Spring Jewels

Jewels and I go for a walk on our dirt road every morning.

Back and forth, in startles and leaps. She’s unable to move in a straight line,

While keeping her eye on dangerous tall grass in the wind. She stares at me

with that long question, until she does the thing she cannot do. She eases back.

Sticks her neck out. She leans low, pokes her nose in, as if therein lies

A rabbit with gnashing teeth. I’m wondering at the brilliance of our animal being,

making love, (one vulnerable look) so much comfort even the fearful tasks

We come to trust. Our shared hearts enable us.

 

Jewels: An Epilogue

“May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked mind,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing beneath us.”

 John O’Donohue

“Eternal Echoes”

O’Donohue describes spirituality as a state of leaning low, with freed senses. But this freedom may be unnatural for sapiens. It comes, if ever, at the end of a long earthly path for most of us. Arriving out of the long slog of our development and gradual enrichment of mindful, attuned, and flow states, we evolve the awareness that we’re not just the physiological, mental, emotional patterns we have learned and reinforced. There is something true that is not our ego in time and space only. There’s something beautiful in the universe that heals, endowed with intuitive and inventive currents. Such awareness can separate us further from self-sabotaging action patterns and survival fears, allowing what has happened to us to have less of a grip on us. With freed senses, we sense and begin to understand in our Heart that we’re another being amongst an infinite variety. We enter the garden that we never left.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”^]

From the Inside out, we find that we’re one beyond the forms we take, above the roles and rules we have adopted, beneath the surfaces that seem so myriad and foreign. We can step in and out of other beings, whether they wear shoes or not. We come to know and trust a deep state of energetic belonging.

We call this the oneness in all. Buddha Nature. Christ consciousness. Atman. The Inspired Self.

Recognizing the Collective Pain

Powerful-play naturally moves us to discern abuse from ego created ideologies, to see with clarity the injury to the defenseless and to the most vulnerable.

We live in an unfortunate time. Or has every age been an unfortunate time? What most often passes for understanding today is delusion and “beliefs” that strangle us. There can be little doubt that our communities are filled with pathological violence, creating unimaginable suffering. We’re a traumatized and traumatizing society. This is not a diagnosis but an observation of our need to do some serious repair because so many hearts are dimmed, or have never switched on fully, lost to the sociopathic machinery of our name brand society. And, so, we’re unable to depend on one another; nor can the creatures who share our world count on our compassion.

Every one of us is a rather ordinary example of an animated automaton.

I. Gurdjieff, In Search of Being: The Fourth Way

In this unfortunate time, so much human action serves small societal or communal egos that create all manner of fiefdom and demand service to the king or the kingmaker. And all human communities seem to have their fill of lawyer-like prosecutions or defensive arguments, doctor-like prescriptions about the “problem” and the “right” corrective action, salesman-like pitches, priest-like pronouncements. There are plenty of authorities of all sorts telling us what is worthwhile, what is unhealthy and disordered, what is sinful, evil, and what beliefs, feelings, and actions need to be banished or embraced without question.

The only correct way. My way. This is frequently communicated implicitly or explicitly with a threat. Sometimes this gets amped up into twisted rationalizations for violence. It can mobilize armies. It is a Shadow inversion of Powerful-play.

There are some therapies teaching therapists to be dog handlers, shaping behavior by rewarding one direction and punishing another. This is something that must be resisted if we are to embody Powerful-Play. At our best, we’re not striving to be an alpha dog, nor shape the action. If we think that we must be in control, that is some fallen world actor telling us a story.

“They won’t respect us unless we take charge!”

Or “We need to teach them, explain the meaning to them.”

Or “We must give the solution.”

In contrast, in our own precious Work, when we can let all living beings (Inside-out or Upside-down) to speak openly, we’re building trust.  Does that not seem obvious? Of course, we always need to be alert to the growls in the inner forest. There are moments we may suggest the protagonist step back, take a breath. In the Heart-drama, this protagonist is our self, and so we need sufficient Dual Awareness to block inner characters that dangerous rage on to the path and attempt to dominate. Show compassion. But maintain Discernment. A balance which always reminds me of how my therapy dog, Raven, taught our Jewel in need of trauma therapy.

Nudging

We have taken our two dogs into the woods

Our Rescued mixed girl has the largest eyes of all.

Standing rooted, severed from the trees all around,

Judging the rustle of every leaf, she smells something

In a trance of the past so dark on the well-lit trail.

I could cry when she looks so lost.

Our beautiful flat-coated Raven princess

Has fewer boundaries to her freedom, well loved,

Rabbit-hopping into middle age, pausing,

Moving to her wounded fur-sister, bringing her nose

To nose in a soft stroke, as if across the cheek

Of a sleeping child, to awaken her:

The way your heart reaches out to me

Witnessing my unworthiness without blame.

