family picnics, and most of us are really cool.. there have been and were even back then the bad guys and now that the park is so well used the security is better, but it is still a large area so don’t wander around alone or after dark… the park is usually locked at night now. There were two notorious attempts to carve it up by the city parks dept in direct contravention of the deed of grant to the City. They cunically tried to do that over a long weekend in december. The Geldenhuis Family donated it to “all the people who live in JHB” (note no reference to racial groups..see above comment about lack of development under the National Party) one other stipulation was that is should remain extant as one piece of ground and never be portioned off or limited. The whole park has to remain whole. Alert dogwalkers put a stop to that subterfuge and then the city tried it again over another long weekend! An easter weekend in a bizarre demonstration of the arrogance and sheer disregard for a court order! The same group blocked that too, the legacy is an alert and engaged public who resolutely defend our public space from our elected officials and their schemes! Weird huh? The other legacy is the string of fence posts from the southern end of the composting area. small minded officialdom not removing their mess up. The palisade fencing made for this barrier and paid for by the unsuspecting public was used to repair sections of the fence along Beyers Naude and Judith rd which regularly are damaged by cars that loose control and crash through there. I will stop this polemic and thank you once again for such a wonderful blog.