Lessons From A Mouse

It is always the dogs who tell me we have mice—that is before I begin to see them running across the kitchen, which always means as my sister merrily tells me that I have a lot of mice. “If you see one, you have a hundred.”

            I respect mice, and I respect rats even more—their savvy intelligence, their humor and warmth. There is concord in our home between different living beings, whether mice or insects, that I always attributed to my reverence and respect for all beings.

            But sometimes when you see the mice running across your feet, you realize your sister is probably right and there are perhaps a lot. Out come the live traps. But what of these? If you merely put the mice outdoors like I was doing, they promptly return, in fact, why not? There is that fine little box, like a five-star resort, that offers them apple, water, and good Dutch cheese. Yet, if you take them far, far away as I’ve been told you must do to prevent their return, they die a sure death. “Fodder for owls and hawks,” friends say. All part of the natural plan. Which is fine in a way that of course suffering from poison or on glue traps is not. But this does bring up a quandary for the use of live traps, and yet it was with the live trap that I witnessed something deeply moving in a difficult way that reinforced all I believe.

Most animals are born to be wild not behind the bars of a zoo or a laboratory cage. Their often-quiet being doesn’t allow for much protest and yet it’s always there. Animals inhabit and understand the world in a way we never will. As John O’Donohue writes:

     Stranded between time

     Gone and time emerging

     We manage seldom

     To be where we are:

      Whereas [animals] are always

      Looking out from

      The here and now

They are part of a natural world that acts so often as a balm to us humans when all we’ve created goes wrong. In hindsight I see that the turtles and fish and snakes and hermit crabs we kept as children in artificial, carceral existences was wrong. Of course, we kept them because we loved them, but I remember the hermit crab that escaped and met his demise under a kitchen cabinet. Or the box turtles we thought we were giving a good home to in a large turtle pen complete with small pond and how they tried to climb the cinder block wall separating them from their freedom.

            What I witness when I set the live trap with mouse on the dining room table is a pair of pink little paws—mouse hands—reaching and straining out through the vents. The image is shattering for despite the bottle cap of fresh water, the apple and persimmon pieces, to say nothing of good French and Dutch cheese, this mouse, like all wild animals, wants freedom. It’s an indelible image that needs no animal interpreter to decipher and I think of all the mice and rats in cages behind laboratory doors.

  But this mouse is in luck and I simply walk the little fellow outside once it warms up. I watch as he runs seeking cover under dried grass and leaves. The mice I take out from the house may become easy prey but this is the way of nature. Still, there is the question of humane (a dubious word in this sense) means of controlling mouse populations within country houses.

Back and forth my sister and I go discussing the growing issue, the merits of different methods for humane treatments. And that is when she tells me about Conntraceptol, mouse contraception. To me this made good sense and a way to redress the balance. Does it work? We’ll let you know, but since the company assures that it’s not harmful to animals, i.e. the owl that might eat the mouse, it seems a way to let the mice live in peace with the least amount of human inflicted suffering. I suppose nature does always live on in beauty and in peace despite the damage humans do, and that in itself is reassuring. But we can always try to help her along. And I’m sure there are plenty of mice having babies to make up for a slight decrease in population here in one house—that is, if the contraception works.

And what of Sparkle and Stash? They are my helpers in alerting me to who, in their minds, are the invaders and helping me take census. Here’s wishing peace to all beings.

Lessons From A Bird

(Note from the Editor: Kay Pfaltz’s Lessons From My Dogs will return next issue. Below she introduces a new voice from Spain, that of her friend Isa.)

Lessons from a Bird: Verdi

by Isabel Guixa González 

One morning, I found a little bird in my dog's mouth. I don't think Keko, my dog, was trying to kill him because the moment I said, “Drop it,” he did immediately and the little bird wasn't injured, just terrified.

I put him in my hand and tried to figure out the kind of bird I was looking at. He was petrified—his eyes almost closed and he looked exhausted. He was greenish with a yellow stripe on his wings, so I knew at once he was a verderón, a bird that is only found in Europe. Verderón is the common name in Spanish for that kind of bird, like sparrow in English, and it ended up being his name too: Verdi. Sometimes I called him, my little bird “mi Pajarito.”

I left Verdi in a corner in the hope that his parents would come. I looked up desperately trying to find his nest but there was no nest and no one came for him. It was getting dark and my cats were patiently waiting for me to leave so they could take good care of the bird. I didn't know what to do; I didn't know how to take care of a bird and yet, I just couldn't leave him there all alone. He wouldn't eat and I don't blame him, he was scared and he didn't like the idea of having a gigantic human mamma…. I wouldn't want to be fed by a giant mamma either. But I managed to open his peak with my hands and within a couple of days he would open it by himself.

He stopped being afraid very quickly and we bonded within hours; not only did he accept that I was his only option to survive but I think he also liked me a little, too. His affection seemed to grow. He would sing nonstop when I was around and if I got closer to him, he would move his wings as if he were dancing. I became very attached to him, and we spent a lot of time together, him looking out the window and singing and me working and wishing Pavarotti would stop singing for a second. He was a nonstop singer and after three hours of the same song I would try to convince him to stop. “Hey, Verdi. You are a great singer and that song is fantastic but do you think we could be silent for a couple of minutes?” It never worked—he was such a happy bird.

My cats, however, were most disappointed with me for leaving Verdi locked in a room. They would wait at the door of the room for hours, plotting a plan to get in and make quick work of Verdi. Fortunately, for both of us, and much to the dismay of the cats, that never happened. 

In the Verdi’s room, I had a cage. The door was always open, and he would get in and out of the cage whenever he wanted. He liked to sleep inside it especially the first couple of weeks, maybe he felt safe there. 

Together Verdi and I lived happily in this fashion, our attachment growing as the days passed. I knew, however, that one day I would have to release him back into the world that was his.

One day, I knew that day had arrived. He could fly and could eat on his own. He was strong and confident and he wanted to go out so badly. He would spend days looking out the window and I knew what he wanted. I knew, too, he had a much better chance of survival than he did when I found him. I told him that I loved him; I wished him good luck, then I opened the window. It took him only a minute to jump and then he flew high until I lost sight of him. I left food on the window just in case. I am still a little sad...I miss him and I hope he survives; I think he will. He didn't come back and this might sound ridiculous but I feel him, I think he is alive, I hope he is alive. I see many birds like him every day and I wonder if he is one of them, I wonder if he remembers me. 

I will be forever thankful to Verdi. During his brief stay, he taught me more than most people. One of the lessons he taught me was trust. I find it hard to trust people, and sometimes that makes me unintentionally isolate myself. Verdi trusted me very quickly. I know he had no other option but it was still too quick. He saw almost right away that I wanted to help him. Something great came out of trust, he made me wonder how many good things I was missing out on by not trusting.

The bond with an animal is special, it's a unique feeling that not everyone understands. I never thought a little bird would make me feel that way. I am so grateful he was part of my life.

Isa is an animal-lover, biologist, and biology teacher in Jaén, Spain, teaching kids to respect nature, animals, and all life. You can contact her at isaguixa@hotmail.com. 

Lessons From My Dogs: Trust

  The earth and her trees seem greener than ever before. A wild storm in the night broke off limbs, and in the early morning light, leaves hang glistening and heavy with rain. Sparkle runs in from hunting outside, holding up her hind leg. She never cries out but as she snaps her head around in agitation, I know something is wrong. I assume it’s a sting and treat her with Apis. The stoicism that is so admirable can also make it hard to understand what’s wrong, and as I check her all over, I try to tune in and intuit what she feels. But she’s nervous and uneasy—clearly not happy. Only later do I see the torn toenail and realize the pain she’s in. I give her a Tramadol and vet wrap the foot to keep her from bothering it. Sometime in the night, the entire nail falls off, the quick severed far back. She has acute nerve pain, but again, she never cries. And a moment comes, when I am pulling back the bandage and applying disinfectant when I realize it is only through trust, a trust born of love, that she lets me tend to her in this way.

            It’s the same trust I offer them when I let them loose to hunt, even through possible perils: The deer that attacked Olive. The copperhead that bit Chance twice, sending her to the ICU for nine long days, requiring her to have three blood and one plasma transfusions. Scrapes and falls. Ticks and fire ants, coyotes and bears. But, if trust is born of love, the flipside is that love must also trust the greater process of life. For too long I kept Lauren in a figurative glass bubble. While my intentions were to protect her, hindsight offers the obvious that she would have preferred to be running free as Sparkle and Stash do now. And I tell them frequently they are reaping the benefits of all my prior lessons learned.

            It becomes a week of small traumas, and I again see this same trust when Stash injures her front paw from hunting too hard. Like Sparkle, she lets me laser the ankle bones and do whatever I need to help her heal. I have always thought the dogs, and animals in general, were far wiser than I, knowing and understanding things I don’t even know I don’t know. They speak in pictures and communicate telepathically, perhaps most importantly picking up our intentions, and when those intentions are admirable, trust is born.

