What we choose to look for heavily influences what we will see. Someone seeking evidence of God’s mercy or goodness will see it; someone seeking the faithlessness of men will find it. If all we look for is proof that animals are little more than lovable, pleasant jumbles of instinct and conditioned behaviors, then that is all we will be able to see. Believe in something more, and you risk being scoffed at as naïve, sentimental, foolish, irrational. Why do these scoffs frighten us so? The scoffers do not enlarge us or enrich our lives, and yet we fear them and give them the power to make us shy away from what our hearts pull us toward. Hungry for connections with others, reaching outward from ourselves from the moment of our birth, we somehow still manage to build walls between us and those around us, to draw the blinds and, huddled in the lonely darkness we have created for ourselves, sadly wish for more.
Whether my beliefs about animals are a delusion I’ve created for myself or an acknowledgment of what actually exists is fairly irrelevant. I am not as concerned with why I may believe what I believe so much as I am with the effects of what I believe. The effects of believing as I do are good ones, ones that enlarge me, make me kinder, more patient, more forgiving, more compassionate, more loving. In short, I am a better human being for having loved dogs and more specifically because of the ways that my personal beliefs shape the expression of that love. Ultimately, this belief in dogs as cold-nosed angels has pushed me hard to explore myself and to clear away more and more of the obstacles within me that prevent life and love from flowing unimpeded through me.
Raised with the life philosophy that everything happens for a reason, I don’t pretend to understand the reason or purpose behind all that happens in my world, but I have faith that there is a grand design at work. Choosing as I do to look for evidence of such a grand design, I cannot help but find it. And what I also find, perhaps only because I choose to look for it, is confirmation of my belief that there’s a lesson in every experience, some valuable nugget of wisdom or awareness or understanding or self-knowledge. Because of the power of this belief, even the hardest, saddest, most frightening times in my life have served me well as the rough ore from which I have mined some precious gems. All around me are potential teachers, every encounter a lesson if I am only willing to keep myself open to this.
Though it may be easy to dismiss my philosophy as the workings of a mind bent in rather mystical ways, quantum physics reveals that to an astonishing (even disturbing) extent, how we focus our attention has tremendous impact on the shape of our reality, right down to altering how subatomic particles behave. Commenting on a quantum physics experiment in which the behavior of electrons in an environment varied depending upon what the observer was trying to measure, Wheeler stated, “The observer is inescapably promoted to participator. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.” The very moment that we ask “What can I learn?” we become participants and not merely spectators.
PARTICIPATING IN THE UNIVERSE
To ask “What can I learn from you?” is to open the door to an entire world of possibility in which our dogs can and do serve as our teachers. This is a participatory universe, and this simple question declares our willingness to participate in a very specific way. Much earlier in this book, I wrote that in order to hear what your dog might have to say, you have to take the first critical step of accepting that he has something of value to communicate to you. Block that most fundamental belief, and chances are good that even if your dog began speaking to you in plummy, cultured tones and the queen’s own English, you’d not be able to hear him. Equally so, until we have opened ourselves to an acceptance of the spiritual being in canine form we may block up our souls’ ears. If our assumptions about dogs and other animals do not include the possibility that these are voices that might carry important messages for our lives, then we may not be able to hear them. Not because they are speaking in mysterious ways beyond our comprehension, but because we have blocked ourselves to the possibility that there’s something to be heard.
When we ask “What can I learn from you?” we can suddenly hear and see in new ways. What was once unintelligible or meaningless becomes fraught with potential, pregnant with possibilities. A whole new world of communicating with our dogs and other animals unfolds before us. And something amazing happens. You see more than you ever did before, and the animal now responds in ways you did not expect were possible, ways you did not anticipate or even ways you had hoped for but could never elicit before this. Inevitably, you come to wonder what exactly has brought about this change. Perhaps, you ask yourself, the animals have sensed this change in you and responded by offering more? Have the animals changed, or—uneasy possibility—have they always been this way? My experience is that both are true. The animals in and of themselves are exactly as they have been all along, just as waterfalls roar whether we stand at the cliff’s edge or not. At the same time, we are not who we have been all along, which in turn means that in the context of their relationship with us, the animals are also in a new place. One simple question shifts the entire spirit of what happens between us and an animal. We find ourselves living the truth of the Arapaho saying, “When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us.”
This wondrous and good change is the result of a profound shift within us. “We create ourselves by how we invest the energy of our attention,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Finding Flow. A shift in our focus, a new or renewed investment of our life energy—our attention—creates new realities. Our focus alters our perceptions, our perceptions inform and alter our behavior, our behavior in turn affects the experience and behavior of others, and we then have new perceptions, which lead to shifts in our behavior. And so it is that we create our reality. New questions arise, because new choices present themselves. Both we and our dogs have new options for how we will behave. We encounter new responses; we offer new opportunities.
