Bones Would Rain from the Sky Page 35
Our dogs, like all spiritual beings, have lessons to learn as well as to teach. Whatever the physical form that expresses our small cup of the spiritual ocean, each of us contains the light and the dark, the fullness and the emptiness, the good and the bad. Woven through our lives are flaws of understanding, failures of compassion, places where we have not yet learned to sweep away the fear and let the love pour in as it wants to do. Our lessons in this lifetime are simply our struggles to smooth the flow of life through and around our particular flaws.
What I find so deeply moving is the animal willingness to let love flow and not block it. Never once have I seen a fat dog draw back in shame from a loving hand that offered a belly rub, nor a dog who would turn away affectionate attention because of guilt over past misdeeds. But moved by fearful reasons, I have countless times shrank back from love extended to me, turned away the gifts freely and generously offered, set walls against the flow of love through me. In doing so, I limited myself as an instrument through which love and life could flow. It seems to me that dogs and other animals are such effective angels for the human spirit because, like very young children, so little blocks the flow of love and life through them. I watch dogs, and over and over again they teach me by example. They do not refuse the dynamic flow of life pouring through each moment. Whether we can articulate this or not, we recognize the power of such unimpeded flow and welcome its presence in our lives.
I have known dogs who were broken beings, victims of human neglect and anger and fear, and for these poor creatures, the flow of love was interrupted. And still, even when damage seemed too great, the flow of time and love offered without cessation did the work it does best and healed much of what had been put askew. Though not all that is broken can be put right, this too is a lesson about the power of love: In its presence, great things can be done; in its absence, the wounds created can be terrible.
For readers who find themselves drawing back at the notion that a dog is also a spiritual being, try this: Just crack open the door of Maybe. Emily Dickinson wrote about the need for the soul to remain ajar, open to the ecstatic experience. You need not enter nor even peek inside. Simply leave the door of possibility open, and see what happens. Matters of spirit flow past and through and over the barriers we set in place, and given even a small crack in our fearful fortresses, spirit can move us deeply, and in surprisingly profound ways. See what happens when you examine an experience with this question in mind: “What can I learn from you?” It is surprising what unfolds when you approach another being with that question humbly posed and a sincere curiosity about what the answer may be.
MY LIFE AS A DOG
This book opened with me under a table, licking my aunt’s knee. In my childish desire to be a dog, I could not possibly have understood just what I was asking of myself. My childhood version of being a dog consisted of little more than barks and wagging tails and gnawing on bones, a concept of dog no more sophisticated than a child’s concept of what it is to be a mother. Now, as an adult, my desire to be doglike is more fervent than ever but tempered with a fuller understanding of just what that means. And it requires much of me that I did not expect, focused as I was on the dogs themselves.
There have been inklings, hints, quiet murmurs just at the edge of my awareness for many years. Each time I heard someone say “I’m more an animal person than a people person” or “I just understand animals better,” something moved uneasily within me. Inevitably, these admissions were accompanied by an earnest listing of how it is that animals are easier, less frightening, less painful, more honest and more forgiving. All of us know firsthand that other human beings can be cruel, hurtful, deceitful, angry, violent and plainly callous. By comparison, animals seem nearly angelic, love made real with a wagging tail. We may cling with almost zealous fervor to the notion that animals alone are safe, that only in a dog’s eyes or a cat’s purr can we find unconditional acceptance of ourselves, that only animals are capable of truly appreciating us as we are.
Gary Zukav writes, “When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understand in order to heal.” In no small part, it is precisely the illusory part of the dynamic that makes animals so attractive to us, especially if we have been wounded or hurt by other people. Throughout my life, animals have provided a safe haven for me when the people in my life could not; the oft-heard sentiment “the more I know of men, the more I love dogs” is one I certainly understand. In my teenage years, my woes were poured into interested ears that pricked toward me, my sadness absorbed in dark eyes that watched without judgment or rebuke, and ultimately, all of my words lay spent in the quiet space between me and the dog. And in that silence, in the quiet that offered no recommendations for action but merely a place where even the world’s greatest woes could be poured without end, the healing occurred. The dog need not do anything except to be there, his silence a soothing balm and a stoppage against the harsh and angry words that filled my mind. Long before I encountered them on a page, I knew the truth of Max Picard’s wise words: “Many things that human words have upset are set at rest again by the silence of animals.”
Though I understand the safe haven that animals offer us against the slings and arrows of life, I am just now coming to understand that this is not an end point, a place to rest in safety, free from the complications and grief that may attend our human relationships. While valuable in and of itself, it is also a springing-off point, a place where we may begin the real work of love. Animals do not offer us a safe haven so that we may turn our back on our fellow humans. All that I have learned from the animals in my life up to now were preparatory lessons, prerequisites if you will, for the greatest challenge of them all: learning to love other people with the same grace and the same generous forgiveness that our dogs bestow upon us every day.