            I think back to when these two dogs came into my life, and how the going was not always easy or smooth. But in welcoming them, giving them space just to be, a slow but steadfast trust evolved. And this has been the cement of our relationship, for without trust, there can be no love.

            Sometimes our days consist of no more than the small moments of being, but these moments make up the better part of the most peoples’, and it is in tending to these small moments that the trust and security for the dogs, all of whom were strays—Sparkle quite feral—came to be. I can say it no better than the poet/philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, as he describes the peace of being, even after losing his parents at such an early age:

            Here there is a sense of rest and quietness. Silence in the house and outside. A tranquil fire gives a feeling of comfort. The portrait of my mother seems to smile upon me. The peaceful morning makes me happy. Whatever pleasure we may get from our emotions I do not think it can equal those moments of silent peace which are glimpses of the joys of Paradise. Desire and fear, grief and anxiety are no more. We live a moment of life in the supreme region of our own being; pure consciousness.

            Here, too, there is a feeling of peace and comfort, which the dogs feel. In the past I would have rushed them off to the vets, but the vets are always booked these days, forcing my intuition and common sense to work as they were meant. Even as I trust that the two girls will heal with time, they trust that I will always “fix” them. For a while I can do this, but I know there will come a time when I will let them down. But that time is not here yet, and for the moment, we let go and sink back into the hot and sodden days of summertime just being.

Stash getting ready to hunt.

Sparkle runs across the front fields.

Lessons From My Dogs: Stepping out of the Postcard

            Years ago I worked for a southern university’s Paris program. The director and I frequently discussed one particular student who had trouble grasping the French mentality. He lived inside a glossy, touched-up postcard of Paris, never fully understanding the essence and quirks of French life, always remaining (or trying to remain) within the picture-perfect Paris postcard.

            Another couldn’t quite leave the miles of highways and fast food to-go culture of Texas behind, at every chance comparing Paris to that antipode because it was at that time the only other place she knew. “You can take the girl out of Dallas, but you can’t take Dallas out of the girl,” went her favorite refrain, and we’d laugh at its truth and her discernment. She has since traveled the world many times over and I think that first trip to Paris was her beginning.

            Of course, our lives are not postcards or Instagram images; they’re not meant to be. Life is rich and beautiful, and often messy. On daily walks with the dogs, I look to nature as I step over a crisscross of fallen trees and branches in their slow evolution into nurse logs then earth. Everything perfectly ordered in its chaos and mess.

            My brother is correct when he says that Facebook or the internet is neither good nor bad, it’s how you use it. I have social media accounts, which I use sporadically—they do help us stay in touch with far away friends. And to a certain extent, I’d say they help us connect, at which point I’d say, then they don’t. I suppose we like what we know. I grew up with both TV and telephone but previous generations did not and felt those two inventions, television certainly, would be the death of us. The kids today grow up with phones attached and likely would find it hard to survive without these appendages.

            I’d like to propose that deep down humans naturally gravitate towards those people whose lives are unpretentious, unscripted, un-curated (my sister), which reads as honest, unaffected and is, in the extreme, our animals. Simple lives with simple pleasures so far removed from the high-tech world of invention for more, for faster, for growth, and for profit. I ask why must we always progress? At what point can we stop and say, this is enough? In this age of AI that feels more like science fiction, it is Mother Earth who finally seems to be saying, enough.

My dogs wear the same clothing—a fur coat—day in and day out. They make no trash except for a most biodegradable kind. They don’t listen to the news, and are better off for it. They use no plastics, wage no war, exploit no one, except possibly me with their pleading looks that say, “You never feed us.”

I watch the lady bugs crawling across the floor. They look like they have no set destination—mere wanderers on earth—but perhaps they do. The flowers, many of whom popped their festive heads up in February this year, are one of my greatest joys, and it’s hard not to rejoice when I see them no matter what their early appearance signifies. Sparkle and Stash lie outside in the first soft air, surrounded by a palette of color: daffodils, vinca, violets, hyacinths, pansies, the first of the tulips. The two dogs welcome the sun’s gentle warmth on their backs as I click a photo. Ah yes, it’s a perfect postcard.

Lessons From My Dogs: Antidotes to World Sorrows

            A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement.

She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”

The girl bent to pick up another starfish. Then she looked up at the old man, smiled and replied, “I can make a difference for this one.” And she threw it far out into the ocean.

This Solstice as the lights shine and the carols softly play, I’m grateful for so much—family (human family and dog family), work I love, a warm home, running water, clean air, heat, birds, trees and so much more—but there are dark spots sometimes obscuring the light, including the direction humanity seems to be going.

The lights shine and the carols softly play.

I look to Sparkle and Stash awaiting their treats in pools of wintery light. Sparkle raises her paw up a few inches from the floor. It gives me a shiver and reminds me of the email I just received from the Beagle Freedom Project that spoke of the kind and timid lab beagles trained with food to present their paws for injections.

Awaiting treats. Stash and Sparkle raising her paw.

I used to say that climate change was the biggest threat to humanity, perhaps singularity. I now say it has always been ignorance. Pad that with greed and grasping and we have the recipe we’ve played out over millennia. Ignorance dies hard. What we need to replace it with is the wisdom of the heart. When there is immense suffering, it can be hard to imagine we can affect any change and yet change has always begun from the small individual acts of courage and caring. Like the girl and the starfish or the old man who stops to move tiny toads from the road, telling his impatient companions the toads have places to go, too, caring deeply about what moves us is a way of tending to the world.

Were the animals left on their own without our interference, there would not be the large-scale suffering that comes from lives confined to labs or factory farms, not the widespread abuse to animals and planet perpetrated by humans in the name of progress, but often no more than ignorance or greed. Death to me has never seemed the issue so much as a life of suffering. I think again of those beagles bred and raised in sterile, metal cages who never once in their lives go outdoors and walk their feet on grass or feel the sunlight on their backs.

And yet, if the negative abounds in the news, it’s helpful to look at our current moment in time through the lens of history. Historian friends offer me another alternative, and that is that humans continue to improve. While in many respects, I see evidence of this—bills passed that don’t require animal testing, greater awareness about the foods we eat including the environmental toll of raising animals, measures on climate change, measures on greater equality—I still find that the vast amount of suffering in the world has been caused by humans. Or perhaps I should say caused by excess and the desire for power.

The antidote? For me it has always come from nature. One step outdoors on a brisk winter evening into the entrancing beauty of a still and starry night is enough to let me see the miracle of all life. As the temperatures dip well below freezing, a crescent moon curls between the outstretched arms of one very old walnut tree. I step into this scene of stillness and serenity and stand awed in the presence of something beyond human words. The walnut tree is well over a hundred years old. And for some reason, this slice of continuity gives me hope.

There are some very human miracles happening daily, too: great acts of kindness and selflessness. There are other human antidotes that connect us through time: Handel and Bach and the power of music. If I’m feeling the overwhelm of the world gone wrong, I say to the dogs, “What we need is Bach.” (Or Mozart, Dvořák, Vivaldi, or whoever, across centuries, stirs your heart strings.)

Then, too, it helps to take a different perspective and realize that our perception of reality is but one tiny slice of the universal reality in which we and so many life forms inhabit. When I feel the ugliness of human destruction, I stand back and watch the play of light on the mountains beyond and think, “We’re all standing on a planet floating in space!”

And finally, as T. H. White tells us, when you feel sorrow, learn:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin. “Is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”  —The Once and Future King

           What do my wise and guileless teachers tell me? The same things they’ve been saying forever, “Slow down, work less, appreciate the wonder of each individual day that will never return.” Somehow, in loving all the good that is out there we shift the paradigm. I don’t know how, but I feel that loving the whole world can’t hurt.

            Now, there come days, in between the cold, crisp days of mid-Winter, where a balmy warmth carries the scent of spring to come. But tonight the earlier rain has just turned to snow and now ticks against the window panes. Sparkle and Stash lie curled in dog balls, warmed by the woodstove. As I stroke them, speaking softly, I send my love to all the beagles behind bars, to all dogs, all animals, all beings who may not know the goodness and peace that these two live daily.

Siberian elm and silver maple silhouetted.

Lessons From My Dogs: Why Worry?

                        “Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”

                        “Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh.

                        After careful thought, Piglet was comforted by this.

            I must drop off Sparkle and Stash at the dog cottages where they will board while I travel overseas. I look over my shoulder and the last vison I have is of Sparkle trotting out into the gravel run, ears pricked to look to the spot there where she had last seen me. My heart stumbles as I walk up the hill and I want to turn and run back to her.

            I love the work and travel, but I feel so far from them. And the world feels crazier than ever. In some ways it may be, but any historian will point out the error. The Middle Ages were no picnic. The desire to hold and stroke them overwhelms at night in my room an ocean away. I worry. Will there be thunderstorms? Stash is so frightened and who will comfort her in her fear? There were storms, but Sparkle was there for Stash. There were even severe tornadoes. My sister texts me, telling me after the fact, I guess preventing me from panicking. The tornadoes cut a path straight through where the two beagles were staying—a fear I had not even considered upon leaving.