When Badger came to live with us, he had a repertoire of behaviors that, though few in number, had been successful ones, at least in his experience thus far. Asked to do something he found unpleasant or senseless, he would simply stiffen and show his teeth, an impressive dental display against his dark brindle face. Until meeting me, this had proven to be a rather successful ploy; most folks he had known would simply back off instantly.
To Badger’s great puzzlement, I did not respond to these toothy warnings as he expected I might. Though I acknowledged with some sympathy how difficult he was finding my requests, I did not back away. Initially, he seemed to think that I had inexplicable moments of intense density that left me unable to comprehend his very clear signals. Puzzled by my bouts of stupidity, it occurred to him that perhaps he needed to emphasize his point, and he did so by peeling his lips so far back from his teeth that I thought the lips might meet atop his muzzle. (His response would have been comical if not for the grim reality that this behavior, in most homes, might have resulted in his death as an aggressive dog.) That failing as well, he would usually sigh and cooperate, pleased though a bit puzzled by my enthusiastic praise and the tasty rewards. This was not how he thought the world worked, but as time passed, the very fact that I did not respond in the usual ways led to new possibilities of how Badger could respond. He still has his moments where he grits his teeth and resists, still flashes his teeth at us in annoyance from time to time. These are, after all, old habits with a long history of success behind them. Slowly but surely, replacing these habitual responses is a new thoughtfulness, a pause to consider what’s being asked, a weighing of how persistently we’ll ask, and finally, a cooperation that may be grudging but that is, most of the time, voluntary.
In opening to the possibility that more may exist, we have primed ourselves to a greater receptivity of what has always been before us. It is as if we were comic figures, stooges groping in the dark and claiming that we cannot see—only to realize that we had our eyes closed. When our eyes are open, new options spring into existence, and from that moment on, our rel
ationships with our animals take on new dimensions and greater depth.
This is not a painless or certain process. New is not synonymous with better, and exploration is at times tiring and confusing. Though the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and others around us is a welcome one, it is not without price. We are held accountable for what we know. Nothing more, nothing less. But with each increase of understanding, awareness and knowledge comes a corresponding increase in responsibility. Weary at times of this new responsibility, we may long for the old, familiar way that did not require so much of us, and we may forget that it was some lack, some unease within us that prompted us to crack open the door of possibility and let in the light from this new world. Slowly, with stumbles and wrong turns, we begin to find our way and more easily shoulder the responsibility.
And as we learn to walk in this newfound awareness, we must be careful. Included within the possibilities that lay before us is also the possibility that we will mistake the grace within the message for the goodness of the messenger, confuse the value of the lesson with adoration of the teacher.
SAINTS NEVER NEED HOUSEBREAKING
Acknowledging and honoring our dogs as our teachers does not mean that we place them on pedestals where they can do no wrong. If we do this, then we have missed the Buddha nature of the dog—missed the entire point that, as a Zen saying notes, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” Life is an oddly complex blend of the lofty and the laundry, an ongoing tug-of-war between the magnificent heights our spirits may soar toward and the mundane realities of more earthbound realities like grumbling tummies and a need for a warm, dry place to sleep. And while it is quite interesting, and I believe important, to live with an awareness that the dogs at our feet are spiritual beings, just as we are, just as the birds outside our window are, we are also bound to acknowledge that these spirits are held in physical form. I may find great joy in contemplation of Grizzly’s spirit, but I also must teach him not to vault from the open car door until asked. Pondering her dog nature does not relieve me of the responsibility for trimming Bird’s nails or teaching her good manners. Left unsupervised or uneducated, these generous, kind spirits we call dogs may rummage through your garbage, chase and perhaps even kill other animals, clean the litter box for you, roll in dead things, and in short, live life by very canine guidelines.
While I remain grateful for what dogs make possible in my life, and while I welcome the lessons they have to bring, I will not put them on a pedestal as beings superior to me. The only thing that belongs on a pedestal is a completed work, something finished, done, as good as it can ever be. No living being deserves confinement in such a lifeless space; it is not something you do to anyone you love. Placing anyone on a pedestal implies sainthood, something possible only with finished lives, lives that weighed as a sum total were found to be far more heavily weighed toward the good and light than the lives of most. While many dogs I know can draw their last breath and have the people who knew them say without hesitation that the dog lived a blameless life, this kind of sainthood is possible only when a life is over, when the mistakes have been made and the lessons learned. If we assign them sainthood before their lives are completed, before we have lowered them into the grave or cast their ashes to the winds, then we have blocked ourselves from participating in the dynamic flow of their lives, and we may be denying our own responsibility as participants in their lives.
An animal to whom we have attributed sainthood or moral superiority would not need—nor would we dare to apply—reminders that living with humans requires certain manners, agreement to abide by (what must seem bizarre) rules, and an inhibition of many natural behaviors. A balanced relationship of respect, trust and compromise is not possible with a saint, nor is there any sense in such a relationship of the responsibilities that we have for providing leadership and supervision. And this is a very real danger of viewing animals as pure, wholly good and morally superior to us: We will fail them terribly precisely because we have not honored who they are as complete beings but have merely placed them on a pedestal so that we might admire what we would like them to be. No pedestal, however generously sized, permits freedom.