I realize this is not a notion that slides easily into our minds. Casting about for some alternative—one that won’t require that we learn to love other people—it may be easier to think that our dogs love us as they do because they are not capable of understanding. This “sweet ignorant darlings” approach certainly takes the burden off us; a dog’s naïve or ignorant adoration does not oblige in any way, as a fully aware and deliberate love might. In the same way, we often discount the love of children as uninformed. But what if our dogs and children are the ones who are not seeing an illusion? What if, unfettered by the fears and logic that tangle our adult minds, they are the ones who see past our surface imperfections, past our petty fears and straight to the heart of the matter to our unblemished, shining souls. What if what they love is simply this: the uncorrupted good within us, what we can be when we let love flow through us. It is perhaps a hackneyed phrase featured on refrigerator magnets, but this is not such a terrible thing to pray: “Help me become the kind of person my dog believes I am.” This is not such a terrible shape to give a life.
AS FORGIVING AS A DOG
In search of a way to find the dance between man and animal, I did not yet realize just where my journey was leading. Focused on the animals and by association on the people with them, I could feel something else at work within me, something that pushed me to consider the people around me with a newfound compassion. Having kept most people at a distance, I found myself more aware of them in new ways, and to my surprise, more able to see them more fully beyond the context of their relationship with their dogs. This was far from complete but occurred rather in odd flashes of insight. Though intrigued, I was also uncomfortable with the pricklings I felt when I considered what this might mean, and so I did not invest myself in an exploration of the phenomenon until three separate incidents shook me on a very deep level.
The first came on a winter morning as I sat silently watching the sun rise through the trees across the field. I was thinking about the many ways that we humans fail dogs, and how it sometimes cost dogs their lives. Specifically, I was thinking of Gillian, a beautiful young dog I had br
ed who, later that day, would be put to sleep for being a dangerous dog. Into my sad contemplation of the part I may have played in this tragic scene, the phone rang. Startled, I answered, and felt a wave of anger flood me when I recognized the voice of Gillian’s original owner. Without question, I blamed her for the largest part of the whole situation (and blamed myself for even selling her the dog in the first place), and now, on a morning when I wanted only to be alone with my sad thoughts and apologies to this dog’s spirit, her voice in my ear infuriated me.
Gritting my teeth, I answered her questions in tersely worded replies, unwilling to grant her anything but the most rudimentary courtesy. I listened in angry silence as she spun out her explanation of how and why it had all come down to this: a dog who would be dead in a few hours, Gillian the only one who would pay full price for promises made and broken. It began to dawn on me as she talked that she had called me because she was seeking forgiveness; I could hear it clearly in her tearful admission that she had failed this puppy. Hot righteous anger flared up in me, and as I swung up on my high horse, I felt a heavy weight on my knee. Glancing down, I saw my old dog Banni’s head resting there, his dark eyes fixed on my face, his gaze steady, unblinking, telling me something. I shifted my focus to this old friend and silently asked what he needed to tell me. He answered with a quiet question: “What would she do?”
The question, so clearly posed in my head, confused me at first. What would who do? The woman I was speaking with? I struggled for an answer, the woman began to cry, and Banni’s eyes locked on mine. The next image in my head was so startling that I nearly dropped the phone: I could see Gillian reaching up to lick away the woman’s tears, eyes soft, tail wagging gently, the essence of forgiveness given physical form. Suddenly, I understood the question—“what would she do?”—and knew that it was what Gillian would do. She would forgive this woman, this flawed human being who had loved her but still failed her.
My challenge was this: Could I offer the same simple acceptance and forgiveness? I did not think I could, and I told myself that to forgive this would somehow equal condoning what she had done. Again, the steady gaze of Banni pushed me onward, and inexplicably, I was hurtling back years in time to Banni’s youth and a gorgeous spring day when, as a young dog enjoying the day, he had ignored my repeated commands to come inside so I could leave for an appointment. In a rush, unreasonably angry, I had marched across the yard and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, dragging him unceremoniously to the back door, where I scolded him far past any sane reprimand. He sat frozen, his eyes wary, until at last, realizing how stupid my own behavior was, I had sagged into a chair nearby. Holding my hands out to him, I apologized and asked for his forgiveness. And it had come faster than the speed of light. His forgiveness did not equal in any way an acceptance of what I had done; it simply acknowledged my apology and opened a way for me to go on, for us to go on and hopefully find another way next time.
So many years later, his graying muzzle laid on my knee, it occurred to me that if I were a good dog, I would be able to forgive this woman. It would not undo what had been done, and it would not change the sad reality that a dog she had loved would die that day. Forgiveness would not shift the responsibility for her failures onto anyone else, but it would be a way of saying that just like me, she was a flawed human being. I too had made terrible mistakes, broken promises, failed the ones I loved, and far past the biblical seven times seven, I had been forgiven by the animals and the people who had suffered at my hands. To deny her forgiveness was to act arrogantly, as if I had never needed to be forgiven, as if I would not need to be forgiven countless times in the future. Surely, I told myself, I could find a way to do what any good dog could do any day and sometimes a dozen times before breakfast: forgive a human being for being human. And so I did. It was not easy. But it was important.