I know it’s unproductive to worry.

  “Worry does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.” The Buddha

            “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life.” Luke 12:25

Yes, but easier said than done.

I keep their photo with me and try to connect with them but all I feel are the many miles between us. Then I turn the photo over and read the words a friend wrote many years ago:

You can be with them when you want to. See their eyes, feel them, and you are with them. It works, as you know. Be open to them as they are to you so that they can let you know of their presence if they want to do so. And since the dogs will be here, in safety and peace,[they were then secure with my mother] let them enjoy time here as you enjoy time there. All will be well. All in Divine Right Order. So easy to say….

Sparkle & Stash

Hot dogs

I know this is true and I know in a larger sense everything is okay. I’m not much worried about dying for my own sake, only that I would hurt the people who love me and leave Sparkle and Stash without someone to care for them in the way in which they know.

The plane lands safely and I don’t die. The next day I drive out to where they’ve been boarding. I hear them before I see them. I call their names and hear Sparkle make her low-pitched Roooooo, the sound she makes in joy and greeting when I return home to her from work, so different form the shrill sounds she makes hunting. Stash hears her, understands and comes running out from inside. ARRR, ARRR, ARRR, mouth open wide, she reprimands me, “You’re back! You’re back! You left us!” ARRR, ARRR, ARRR.

            Once home, they crash, sleeping on chairs, on the soft bed. This trip was longer than usual. They stay glued to me. They each gaze into my eyes—and the knowing, the love is all there.

            Stash had been hurt, the vertebrae in her neck damaged. I laser her and slip the Assisi Loop over her back and now she spends hours hunting in the front fields. As the temperature creeps up, I go out to call her in and smile in relief as I watch the grasses moving as she makes her way. The sounds of the cicadas fill the still air and speak of heat and sultry summer days. Sparkle jumps up to me, not quite as clamorously as Sasha used to, but there she sits in her funny sit upon me, her dark eyes gazing directly into my own, her once sienna-brown muzzle now flecked with white.

I don’t want to look back as I so often do and wonder: where did all the days go? And Sparkle in her wise self says, “They went to loving.” Yes, I want to be able to say the days went to loving.

            I look to the photos of all the dogs who’ve gone before. They’re all unanimous in saying one thing: don’t worry. I will travel again and have to leave them and they will be okay. But that’s the future and this is now.

In the pink puffs of mimosas, I feel the fullness of summer. Languid days, the orange day lilies, bare feet on grass, fresh lemonade. The earth thick and damp with the smell of rain, the scent of summer trees. In the green leaves of a volunteer pumpkin vine, I already feel fall. And in the stillness of this evening, the towhee tells me to drink my tea. Two pairs of eyes gaze back at me with what I can only hope is their own form of gratitude and love.

Days of perfect peace and quiet joy.

Lessons From My Dogs: The in between moments

            In the poem “Place” W. S. Merwin begins, “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” He goes on to explain he would plant it not for its fruit, but for its own sake. This little tree may never see the dawn of the next new day. It may never grow tall and offer shade on a sunbaked summer day. And it may never bear fruit, but Merwin believes it has value simply in being.

            I understand this sentiment when I look out to the trees and the new green of leaves just beginning or even the multitude of weeds. I understand it with every window-stunned sparrow tended and every supine, legs-waving ladybug righted. I understand it most of all when I see gentle brown eyes gazing back into my own with quiet wisdom and mutual love.

            Of course, this little tree remains greater than the sum of its fruit, leaves, or branches, for in planting it on the last day of the world, it’s a glimmer of faith, a repository of hope. Hope that just maybe there will come another dawn. And while hope pertains to future, and so takes us out of present moment awareness, it is a delicate thing and maybe necessary in the face of self-inflicted woes of war and climate change.

            If hope points to future, gratitude speaks to what is—often the quiet moments in between doing. The two-toned light of yellow daffodils that color the yard in joy. The sound of birdcall. Barefoot walks. The first evening chorus of peepers in the cool air of sundown that belongs purely to spring. The smell of rain. Sparkle chasing the elusive squirrel; Stash rolling in the grass. As always, the little hounds ground me and bring me back to what matters: the raucous wren, the darting bunny, last year’s leaves that crunch under foot, croaking frogs in vernal pools, the clouds, the sky—the constant practice of living in the present moment.

            Pink cherry and almond blossoms blow across the front lawn, while in the back the quiet quince holds onto its salmon buds. Fuchsia magnolia stands in contrast next to forsythia. The plum and viburnum offer white elegance against their gay and gaudy companions. Violets and vinca cover the earth in purple. Hyacinths pour forth their Easter scent. Soon, around the perimeter, redbud and rhodo will paint bold brush strokes against dogwoods lacey sleeves. Tulips, pansies, and more are a palette of wonder, a reminder daily that through sadness or joy, flowers are our steadfast companions.

            When it seems like so much is wrong with the world, I think it helps to appreciate all that is right. Like when gazing into Sparkle’s soft brown eyes, I silently tell her, I love you, and without sound spoken aloud, she flaps her shortened tail. I am often surprised by people who say that animals don’t know or understand, when I see daily that they know and understand on a level in many ways superior to our own. True, my dogs have never written a concerto or painted the Mona Lisa, but they know things intuitively that I don’t even know I don’t know. They think in images and easily read our jumble of thoughts, so it’s also equally easy to understand why Stash scuttles under the bed at my mere thought of plunking her poop-stained body into the tub.

            Then there is the bluebird couple who have taken up residence on the back porch. They’ve decided an old broken bluebird box is the home they want, no matter that there are two good ones, complete with baffles, out in the fields. They flap and flutter about; it’s just what they want, the housing market is hot, get it while you can. I can be talking or coming in and out and they don’t seem to mind; they know my attention is not on them. But just let me get my camera to try to get a photo of them together with their newfound real estate, and they watch me, keeping far away. It seems, no different from the dogs, these bluebirds also loathe having their pictures taken and can easily read both my intention and my thoughts.

            And so, these precious days pass, one after another. In between its eddies, life pools in the shallow spaces. There is the daily routine: the dogs, the birds, the flowers and the trees, the tiny insects and the life unseen. Shoo the wren out of the house. Nudge the snake out of the house. Pick herbs from the garden. Pause for tea. The simple things, for gratitude, not desire is the foundation of joy. Out in the pure air, their noses in dirt, the two dogs find delight in the moment, the earth offering everything they need for contentment. I turn my attention from politics and the calamities humankind has wrought to marvel at their daily joy, and this too, like the tree on the last day of earth, is all the meaning from life I need.

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

Sparkle & Stash on the bench in the Spring morning air.

Tulips, vinca, and pansies ground me in what matters.

Soon, the violets will blanket the yard.

Can you tell we really hate being made to pose before the April flowers?

Stash tramples the first violets.

Sparkle & Stash hunt as St. Francis looks on.

The daffodils are always the first to show their smiling faces.

Hope breeds eternal.

Stash getting ready to hunt.

Where’s my treat?

Gentle brown eyes gazing back into my own with quiet love.

And return to quiet peace.

Lessons From My Dogs: Impermanence Equals Timelessness

In one of the stars, I shall be living. In one of them, I shall be laughing.

            And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night. . . .

                                                                        —Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

             The losses pile up as we grow older. Having said goodbye to two beautiful dogs who grounded our home in a comforting grandmother energy, as well as goodbye to human family, friends, and acquaintances last year, I feel the nature of impermanence more than ever.

            Each day, each hour, each second brings its own version of impermanence, and we get to practice over the years: the seasons dying one into the other, small creatures around us living out their short lives who then return again to earth. A little brood of baby praying mantises adorned my plants, but didn’t survive the winter. Every time I bury a bird or a mole, I feel the sorrow that physical death brings. But there’s a silver lining, for in our consciousness of death, we’re also made more grateful of the precious, transient quality of life.

I often stand in the bracing air of dawn, the sky afire with morning’s sunrise and think: every new sunrise is a miracle; every sunset, a spectacle. The animals and the plants don’t need to be told not to waste their time on earth. They live in perfect harmony the way they were meant—at least if wild and not imprisoned in laboratories or industrial farms.  

To glimpse impermanence, we need only glance at old newspapers, or history books, or the daffodil. Just as to glimpse eternity we look ahead to the flower who blooms again in spring.

            My dogs don’t need to be instructed that impermanence is the nature of all life. Without that knowledge, the little hounds still live their lives fully. They throw their all into the task at hand, whether it is hunting for rabbits or hunting for hidden treats in the house. Yet, without that knowledge, I wonder if humans would squander time.

            Two snowstorms in quick succession have made our world feel like winter once again. I rejoice in shortened days, bare tree branches, and starlit skies so silent and pure they stop us in humbled awe. And on a warming planet, I welcome winter’s chill, if only because it allows us to feel we’ve earned a soft spring evening. The silence of a winter snow gives the gift of inwardness that speaks of log fires, books, and time.