The real animal, a spirit housed in physical form, inhabits the real world just as we do. However wise the spirits may be that inhabit our dogs’ bodies, we cannot forget that these are not saints, but souls here with us in dog form, not as wild wolves or even the sparrows that flit outside our windows without need of our assistance or guidance.
REACHING FOR THE GOD IN ALL
I have developed an odd form of dyslexia in which meaning to type god I instead type dog. For a while, I brushed it off as simply a bizarre habit born of a year where I wrote almost daily about dogs. That was followed by a phase where I actually grew mildly concerned that I was losing my grip on reality and perhaps taking the topic of dogs far more seriously than I ought. Looking for and finding reasonable balance in my life, I was able to dismiss this concern. I ended up pondering the notion flippantly posed by a friend: What if dog is simply an anagram for God? I do not think my friend meant for me to actually spend time contemplating this, but I have. What if God is dog, and dog is God? Upon some contemplation, I discovered that in my mind’s eye I could easily replace the image of God as a fierce, bearded old man with the vision of a kindly eyed, tail-wagging, absolutely immense dog. Of all animals with which I am familiar, the dog best embodies the godlike qualities of unconditional acceptance, forgiveness and a deep love for humankind.
This notion of dog/God is not as big a leap or as profound a sign of madness as it might seem. To steal from the title of Machaelle Wright’s book, I have long tried to behave as if the God in all things mattered, honoring the expression of God wherever I meet it, however it is expressed, whether in the beauty of an orb weaver’s web or the dark depths of a dog’s eyes. A long, long time ago, walking a coonhound into Sunday school, I believed as I do now that we are all creatures and creations of the same mighty force. As mystic Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “By means of all created things without exception, the divine assaults us, penetrates us and molds us.” Call it soul, the God force, spirit or divine—name it what you will, it is precisely this unnameable thing that floods us with the joy and peace we feel in our most intimate connections. It is this that opens us to new—even ecstatic—experiences of our world and ourselves and others around us.
It is, I realize, one thing to acknowledge our dogs as thinking, feeling, sentient beings. Anyone who spends their days in the company of dogs cannot help but become aware that though they may feel and think differently than we do, dogs do think and they do feel. (There are, of course, those who refuse to grant this, and I can only assume that at this point, they’ve long ago given up this book as the work of a science-challenged mystic.) But even for those who would readily agree that dogs do think and feel, taking the next step into an acknowledgment of the dog as a spiritual being may be, for some readers, difficult to get their minds around.
“Let me get this straight,” some might say with considerable skepticism and no small degree of alarm that perhaps I’m really treading water a little too far out from the shore. “Are you saying the goofball who is lying at my feet contentedly squeaking a rubber hamburger over and over is a spiritual being?” Or perhaps your four-legged spiritual being is out in the yard rolling on her back, or maybe she’s barking at a squirrel or rummaging through the bathroom garbage or licking herself in a most indelicate way. This is a spiritual being who may have profound, important lessons to teach us?
My answer is an unequivocal yes.
We are made uneasy by this idea, mostly because we would prefer that our spiritual teachers and guides be different from us. There is an expectation (one not always articulated or even acknowledged) that any who might serve as our spiritual guides be purer, wiser, even superior in some way to us. We’d prefer important spiritual lessons and messages be delivered to us via such astonishing and amazing mediums as burning bushes or honest-to-goodness angels,
not from Mary Lou at the grocery store or Tony clown at the dry cleaners and certainly not from a being who chases cats, adores liver and drinks out of the toilet.
We are not, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes in her book Close to the Bone, human beings on a spiritual path but spiritual beings on a human path. This distinction offers the implication that spiritual beings might be on other, nonhuman paths, an implication supported by the most enduring human beliefs that we are not just in the world but woven into its very fabric as are all other beings. If we can accept that what connects us is far greater than anything that separates us, the differences in how we physically house this spirit become relatively unimportant. The Sioux believe “in all things and with all things, we are relatives.”
I am not going to attempt to convince any reader that God resides within the dog at their feet and the cat next door and the bird singing outside their window and the tree across the street. I can only state that I believe it is so, and because I believe it is so, my experience of what happens when I am with the dog at my feet is, of necessity, different from the experience of someone who believes that a dog is nothing more than a lovable jumble of instinct and conditioned responses. I have no doubts that the dogs sprawled at my feet are spiritual beings, no more than I doubt that my husband who sits sipping his coffee and reading a magazine is a spiritual being. Gazing out the window at the ancient maple just outside the back door, I would say that this tree also contains a spirit. And the owl who perches on a fence post beneath the maple, waiting for the day to yield to a familiar, deepening darkness—he too is a being of spirit. We are, all of us, merely different-shaped containers, each holding for a brief while a small measure of the universe.
Bones Would Rain from the Sky Page 34