The dog still died a few hours later. I never spoke to the woman again; what little we had between us had died that day. There is still great sadness in me for Gillian, a promising young dog who did not receive what she had been promised, what she deserved and needed. And there is deep gratitude in me for Gillian’s lesson, for it was the first major crack in the wall between myself and other people.
TREAT ME LIKE A DOG
The next lesson came only a few months later, when a longtime friend unexpectedly began a verbal attack on me, laying at my feet a mountain of blame for her unhappiness with her life. Stunned, I listened in growing disbelief, the pain caused by her words a physical sensation as distinct as if I had been punched in the solar plexus. My initial response was one of anger, and yet, even as my snarled response rose up in my throat—“I’m not going to stand here and listen to this—screw you!”—something bizarre happened. Her words, shooting in painful trajectories from a face screwed tight, floated away so that their specific meaning was lost to me; all that was left was the pure sound of her feelings, and I was struck by the anger and fear that I heard in her voice. Without words, it seemed as if she were pouring out snarls and yelps and desperate, frantic barking.
If she were a dog, I asked myself, what would make her act like this, attack like this, without warning? Immediately, I corrected myself. There had been warning, hints in telephone conversations prior to this, and from the moment we had met on this day, I had felt the connection between us taut with tension though I could not determine why this was so. I was aware that I had to choose my words and actions carefully to avoid setting her off—in other words, I had warning. Transforming her into a dog who was snarling and snapping in fearful frenzy was a way of setting aside my own hurt response. Seeing her as hurting and terrified stilled my reflexive reaction, and though still hurting myself, I found I was able to listen compassionately and then walk away from that encounter knowing that I had done nothing to pour fuel on her fire.
The relief of finding a perspective that allowed me to stay calm and not react out of my own fear and anger was short-lived. Long after the incident had passed, I was deeply shaken by the realization that once I saw her—truly saw her—with the same clarity that I usually can bring to my interactions with dogs, I was obliged to respond to her with at least the same compassion I would show any dog brought to me. This was not a new concept for me. For years, I’d given it lip service and even some genuine effort, and at times, was even able to actually be kind and fair to many people. But never before had I been struck so deeply with how serious an obligation I had to live these words—or how difficult this really was.
Long ago, I had read Leo Buscaglia’s wise words, “We must treat each other with dignity. Not only because we merit it but because we grow best in thoughtfulness.” Living these words, I was discovering, was not an easy matter. An examination of my own behavior showed that while most people fared well in their interactions with me, not all did. With every animal that I came into contact with, I strove mightily to be compassionate, to demonstrate respect and kindness even in the face of their anger or fear. It seemed quite sad to me that if my friend had been a dog snapping fearfully at the end of the leash, I would instantly have responded in a way that I could manage only with effort on her behalf.
This was a terribly uneasy moment of awareness, one that nagged at me for many months. Watching myself, I could see that there was quite a difference at times between how I treated animals and how I treated some people. I could readily excuse my behavior with a recitation of my homemade litany of how “he done me wrong” and “she done me wrong” and “folks will do you wrong,” but… the uncomfortable truth was that I wasn’t bothering to make the distinction between past wrongs of others who had indeed hurt me, and the people in my life right now and their current behavior. To tar all people with my mistrust and fear was as silly as the prejudice I encountered daily when walking German Shepherds down the street. Despite my dogs’ calm demeanor, good manners and tail-wagging greetings, they would often be viewed as aggressive, dangerous or even deadly, depending on how another German Shepherd at some other time had acted to
ward the person who now viewed all prick-eared, black-and-tan dogs with fear and loathing.
ACTING AS IF IT MATTERED
On the last day of her life, Vali did what she had done her entire life: She taught me. I knew we were making our way through the last few ticks of the clock, and each passing hour was treasured and savored. Leaving her in the cool shade where she could lie and watch the comings and goings on the farm, I picked up the hose to refill her water bowl, letting the water run for a while to be sure it was cold and pure. Hearing a noise behind me, I first thought it was Carson, Vali’s sister, coming to play in the water as both of them had done since they were puppies. Instead, what I saw was Vali, her dimming eyes grown bright and alert as she fixed her attention on the hose. So weak she could barely stand, she made her way across the lawn while I stood dumbstruck. Reaching me, she stretched herself to bite gleefully at the stream of water as she always had, and then, as she steadied herself to try again, I saw in her eyes the terrible moment that she knew this was truly more than she could do. She stood for a moment, her muzzle dripping, her frail body held unsteadily by pure effort, and then, with resignation, used the last of her strength to stagger back to the shade where her sister Carson lay.
“Why would you do that?” I asked Vali as I stretched out beside her and stroked her head. I knew she had loved any water game, always had, but from my perspective, it hardly seemed worth using what precious little energy remained in a life to snap one more time against that which could never be caught no matter how powerful the jaws brought to bear. Her answer came quietly: “If something matters to you, you give it all you have to give.” I did not know that only hours later, when the stars hung bright but silent in the sky, her heart would finally beat its last beneath my hand and she would be gone. I never suspected that just hours after her death, her final lesson to me would need to be put to the test.