            And yet I know the snow will melt, transforming its icy crust over which Sparkle and Stash must now navigate with difficulty, into a mushy slush that feeds the earth. Winter into spring, spring into summer, each sacred second grasped more intensely because of its fleeting nature. Each second sacred.

            I hear the lulling lap of tongue as Sparkle licks Stash like once she did for Isabelle and Sasha. As the sun rises, it casts pastel sparkles upon the quilt of white. Stash says she’s not going out in sub-freezing weather when there’s a warm bed with blankets. But Sparkle leaps up and I watch her light frame trot across the hardened coating as a thousand diamonds shine around her as if beckoning to their namesake. Later, as the sun rises higher, a twittering, tweeting flock of starlings drops down to feast upon the scattered seed—their chorus fills the silent air—then in one upward lift are gone.

            The night before when the falling snow turned to ice, we sat listening to it tap upon the windows and I thought of Joyce’s last paragraph in The Dead as I almost always do when snow falls softly. Even though Joyce is gone, and Michael Furey and those he represents are gone, Joyce’s words live on.

            For many years I felt that if I could just hold onto the good moments and remember how they felt, they would be with me forever, a constant by which the rest of life’s experiences could all be measured. I know now that these moments, while a part of us always, are inherently unattainable if willed to come forth. Compassion, humility, and wisdom are not gifts we gain then retain forever, but something we practice, something we work hard remembering, living day in and day out.

  We pass through the darkness, those moments whose pain is deep, only to emerge into sunlight once more. Each time we do the hardship is lessened and we realize that this, like all things, shall pass, for joy doesn’t lie in the depths of pleasure but in something much softer. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Some days, I feel those who’ve moved on are with me still. And while I would give most anything to gaze upon them one more time, I know I cannot, except in memory, and I welcome this transient existence as it touches something eternal, morphing impermanence into timelessness. On other days, the longing hits in one quick wave, only to be followed by its timeworn antidote: deep gratitude as I remember what long and beautiful lives they lived, surrounded by love, and that I was granted my wish: that they each die held in my arms in peace.

This particular day comes to its own death but not before first dazzling us with a burnished show. As the sun sets and casts its glow, the white snow is transformed into a rosy fantasy land of glossy cotton candy.

From contemplating death, I return to the beautiful, mundane, everyday things of life. I cook for the dogs free-range local chicken with a few raw necks thrown in. Spoiled weasels that they are, they had tripe last night. I feed them in separate bowls and watch their simple joy as they devour the food in seconds. After they finish, I place the skillet on the floor and let them share, lapping it clean. And I laugh as I think of two little backwoods hunting beagles licking clean my copper Dehillerin skillet. There’s perfection in the moment even as I know that it, too, like the little dogs one day, will pass. But for right now, they are here, and all is right with this beautiful, miraculous world.

The sky afire with morning’s sunrise.

Stash imitates a rabbit as she and Sparkle frolic in snow.

Sparkle walking on water (frozen) behind the Luxembourg Gardens chair.

Baby praying mantises.

Warm and cozy inside.

The gift of sunset to end a perfect day.

Lessons From My Dogs: The Things That Matter

                        Because beauty consists of its own passing just as we reach for it.

                                                                                    —Muriel Barbery

            I stand still and listen to Sparkle and Stash hunting far out in fields whitened with fall’s first frost. The small hounds make a show of telling me bunnies have passed nearby, while I stand wishing the bunnies safely on their bunny way. Little do these dogs know how their simple pursuits fill me with joy and point me to what matters most.

            When the world of humankind often feels like madness: wars, anger, greed, corruption, cruelty, and destruction, I, like many, turn to nature. Standing in the stillness of a clear autumn day, I find solace. I find my balance. Nature can be harsh, certainly, but there’s a beauty rhythm that makes sense.

            Fall, twilight of the year, has arrived. I know I wouldn’t want to live in a place without the seasons: the silence of winter’s snow. Darkness enveloping. Quiet nights. Woodfires, books, baking bread, homemade soup. The soft thrill of spring. The smell of the forest. Birdsong, spring peepers, flowers, and the first new air. The languid days of summer. Bare feet on grass and veggies from the garden. And fall. Autumn harvests, trees in colored costumes, the smell of burning leaves. Fall has always touched my heart deeply. The French have a saying, reflets d’antan or “reflections of yesteryear” and perhaps fall asks us to reflect upon the year as it nears its end. As we mark the passage of time with tradition and ritual, we seek also to differentiate time past from time present and time yet to be, giving us a sense of control over what will always be uncontrollable, even unknowable. Perhaps the seasons mirror back to us the only true certainty: the paradox of change.

            Many times this year the world felt foreign to this human. The divisiveness, the othering, and the wars, when it seems obvious we’re all one and connected: rocks, trees, animals, human animals. Unlimited information and misinformation bombard us, yet sometimes it’s more important to feel than to know. The artificial and nonsensical world of social media further fuels human rage. Social media may be essential to the young and nearly essential to everyone else—keeping up with far-off family in one fell Facebook post. I like to keep in touch with friends in other countries, yet find myself drawn into an artificial world that’s hard to understand.

            How can one small square on Instagram within a rectangle of my phone compete with the picture that surrounds me now? I don’t want to become lost within those squares within the rectangle, head and neck perpetually bent, missing the sweep of autumn flowers or the pumpkin turning orange on the vine. Instagram as yet cannot offer the sun’s late-afternoon warmth on my face, the spacious stillness of a pure autumn day . . . or the scent of a rose. None of this can my iphone’s lens adequately capture, and as I stand, phone poised, ready to snap a photo, my heart speaks up and I realize, the dogs have it right. They’re back from their hunt. There’s Sparkle stretched out in a patch of sunlight—her white contrasting with the brown earth and grass. There’s Stash in style up on the bench. I put down the camera and stand and listen to the wind as it moves through dusty red dogwood eaves.

            If I were told I had only one week left to live, I would not take for granted the fluttering of doves as they bathe in the birdbath, nor the harvest moon that rises orange over the mountains. I would marvel at the figs hanging ripe on the tree, the feel of grass beneath my bare feet and I wouldn’t worry about any little weeds. The ants marching in formation, the cricket’s autumn chorus, and the beetles scurrying by—all miraculous to behold. In the cornfields, tawny, dried stalks clack back and forth. And how magnificent, the butterscotch taste of a wild persimmon or a tart, fresh-picked apple? I would love the eerie glowing leaves against a gunmetal gray sky and let the scene speak to me of the pot of soup upon the stove, the warmth inside, an inward time.

            So, I renounce the nonsensical world that resides on a tiny rectangular screen and look up in time to see a shower of golden walnut leaves dance wildly then fall to earth.

            All at once, the little hounds leap up, following some silent signal that speaks to them alone. The evenings grow shorter and the light holds poignant clarity. The air is the crisp air of fall. Overhead, geese honk flying south. I wish them safely on their journey and wish for all mankind to love this imperfect world as much as I.

Sparkle hunts in the first frost in November.

Climate change makes it warm enough to swim in Noevmber.

My best teachers.

Lessons From My Dogs: Living From the Heart

                      We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept

            its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.

                          —Irving Townsend, ‘The Once Again Prince’ Separate Lifetimes

            A light has gone out. The sweetest dog I ever knew left her earthly existence on Monday, April 19th. I had Sasha longer than any other dog, a quarter of my life, and she formed the connecting bridge to those gone on: Flash and Chance, Isabelle and Olive, and to Sparkle and Stash who remain with me now. And while she never knew Lauren, she was the most like her with her obsession for food.

            Over our fifteen years together, she not only accepted every new dog I brought into our home, but welcomed each without any jealousy. Sasha was a gentle soul. She never fought and never hurt another being, and yet as the years passed and we spent the months and weeks and moments together, I knew, through no fault of her own, she would one day hurt me.

            Little did I know the depth my love would take those many years ago. I was volunteering, walking out dogs at our local SPCA when I first saw Sasha. She was standing, looking scared and confused in an outdoor run. I had no intention of adopting her because she was smaller than the big hound mixes who languished there, and I figured she’d easily find a home. Because she was fearful and shied away from people, volunteers had to lure her out with food. Over the weeks, she grew bigger and bigger and I assumed it was because of all the treats. But I was wrong; Sasha was pregnant.

When she whelped her pups I was not there. Later I heard that one puppy got stuck coming out and Sasha cried and cried. Finally, after forty-five minutes, she was rushed to the vets for an emergency C-section. Months later, in what I always assumed was the kind of back room deal politicians make daily (“If you take Sasha, we’ll take the Pitbull that’s been at the shelter nine months,”) I agreed to adopt Sasha. Her estimated age then was four years old.

Sasha was deeply depressed, anxious, and frightened when she entered our lives. Later I’d joke that she brought the Great Depression, but when it happened it wasn’t so funny, and we all became depressed just being in her energy. It was so intense I wanted to give her away. That is until I sat beside her on the sofa and listened, through our animal communicator, to what Sasha had endured. What she relayed broke open my heart and I promised her from that moment on, I’d always love and protect her and I’d keep her forever.