 

We want to give an agency to the Jewels of our drama, letting them stick their head in places, and to move in and out. If they seem suddenly unaware, we may want to nudge them or make some noises to keep them from getting fully lost, to alert them to where we are, to pull them back to a wider view, prompt dual awareness, to be here and there.

“Good. Good. Now talk to me . . . ”

“What are noticing?”

“What are you feeling?”

We build trust this way. By noticing where the protagonist is moving, protecting them if they need us to call them back, to provide a little refuge when they are temporarily overwhelmed, playfully waking them if they have fallen into the trance of trauma, we give them a loose leash…

Real Lessons Learned

I learned my lesson from Lucky, my childhood dog, and I have stayed determined to be present with dogs I love, and I would never abandon them.

Over our years in Horseshoe, North Carolina, I calculate I have gone on at least 3,500 walks on the same dirt road. My dogs and I have become an integral part of this place, spotted every morning and late afternoon, as familiar as a wide bend in the dirt road, as certain as the place where thickets break open to the steep valley, as foreseeable a sight as the Magnolias flowering.

For the first few years on these walks, there were three of us. Jewel’s more complaint sister Raven moved freely, unburdened by a leash, because she was innately dependable. Secure about the world, she had a keen grasp on how these walks needed to work if we were going to be walkers together, whereas I kept tight to the lead with Jewels who was tense and worrisomely impulsive.

As it happens, Raven began to slow down, no longer prone to prancing around us and teasing with her long poking nose. I remember vividly one long last special walk up to a nearby mountain meadow, Raven struggling to keep up, her breathing ragged. Within a few days she was dead, leaving us all—my wife, Jewel, and I—in heavy mourning.

Jewel couldn’t have had a better mentor than Raven, her surrogate mother, a gentle older fur sister. A man in the kill shelter where we rescued Jewel seemed to have a keen insight. He said, “We think she is two years old, and all we know is that she was chained out in the yard with an aggressive dog. We had to put that dog down right away because he lost his mind. So, you know, she hasn’t been taught much and she is jumpy, but she wants to be a good girl.”

Of course, Raven was the one who taught her to be that good girl. Much more than my wife or I, Raven showed her the ropes and conveyed how this life together needed to work if we were going to be family.

After Raven’s passing, I learned to trust Jewel on these walks more and more and stopped thinking she was going to run off or lunge out at every car or truck. She remained hypervigilant, but this came to serve us, as her jumpiness acted as an early warning system. If a vehicle was heading our way, she’d know it well before I would, and she’d move to the side in the grass and sit patiently until it came into view, where she remained immovable until it passed.

However, for the sake of full disclosure, there always remained one old red chevy truck that drove too fast, and which offended her because, by this point in our story, Jewel knew how all this needed to work if we were going to remain safe together.

I don’t know if it was truly necessary, but kneeling beside her, I would grab hold of the collar as Jewel growled and, to her best ability scowled at the son of a bitch, a sour-faced driver who never slowed, speeding off into the dust and around a corner, leaving us fading sounds of spitting gravel.

Once we got past the need for a constant leash, Jewels walked freely beside me-Though again in full disclosure, sometimes, when she couldn’t help herself, she jumped for a few moments into a bush to chase a rabbit or a squirrel. But that was fine as I saw it. She was still the best of girls. And after her bit of excitement and failed hunt, she would quickly return where we could discuss the “cheaters,” those little creatures that swerved and hopped and spun about with ridiculous adeptness, going up or under, always out of reach. It was unfair, we agreed, if not exactly morally wrong, to have such ability.

One day my wife and I got the idea that Jewel might need a companion. But Jewel had learned to trust only one dog in her life, and when we tried to introduce a Springer pup into the mix, a gorgeous girl we named Lady Merriweather, Jewels was frayed by the experience, anxious and restless, irritable, and confused. After several weeks of trying to make it work, we gave Merri up (to a truly fine home). It was the only right choice, of course, because we had long ago made a commitment to Jewel.

She got older, as I did, our muzzles grayer.

For some who might have witnessed our walks, they would just see repetitions up and back on a road that led nowhere, an unpaved fragment on a map. It would seem we never really got to a destination. But for us the walks did lead somewhere, each time we took some further steps toward faithfully attending Love’s work.

As it had to come, there came the night we found the lump, harder than the fatty tissue bumps the Vet always dismissed. This was cancer in her left leg, growing from the center of her joint. Surgically removed once, it came aggressively back, an oblivious speed demon, an ugly massive intrusion, ultimately fatal. Of course, as anyone knows who has ever loved and lost, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to work.

I’ve known a few great lovers in my life, most of them canine. My emotional memory has trapped the last seconds of these intimate relationships in grief. It always fades with time. But I think I am a little wiser now and would never attempt to hurry away such pain.  Indeed, I have found it important to remember the last moment, as important as any affirmation of this short life in a beautiful world.  It is a last but infinite moment when we have both earned the right to look deeply into each other’s animal eyes.