My 13-year-old son saw me struggling the other morning, working on my mythical blog. He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him he said, “Oh, blogs are easy. You just have to write a little bit about something that happened that day, or something you saw that was funny.” Like I’d lucked out and been given really simple homework, those great gimme assignments where you don’t have to do any research or show your work on a separate piece of paper.
So maybe a blog can be like Reiki. You don’t need to have it all mapped out perfectly and cleanly, you don’t need to be balanced and aware, you just need to start, to sit with the intention to connect to yourself and share from as deep as you can go. We’re designed for this, for sharing, for the spread of wellness. It’s easy.
Our sweet dog, Gryphon, died last week. Gryphon was – seriously, no hyperbole – the nicest dog on the planet and the kindest being I have ever met. He didn’t have an alpha hair on his body, yet seemed to have a patience, a source of strength and calm, that sat – well, okay, lay – in the middle of our family, a compass that always pointed to the truth. Back when I used to work out of my home, he would greet each client when they arrived, sit at their feet and gaze at them with wonder; they’d pet his head, and he’d gently burp, a little doggie shaman release of whatever they might have been holding.
The smell of a dog: pure devotion mixed with the most revolting thing they could find to roll in that day. Now I miss it, and in a horrifying rush I understand who he was. Why didn’t I hug him more? How could I have let him get sick and die? What is the point of all I know if it didn’t prevent me from waking up one morning and realizing too late who had been sleeping on my floor all these years? I get what those eyes were trying to tell me, that I worry about all the wrong things.
At first I felt only the slightest tug in my chest, like a large fish had taken a small sample of bait before dragging the whole boat under. I sat in that awful pause between a very bad thing and my ability to feel it. I felt as though the world had gotten bigger and scarier, my tools looking silly and childish held up to the immensity of the universe. And the universe was not me; I felt separate and afraid, supported only by the structure of all the work I’d done on myself, phantom scaffolding standing sadly on a beach long after the castle made of sand had been washed away. All the wrong things.
For some reason beautiful things happen to me while I’m riding the bus to the city. Something about dropping the reins of my own personal chariot, I suppose. But a few days after Gryphon died I was watching the rock and dirt and scrubby brush of the Waldo Grade go by, and I felt it, a pulsing web of well-intentioned kindness that is the natural intelligence making up this world. My first response was a terrible shame, an awareness that those hands have been trying to help me all this time, not push me under. And even the shame was a result of misunderstanding the nature of things; this ancient love only wanted me to know myself.
This was the music Gryphon had been listening to. This is the ground from which we spring. This is what we are made of, and it is always trying to communicate with us.
Sometimes faith gets lost so you’ll chase after it, like a dutiful dog who suddenly takes off after something wild. You stumble to follow over rocks and tangled roots and plants that make you itch and swell, only to find yourself in an eerie and beautiful land outside of the ordinary. And however long you linger – an hour, 300 years – your heart will be changed by what it has seen, and everything that happens to you from that moment on will be organized around this awareness, whether you choose to suffer in willful amnesia or surrender to the simple truth.
Good dog.