Fortunately, the Great Depression lasted only a couple of weeks, and thereafter, Sasha brought only laughter and joy.

  * * *

She stands before me in the light. Her old eyes search for mine. At 18 3/4 years, give or take, she looks remarkably good. I have always thought that, in her simple wisdom, Sasha was something of a blend of Forest Gumpp, Ferdinand the Bull (she loves to sit in the flowers and sniff the air) and Chauncey Gardner from the film Being There.

She follows me, my faithful shadow. I use hand signals as she lost her hearing years ago. Much of her eyesight was next to go, and finally, part of her mind so that she is not the dog I once knew so filled with enthusiasm for life. And yet something of her former, joyous self remains inside the failing body, and in a sort of ritual she bounces her crooked run beside me up the yard in the first morning light. She’s thinking about all the food she’s going to get to eat when we go inside. She still loves to eat, her mouth and stomach rallying right up to the end. She has developed CCD and paces the house looking for me, while half the time I am looking for her, and so we each spend our time seeking the other. The tenderness I feel when I come upon her standing in a room, lost and slightly worried, ears pricked, searching with what’s left of her old dog eyes, and I watch the moment she becomes aware of my presence, the flattening of her ears, a feeble wag of tail, the relief, the old joy. Her vulnerable, white face tilted up looking at me with devotion brings tears. I bend to kiss her head. The light hits my own face forcing me to shut my eyes, and together we are encompassed in a light so pure and bright it feels like a benediction. I have the thought that if I could solidify this light, I would encapsulate myself in it with Sasha and all those I love, like a piece of amber, held in that sweet blip of time forever and always.

  * * *

            Sasha was the funniest dog I ever knew. I have never been one for nicknaming dogs, but somehow Sasha ended up with dozens. Likewise, with her a voice just came. Perhaps I could easily channel her because she had no guile. As I would talk to her and talk back in her voice, the silliest, most beautiful, original, and wise sayings spewed forth.

            In the Spring edition of LaJoie 2013 I wrote about my worry when Sasha went under anesthesia for an abscessed tooth. Because nothing bad had ever happened to her, at least not on my watch, and because she was extra fearful, I couldn’t help myself from worrying. She hadn’t the calm and wise acceptance of Chance or street smarts of Olive. She was just sweet, silly, and timid Sasha who had been abused when young and who I’d promised to always protect.

            I quoted a line from Peter Pan to her, Tinker Bell speaking to Peter: “You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.” And then I said to Sasha, “You know that place of all of us together and how that feels. It’s a place of goodness, peace, and love. And it’s the place where you can always reach me. It’s the place of the heart and you, Sasha, have never been anything but heart.”

            I know that it’s true and I know that even though her physical form has gone, she will never leave me, and I can never leave her. We’re connected through a force stronger than guns and war, fires and floods, because we’re connected through love.

            So, while I feel sorrow now, the loss of a magnitude that overwhelms, I remind myself it is only because of the strength of my love. A love beyond measure.

  * * *

            I sit with her on the sofa in the same spot where so long ago she first said she was afraid the rug would be pulled out from under her. With tears in my eyes just like that first time, I repeat what I said to her then: “I will always take care of you. I will always love you.” Then I tell her how wise and beautiful she’s become. And I thank her for bringing so much joy into our home.

            Now, every moment is poignant. Every moment is sacred. We are in the Sacred Bubble and although there is deep sorrow, there is also beauty—the way there is when we are thrown into living so intensely in the present. Why don’t we always live like this, the way the animals do daily? There is a purity that cuts through anything extraneous, a deep and beautiful sacredness. I reach to touch her, there beside me. I stroke her soft thigh, trying to commit to memory that which in so short a time I will never touch again. I sit by her and reminisce about our lives together, and I ask her where did all the years go. The months, the weeks, the minutes….

            When we go outside, the day is soft the way only a pure April day can be. The air perfumed with the scent of viburnum, the grass new green, and the flowers a palette of color. I watch Sasha raise her nose and sniff the air like she loves to do. She stands in the light, and behind her the Bleeding Heart speaks so succinctly what my own heart will not.

  * * *

            Most beagles are food obsessed and Sasha took this to great extremes. My brother nicknamed her, Sasha The Washer, when he observed her washing all the bowls thoroughly after the other dogs had finished eating. My brother also observed that, “The Washer misses you most when you leave,” and it was true. While the others understood and accepted my working, Sasha would lie on top of the sofa, watching out the window, awaiting my return. She’d also be at the window in the office (the room closest to the drive and my departure) when I came home. There she would fling her head back and bark out her joy. She would scramble up on me then run to the bed and jump from side to side, spinning around, and I called her hopping back and forth and squealing in joy, “playing the game.”

            Over the years, I always told people that Sasha was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and yet only now do I realize perhaps she wasn’t so simple-minded after all. Simple, yes, but within her gentle soul she also contained a simple wisdom, the kind of wisdom that comes when one lives so wholly from the heart.  Never have I known a dog so completely without agenda . . . unless it was to get an extra chunk of chicken.

            In a country that grows more and more divisive, and in a world that often speaks only the language of combatants, we would all do well to adopt the gentle wisdom of the heart. Our animals and the natural world are always our best teachers. Just as so many years ago Strongheart helped J. Allen Boone recognize the best traits shared between humans, dogs, and all beings, so too did this sweetest of souls effortlessly embodied those qualities the world is in need of now: kindness, gentleness, acceptance, enthusiasm, and joy.

            I don’t know how to honor this gentle dog—except to try to be more like her: guileless, exuberant, simple, innocent, and filled up with pure love and joy.

                        * * *

I sit with Sasha on my lap in her favorite chair, and I think back to when she would flop her plump body onto me and sit on her own meditation cushion. But this is not like that and she is relaxed and resting after the vet gave her a light sedative. It may be the first time in a long time she has been without discomfort, and for that I am grateful. But I am more than a little afraid. Afraid of what life will be like without her presence. Maybe I should put it off another week. But then the vet is gently slipping the needle into Sasha’s leg, and I know I must do right by Sasha. I know another week would not ease my pain, and could not possibly increase my love. Outside the flowers move in the breeze and the birds call back and forth. Forever would not be long enough.

            Goodbye, Sasha.

            I’m going to miss you so, Sasha.

            Thank you, Sasha.

            I love you, Sasha.

I come home after work, and there is Sparkle and Stash; they need my love and attention, and I open the cabinet where the harnesses are, grabbing two and look to the one I will never put on again.

Feeding time is just as strange when I put down only two bowls. In the corner, there sits Sasha’s stand empty and unused. Before my eyes I see her in that spot where day after day she knew her greatest joy, gulping down her food. After dinner, we go outside. The air is clean and pure, the evening beautiful. But all I want to do is play the game. Just one more time.

Now as I walk a solitary road of memories, I feel a gentle presence close by. My faithful Sasha shadow. How lucky I am to have had something that made saying goodbye so hard.

For more about Sasha, read Flash’s Song: How One Small Dog Turned Into One Big Miracle. Available in bookstores and on Amazon. All profits donated to animal and planet welfare. 

“Now as I walk a solitary road of memories, I feel a gentle presence close by. My faithful Sasha shadow.” Photo: A young Sasha and me at the beach.

Lessons From My Dogs: Saying Goodbye

Elegy for Isabelle

                                                Remember Me Beautiful

                                                Remember Me Young

                                                Remember Me Smiling,

                                                My Face to the Sun,

                                                Remember Me Happy,

                                                When You Remember What Was,

                                                But Most of All, Remember My Love

  Isabelle with a rainbow of light on her back her last week of life.

Sparkle doing her best to help during Isabelle’s last days.

Isabelle came to us as an adult nine-year-old dog missing her front leg after being hit by a car at age two. My sister too had a tripod at one point, but her three-legged was missing a hind leg and was short-backed and long-legged, whereas Isabelle was the reverse, long-backed and relatively short-legged—a beagle/basset mix, I always assumed. Which meant I never knew a side of this dog that wasn’t cumbersome, her hopping-front-leg-forward gate, followed by the walking of the hind legs up one at a time. I watched how she struggled with the day-to-day parts of life the others and I all took for granted. The bond with her took time, but the compassion was immediate.

Yet, Isabelle wanted no one’s pity. In her earlier years with me, she just got on with life, enjoying the outdoors, loving her food, sleeping on the bed. I’d look out and see her digging in the compost pile with all her heart, her nose a fourth appendage, her tail a stabilizing propeller. Or one of her favorite occupations, scouting for mice.

