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.