I thought she’d be able to go with us on short walks if she got in better shape. She did a little at first but then it proved too difficult and she’d stop, flop down on the side of the road and not budge. I ordered custom-made wheels but she didn’t care for them. I got her a wagon and pulled her on short walks. But she hopped out bashing her nose, the smells on the side of the road much too enticing. In her last year of life, a friend gave us a fancy, sturdy stroller called The Dogger. I placed Isabelle in gently, and there she remained. By then I think she was too tired to think about wanting out to sniff a particular spot. Or maybe she just loved being wheeled around, enjoying the views, the smells, the outside air. I pushed her around and around and watched as she raised her nose to sniff the scents carried on the breeze. For that was always one of her favorite things to do. I tried to eat my meals outside during each of the seasons. The dogs would join me and Isabelle loved to lie outside and sniff the air.

There were a couple times during the day when Isabelle magically sprouted her missing leg. Feeding time. It was a funny thing that when I’d stand at the stove then the counter and cook then fill their bowls, Isabelle all of a sudden could walk just fine, and she’d gallop up and down the kitchen, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, her face smiling goofily.

But when she got older, she needed more and more help walking. I’d listen and be acutely aware of that first click of toenail or a slight rustle of tag on her harness that told me Isabelle had pushed up from her bed and was wanting to go out or change rooms. I’d learn to listen like a mother listens for a tiny cough from a child, and leave what I was doing to go to her.

She was one tough dog and she never complained. No whining or balking, just doing what she had to do. Isabelle taught me more than any other dog about perseverance, valiance, courage, and most of all acceptance.

When she arrived, I wanted her to be called Izzy but Belle just came about and that morphed to Bella, both words for beautiful. Our communicator, Patty Summers, confirmed that Isabelle felt she was more Belle than Izzy. Patty also was the one to tell me when Isabelle was in much more pain than I realized, even on pain medications. I knew she hurt, but I also knew the will to live is strong. You don’t put an animal down out of inconvenience, and I wanted to be certain. But I guess I’d just gotten used to helping her walk from room to room, lifting up on her harness. I guess I’d gotten used to seeing her contorted and torqued body moving slower and slower. And by the very end, I was carrying her from room to room.

And so, on January 11th, the vet came to our home and Isabelle lay on the bed and I told her for the last time how brave she was, how I had learned so much from her, how I never minded helping her out. I thanked her for coming into our lives. And I told her how much I loved her. Then she was released from her broken, old body.

There had been one thing that bothered me and that was that I never had a song for her. Always for each of the dogs, a song would present itself but I could never force it. There was a Beatles song and Vivaldi and later Elton John, but no real song stuck. Only when I had told Marcella, a fellow beagle-rescuer and the woman who’d first told me about Isabelle, did her song appear. On Isabelle’s last week, Marcella heard an interview with country singer Brandy Clark where she sang the song, Remember Me Beautiful. Marcella sent it to me thinking of Isabelle, and when I listened, I cried and it so perfectly became Isabelle’s song. For the last few days of her life, I sang that song to her and I sing it still now.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/953203772/on-remember-me-beautiful-brandy-clark-processes-death-and-celebrates-life

My back may rejoice in regaining straightness from its perennial bent position and in not lifting and carrying her, but my heart does not. My heart only weeps as if trying to fill with tears the spot where a gentle soul has departed and a large hole left in its place. A labor of love to be sure. In which case, never a real labor. Some of my most meaningful moments in the day, towards the end of Isabelle’s life, were when I’d stoop to grab the top of her harness and help her outside in darkness, in damp, in cold, and stand quietly as she did what she needed. And in this I found meaning and purpose. In this there was simple love. Pure love that asks for nothing in return.

Run free, Isabelle. We love you. My Bella.

Lessons From My Dogs: Nothing To Do

What has been and what might have been point to one end which is always present.

                                                                        —T. S. Eliot

             I sit, trying to be more like my dogs. I know all around in my home there is stuff:  To-Do lists on the counter. To-Do lists in my mind. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, things, things, things, do, do, do. Things to do. I look to the dogs, all sleeping now save Sparkle who gazes out the window watching for the squirrel. They just are. They may dig a hole, search for moles, sniff the fall air, but always simply being as they are, never dissembling, certainly never multi-tasking, unless it’s to simultaneously sleep and dream of food, something at which Sasha is especially adept.

            For many fall is a time of death and decay; for others like me, their favorite time of year—an inward time, yet like its sibling seasons, it too will pass. Just as birth and death are but momentary punctuations to the cycle of life, so too are the seasons part of the greater whole.

Sasha paces, stops, stares, barks, and resumes pacing. Isabelle, who now rarely walks without my aid, licks her one front leg, gazes up to me, then dozes. Stash runs up beside Sparkle and off they go scouting for rabbits.

            When I step outside, I see patchy clouds drift across the sky. Leaves flutter as the wind blows. Some release, ride a current of air for moments then fall where they’ll turn to earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, our lives like the leaf, catching the ride of life for a moment then gone, back to earth. I watch as another leaf makes the journey, and know all those I love will one day, too. Then stillness. Even my thoughts still for a moment until the thought that I’m being more like my dogs breaks the stillness. I think of the wise words written by Teresa of Avila in the sixteenth century, “What matters is not to think much, but to love much.” I should go back in and work, but I sit feeling the joy of being, not doing—happy just to sit outside on this day in the tawny grass and do nothing except listen to the breeze blow through the leaves.

            I know that whatever pleasures we derive from sensations are but a glimpse of the joy of being, of silent peace and stillness. Yet these experiences are beyond words, more akin to what I feel the animals perceive when I behold their quiet joy. Mindfulness, presence …they’re only words.  I realize there are many who cannot afford the luxury of clean air, fresh water or sitting and doing nothing. There are children to feed or parents to care for, sometimes there is work seven days a week. All I can pray is that into these lives drop the little things—fall leaves, early darkness through the city streets, a lone bird—to fill up a pause and bring joy.  

            Out in the fields I hear Sparkle and Stash speak, picking up a scent. Sasha and Isabelle rest close by. And I have everything I need.

LESSONS FROM MY DOGS: I Would Choose the Dog

                                                The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

                                                                        --Charles Darwin

            In the peace of morning, I sit quietly reading. Early morning light fills the room, and the only sounds are bird call from outside, perhaps the occasional notes of the wind chimes as the air stirs. But into the stillness bursts a little dog—a dirty, muddy little dog, who has been digging for moles. Mud, and pieces of grass cake between her toes, and up she jumps onto me in all her spring-morning enthusiasm to tell me about her dig.

            “Sparkle, no! Look at you! Look at my white page.” (No longer white, but splotched with muddy paw prints.) “I was peacefully reading,” I say to her in reproach. She gazes back at me undeterred, as tender joy fills her eyes. And a voice says to me, “What would you rather have, the peace and quiet of your solemn books or a joyful, if dirty, little dog?”

            I answer, “I would always choose the dog.” For, however much I love and value my books, in choosing the dog, I am choosing life. In a way, choosing what is over my projected image (contented, sunlit peace and quiet.)

            It was the same way when Chance became old, leaking urine wherever she lay. I know people who euthanize the animal when this happens, which I find unspeakably sad. Then, as now, I would choose life over an odor-free home and spotless rugs. I would always choose life, in all its beauty (the flowers and the trees) even with its inevitable flip side, death and decay.

            It's now spring, and with spring comes planting and bending and lifting. When I tweaked my back the doctor said absolutely no lifting for six weeks. And yet….

Sparkle says, “Come on, catch up!”

            There's a dog with only three legs, and she seems to be aging fast. Sometimes it's hard for her even to rise and get out the door without help. I slip on her harness, then I can gently lift up as she hops. But by day's end, she often hasn't the energy to hop out the simple lip to the back yard or climb the steps up to the bed, and I must carry her. My Isabelle. But then I hear the doctor's words. And I think to myself, if I'm hurt, who will care for them?

            And yet… .

            I'm standing by the window, looking out to the branches as they sway in the breeze, to the birds as they peck at seeds, when I see Isabelle, hoping and torqueing her body, slowly and with obvious effort, back from a dig with cohort Sparkle. She hops, but her one front leg buckles and she falls to the ground, her face hitting the earth. I leap from my post by the window and run to where she is. I scoop her up with my tweaked back, and I feel not an ounce of pain. As I carry her in, she surveys the yard, sniffing the air from the weightless height of my arms, and I know she's grateful. When I deliver her to her bed in the sunlight, I hear her sigh, and I think to myself, “Back or dog? I would always choose the dog.”

Isabelle awaits the return of Sasha and Sparkle from hunting the front fields.

            I have also chosen the dog again and again every night as I put aside my book and begin to drift off to sleep. It's always at this moment that Isabelle begins her snore chorus. So here we are a snoring cacophony and mud fest, but that's okay because there is more love flowing through the small home than I could ever imagine.

            Then there is the oldest of us all. The sweetest and silliest dog  that I have ever known. My dear, silly Sasha—who is now senile Sasha, or my Sasha shadow, following me around, then stopping and standing there staring. Sasha has never been too couth, and when spring arrives, so too do allergies, which means Sasha begins her scooting. Specifically, choosing to scoot her butt across the rug where I do stretches and yoga.

            “Sasha, no! That's not correct,” I say, trying to hide my smile. “You can't do that in polite society.” (Not to mention places where my face brushes the ground.) She stares up at me guileless. Said differently, completely clueless.

            Sasha is deaf and, perhaps because of this, she has taken to barking. Perhaps as a way of making herself known. Just as our society tends to overlook and “not see” old people, so too does our society often not see old dogs, lavishing the love and attention on cute, new puppies and pushing the slow, wart-covered dog aside like furniture. But I have always loved the old ones. And Sasha, who is now 16 or 17, and I share a history, stretching back thirteen plus years. She is my connection to Flash and Chance and Olive. And while she has never been the brightest bulb in the pack, she doesn't have mean bone in her plump and lumpy body.

Sasha stands under the viburnum blossoms, her face tilted to the light.

            I'll be reading, or working, or on the phone and out of the blue, “Bark, bark, bark!” Sometimes incessantly, almost always monotonously, “Bark, bark, bark!”

            “Sasha, there's nothing there!” I holler but she doesn't hear. I wave to her instead, for sometimes she barks to know she's not alone, and to find out where we are. And in those moments, when she turns and sees me waving to her, I watch as her ears flatten against her head, the worried wrinkles between her eyes unfurrow and she trots her arthritic gate over to me in relief and love.

            Then a mere five minutes later, from behind me:

            “Bark, bark, bark!” I nearly leap out of my skin.

            But of course… I choose the dog.

Sasha under the wisteria.

Isabelle sniffs the cool April air as the day comes to its close.

Sparkle always leads the way.

Lessons From My Dogs: One with all, a sparkle on snow

            Nothing I ever saw washed off the sins of the world so well as the first droppings of snow.

                                                                                    —Nancy Willard

            One afternoon in mid-January just after a beautiful snow storm, I asked Sparkle if she wanted to walk. I gave treats to Sasha and Isabelle, who'd opted to stay safe and cozy inside, their old bones not cold, and took Sparkle out into this hushed, new world that whispered of sacred things. I put her in a coat in Luis Vuitton colors that I had bought for Lauren one rainy day in Paris. And as she skipped out wearing Lauren's coat from so many years ago, I thought about the great continuity of all things through love.

            The snow was more than six inches deep with an icy glaze coating. Little Sparkle was not quite light enough to walk atop and every other step, she broke through, sinking down. I didn't see cuts but I'm sure the crusty edges sliced at her legs each time she sunk. Even though cold, after a few minutes Sparkle began panting from the effort. It was hard going for both of us walking over the drifts, yet pure and still the way the world gets when blanketed with snow—that deep and quilted silence.

            Sparkle was off leash and I watched her hunt—a Sparkle on the snow. She did her best to run through the woods on scents, me following along, up hills and down, around trees and shrubs, marveling at the many tracks left by animals—possums, coons, rabbits, squirrels, coyotes, turkeys and deer—some we rarely saw by day. But there, living side by side with us, just the same.

   Finally, we turned around to go down hill, and that's when Sparkle wised up. I turned to look for her and who should be following behind, walking in my footsteps? No more falling through scraping herself. No more effort; this was easy stuff. I walked on smiling and adjusted my stride to better suit her small steps, the two of us separate beings, but symbiotic and merging to one.

            But it felt strange. I walked on without seeing her run before me like usual, without the set of dog tracks beside my own. And it was then that I turned around and stood in the snow-soft stillness, and beheld only one long line of tracks. I felt something in my heart the way one does in moments beyond words. I stood with a vast whiteness all around and felt the future pain, yet also awe, of that single set of tracks. 

             It was at that moment that I had a strange flash to future where there would not walk beside me a little pair of dog tracks. And yet she was there within me, literally within my human prints. I felt her a part of me then, more than ever. I glanced down and there she stood by my shins looking up, asking why we'd stopped hunting.

            I think the future that flashed before me was only trying to tell me that she, like all of them past, present and future, will always be within me—as I them—as we with all life, there beside one another.

            “Okay, let's go,” I said to her. The sun peeked out from behind clouds, creating sparkles on the snow.  And together we walked in this fashion, with her stepping easily into my prints and home to a warm house and joyful greeting from Isabelle and Sasha.

            That night as I tucked all three into their spots in bed and thought of Olive and the others, now gone, I heard the following words: When you think of them in your heart and feel them there, they will be there; they always are.

 Sparkle’s little tracks contained within my own.

Lessons From My Dogs: Helping However We Can

The higher goal of all spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.

                                                                        --Abraham Heschel

            I’ve never believed that humans were at the top of the evolutionary ladder. I mean, how could we be when we’re the only species that systematically destroys the earth that sustains us? Animals, plants and rocks seem so superior. Just as I’ll look upon a little ant roaming my kitchen and think that he probably isn’t aware of my existence, lost as he is in his immediate world, so different from mine, then might there be larger or different life forms who also look down upon me as I go about equally unaware? The point, I guess, is to think outside the box. To live outside the box. Because we can so easily get caught up in our small, limited worldviews—the seeing the table as solid sort of thing, when it is, in fact, a whirling mass of moving molecules.

            It’s around this theme, that I’d like to offer a story. This past September, while I was eating and drinking my way through Provence, Jodie, a friend of mine, was spending her vacation volunteering at Animal Aid Unlimited in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. You’d have thought this act of generosity, courage and selflessness would garner admiration from those with whom she worked, in the way it did from me. And yet, often she was met with mistrust at best and scorn at worst. Colleagues questioned the sanctuary and criticized her for spending time and money flying to India to help when there are plenty of animals in need in the U.S. To which I say, true, there are humans and animals who need help in our own country. But help is help, and I don’t think it matters where you volunteer your time or send your money if you feel moved to do so. What matters is that you do it.

            In developing countries there is an intimacy with animals that doesn’t always exist in the U.S. It’s common to have bugs, reptiles and birds in the home. I’ve had a bird fly in through open windows and snatch part of the bread I was eating. In the U.S. we let in certain animals (dog and cats) and try to eradicate others (insects and rodents). There are people in developing countries who care about the plight of sick and wounded animals, but because one is also faced with many sick and wounded humans, people don’t know how to begin helping the animals. Few precedents have been set. They turn a blind eye and then that becomes the way it has always been.

            Like Jodie, I too felt drawn to developing countries in my twenties and thirties, and traveled the globe with the desire to help “save the world.” Once, in Bangladesh, after the devastating cyclones of 1991 that killed many thousands of people and animals, I flew to that desperately poor country, seeking to connect with the Red Cross or other organization and put myself to use. While I was able to hand out fresh water, rice and bread, I didn’t save the world. I saved one goat. And, no different from my friend in India, was met with varying degrees of: Are you crazy or Are you stupid? Flying all the way to Bangladesh to save one goat? But, like the boy and the starfish story, to that goat, my time wasn’t wasted. To that one goat, it was everything. I have another friend who rushed off to Venezuela to help feed the animals, after hearing about the country’s economic crisis. So, whether Bangladesh, India, Syria, Venezuela, the U.S., or elsewhere, we help wherever we can. We help however we can.

            And with this thought in mind, off Jodie flew to India, arriving some twenty-two hours later, an ordeal in itself not for the light-hearted. At the Animal Aid sanctuary, she sat with dying cows, wetting their lips with water and speaking softly into sacred ears. She worked with the paralyzed and legless dogs, who she reported were active and just as happy (if not more so) than dogs we encounter at home. If the videos she sent, and those from the website, are anything to go by, those dogs are 100 % bounding joy. I’ve seen this phenomenon before. Dogs in first world countries can become neurotic or depressed, taking on their guardians first world problems and anxieties, where dogs in the developing world are, in some ways, healthier. They may die at earlier ages from mange and diseases we see as easily preventable, but being allowed to be dogs, and outdoors, they’re happy, roaming the streets, doing what dogs love to do, not cooped up in apartments, lonely, with one hour outside. Even in some of our finest shelters, dogs are kept in separate runs, under conditions that would break the brightest of spirits. In India, the dogs were all outdoors and all together in one big, happy, rambling pack. My point is not to criticize the hardworking people in our shelters. They’re helping however they can. My point is to get us all to think outside the box, and see that maybe our way is not always the only way. And that animals on the streets (if spayed and neutered and given basic care) can also be happy animals. And that that might in fact be their choice.

            And so along those lines, I come to the story that Jodie told me happened while she was there.

            When not volunteering, she stayed in a guest house about a half hour away from the sanctuary. One night, well after midnight, she was awakened by the plaintive, mournful sound of a dog howling. It was not a woooh wooooh every so often and it was not a hello howl to the moon. It was instead, incessant and urgent. It was seemingly inconsolable and deeply troubling. My friend rose, and walked to the window, where, sure enough, there was a female dog lying in the road howling for all she was worth.

            What to do now? One couldn’t just leave her down there in trouble, possibly in considerable pain. (One couldn’t sleep for one thing.) But the dogs who roamed the streets were not tame. These were feral dogs. She could be diseased. She could be injured, in which case she might attack and bite. Back and forth my friend waffled, trying to come up with the best answer for this dog in distress. And all the while she waffled, the dog in the street wailed, louder and louder, and more insistently with each howl.

Until she was answered.

            Jodie stepped out onto the balcony and listened. Slowly, but steadily, as the dog in the street howled, she was answered…one by one…by distant voices. She howled and would receive an answer from a different quadrant. And then my friend watched, awed, as one after another, the pack members returned to what appeared to be the Alpha female, each one settling in by her side, and lying down. And after the last member of the pack was assembled, secure by her side, the female lay her head down, perfectly content now that her pack was all back together.

            Jodie tried to explain the effect and the sense of family that the incidence had on her, but like most events that move us deeply, touching us at our cores, words can only paint on a one-dimensional canvas. The stories that are most meaningful are also those that often remain untold. Jodie could have played the hero and rushed up, in a display of ego, to “help” this female in distress. But some part of her intuition or wisdom caused her to pause, to not react. Instead she stood and watched. Instead she stood and listened to the particular music of an Indian night, but also to the great wisdom that resides within us all. And her reward was the miraculous and heartwarming event she witnessed. Or what to lowly humans can seem miraculous, when to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s just how things are. A great interconnectedness, and mutual respect for one another. Here, the animals are our wise teachers, if we only just stop and listen to them.

The dogs may be deformed and broken but the sanctuary overflows with love and compassion.

Jodie and Deepok.

To find out more about Animal Aid Unlimited or to make a donation: www.animalaidunlimited.org.

Lessons From My Dogs: The Stamp of Love

Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer, qu’en respondant: Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy. If I were pressed to say why I love him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he. Because it was I.

                                    —Michel de Montaigne, explaining why he loved his friend.

Ice covers the branches and now hangs, frozen in falling, in solid crystal droplets like winter’s perfect pearls—and I have never seen anything so pure, a feeling I know I’ll try to express again with the first buds of spring and again in sacred autumn, but for which in truth I know I have no words. For now, I stand enchanted in a silence broken only by the cawing of a crow, as she flies across a heavy quilt of gray, and the slight ticking of ice as the birds hop from silvered branch to frozen ground and back to branch again.

Recently I was listening to a program on NPR about great art. The curator said, “Everything has a price,” even the Mona Lisa now behind her protective pane of glass within the Louvre’s hallowed walls. The Mona Lisa? Really? Well, perhaps in the art world everything does have a price. But there remain ‘things’ for which one can never assign monetary value. While I know it happens in difficult circumstances, I think few parents would willingly sell their children.

          I remember the old Master Card commercials that listed several glamorous material objects—sports car, exotic vacation, gemstones—each with impressive price tags. Then the ad mentioned something priceless: being there to see your child score his or her first homerun. Now, as I stand surrounded by nature’s mystery, present to a vastness and beauty that knows no logic—only awe—I know the moment has no price. It just is.

          As I sat in my meditation chair, Lauren’s old chair, Sasha stared up at me, a round butterball turkey masquerading as a dog. Then she leapt. There is nothing subtle about Sasha. But where subtly falls short, love and loyalty make up for it. She squished up atop my lap, throwing back her head and staring up into my eyes just as Lauren used to do. Then she settled into the spot where she loves to sit, between my legs on a small 8 x 8 cushion, which was a beautiful and unexpected gift my seamstress made for me out of the old fabric of this beloved chair when, threadbare and duck-taped together, it had to be reupholstered. While Sasha is the least introspective of my three dogs, the cushion has become her meditation pillow. I remembered back to when Sasha first entered our lives, bringing the great depression, as I called it—a period of unease due to her own deeply depressed feelings—disrupting the peaceful life of joy that Flash and Chance and I shared. But there in the chair, as I stroked her, I told her: “Sasha, I’d not give you up, even for ten million dollars.” They were the same words I’d used back then so long ago to reassure her that I would not forsake her, and as I spoke the words again, I knew their truth. There is no price tag for them. For love.

          While I know I don’t “own” the dogs—they are not mine, they are my responsibility and they are…priceless. I read that if we can lose something in a shipwreck, it isn’t ours. Of course, we can lose our bodies, our selves, so perhaps, when we speak truly, we own nothing.

          With the dogs I share a partnership based not so much on an alpha hierarchy as on mutuality—listening to what they have to say and taking an interest in their world. For Olive this means sharing her enthusiasm (or perhaps indignation) over the squirrel who steals the birds’ seed. I put out more than enough for him too since the acorn crop this year was slim to nonexistent.

          “Do you want to get the squirrel?” I ask in my most squirrel-animated voice, hoping of course that she never really will, and she pricks her ears and comes running. I open the gate and let her root around in the compost pile at the base of an old walnut tree where the squirrels hang out.

          Taking an interest in Chance’s world simply means being home, being there. Once so independent, she now follows me from room to room, her deaf ears forcing her to search with nose and sight more than she once did for the comfort and reassurance she seeks in knowing I’m here. I’m impressed by how well she and most animals adapt to the loss of a sense, but sometimes I see confusion shadow her white face. I want to put to words the love my fingers know, deep to the bone, every time they caress the lumps and bumps that now cover her fragile frame. I want to put to words the pang I feel when I turn and see her lagging so far behind on our walks when once she strode out front, or when I watch her try to jump upon a chair and fall. I want to put to words the feeling that builds within me as I stand and watch her sleep—but I can’t. I love her more than I have words to say. Every time I see her walk the wrong way in her search to find me and stare off to an empty room with pricked ears, she is writing her own story upon my breast—engraving grooves of sorrow on my heart from which I’ve learned not to turn for, when I stand in stillness and listen to the wisdom of the wind, I understand these are the same grooves as those of joy.

Sasha, Chance, and Olive in the spring air.

          Because of her there is now the daily puddle of urine on the rug or even in the bed. I don’t want a house that smells of dog pee…but neither, I realize, do I want its end. And when we love unconditionally, we forgive everything. We don’t judge, but merely observe and accept. In real love, familiarity does not breed contempt but rather a bond so connected that we feels its desolation if severed.

True love wears no price tag. It just is. And yet people would pay millions to have it. The dogs with whom I share my life don’t leave behind their marks in poetry or song; they’ve never painted a picture, let alone the Mona Lisa, but they leave behind their mark in other ways. They stamp it on my heart.

Lessons from my dogs: Time regained

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung, come to lavish on us their riches and their spell.

                        —Proust, Time Regained

Fall, summer’s shadow, hints at winter. I hear the screech of the hawk gliding high above the treetops and the crows cawing back and forth to each other in a language I am only beginning to understand. Fields of lingering gold: Jerusalem artichoke and goldenrod mingle with iron weed and poke. Fall might mean death and decay to some, but I rejoice in the lessening of humidity, the shortened days and clear, pure nights.

When we travel to foreign lands and step out into new and different air for the first time, it exhilarates. The first morning of cool, crisp air of autumn is like that for me, transporting me to another place and time, which is no more than the changing season.

Like in spring, the animals are again on the move: turtles, insects, mammals, migrating birds—their patterns shifted from the lazy, abundant summer. Each year I see fewer and fewer turtles, toads, butterflies, and other insects but this year the decline was dramatic. I feel the loss and wonder if the world will, too.

Far out in the fields, Sparkle and Stash speak following the scent of roaming rodents. Perhaps they smell the two little fawns that with their fading spots have taken up residence. Their mother was killed and now I watch them, bonded together and playful, zipping around, yet wary. They graze on tall grass then snap heads up, forever watching. Every time they zig and zag closer to the road, my heart flutters.

The resident snakes have vanished, yet bittersweet wraps itself around tree limbs in imitation, and the smell of burning leaves permeates still air.  Russet leaves rattle and fall. The light changes. In the dusk of evening there’s a golden glow. Nights are dramatic: windswept and starry. A half-moon darts across the sky, carried by moving clouds.

Soon, All Hallows’ Eve. I remember the Halloweens of childhood. To this day I still watch Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin, and feel the warmth of childhood, the smell of bread baking and meals cooking. It’s said that the veil between the living and the dead is most thin on Halloween or All Saint’s.

I think of the dogs who’ve gone on, the past tense already claiming them when I write. I try to connect and sometimes it’s enough just to focus and remember. But other times, they come to me like ghosts in a dream, surrounding me, ducking and dodging in and out of my consciousness, playful and light, yet constant and eternal. And I realize they never leave us, not really. We’re connected—connected through love.

            All of them—the ones here in flesh and those now no more than memories—visit when I summon, as I look deep into their eyes in a faded photo. And all teach me something of how to live this life more fully and care for the dogs here now with more presence, and for all beings, all of life. They’re all unanimous in saying: be present, take nothing in life for granted, live simply, love simply, simply love.

            In deep and reverent presence, time slows, and time is regained.

The two little fawns, alert and wary, yet growing used to my presence.