High-res version

i lost my dog again today while we were out on our morning walk.  she’s sitting here with me now–snoggled up against the couch, laying on her side, head on the cool concrete floor, panting contentedly–but an hour ago, it was a shit show.

we got this dog almost a year ago.  friends who lived in the country had come upon her while they were driving home from the grocery store.  she was meandering along the side of the road, with no particular place to go, as if she were just out for a stroll.  but she was filthy and slight, flea- and tick-ridden, paws raw from wandering.  she was tired.  when my friends spotted her, they pulled the car over, and when they opened their doors, she jumped right in the car.  it seems she was ready to come home, and it was less important where “home” was than that she was ready to be there.

we had just lost our elderly dog a couple months earlier, and we were still plenty full-up with one dog and four cats, but it seemed that we were destined to welcome this wandering girl into our home and our hearts.  we named her padme (which means lotus in sanskrit) because she had grown up from the dregs and blossomed into the light.

at first, it was a struggle to find a balance with her.  although nearly two years old, she remained so puppy-ingrained in her behaviors.  i wondered whether she had ever lived inside a house before.  she was sweet and loving but impudent.  she irked my eight-year-old male dog, hank, to no end and repeatedly found herself at the stern end of a correction.  a couple emergency vet visits ensued, and i nearly lost hope of being able to keep her at several points in the early days.  but keep her we did, and she nudged her way into our hearts and, ultimately, into our beds.  she has been family ever since.

in nearly a year’s time, i’ve worked with her extensively to curb disruptive behaviors both inside and outside the house.  her “enthusiasm” shifts quickly from endearing to upending, and she gets away with a lot because she’s such a love, but i’ve tried mightily to be consistent with her around my needs from her so that we can come to some sort of agreement, however tacit and one-sided it has to be (because of the species differential and all).

lately she’s been especially devious, chewing anything that’s not up on a countertop or fastened to something large.  shoes were an obvious early target so we moved out of sight the ones that hadn’t been mangled.  then there were dolls and stuffed animals left lying around that were subsequently deprived of necessary and irreplaceable body parts like noses and legs.  these lessons were learned painfully but quickly, and we all moved on as a group.  next came rugs and couch cushions, the secreting of which has proved harder to manage.  but i’ve found that she tends toward this destructive behavior only when she’s bored and needs some bustin’-out time.  i reminded myself of this observation this morning as we headed out for our morning walk around the block, just after after cleaning up the bedgraggled bananagram game and neoprene laptop case she had chosen as her most recent victims.

we had just started our walk when i looked down at her and considered a statement from the guided meditation i did last night:  “i am that i am.  i am not the body.  i am not the mind.  i am not the thoughts.  i am a spiritual being.  i am one with god.”  i looked down at the perfect brown spot on the back of her perfectly white head, her pinkish ears bobbing in syncopation with her springy step, and the harness and collar that tethered her to my control, and i wondered what it must feel like to be a soul incarnated in the body of a domesticated animal and, more specifically, this soul incarnated in the body of this domesticated animal.  so much spirit and ingenuity, love and playfulness, all destined to be bound up in a life where those attributes will never be utterly free to manifest.  (yes, these are the types of thoughts i have when i’m out walking my dogs, and, yes, i purposefully leave my phone at home so i can be present with these sorts of thoughts.)

by the time we had gotten mid-way through our walk, we had come to a swath of open field, framed on one side by the street and on the other side by the backs of a row of houses that faced the next street over.  i walked with the dogs a well-considered distance from the street and over a berm and decided to release them from their leashes so they could have a bit of a frolic.  i unhooked hank first, and he leapt joyfully and contentedly in the lengthwise direction of the field.  the instant i unhooked padme, however, i knew i was surrendering to the unknown.  she bolted like a bat outta hell, as my dad used to say, directly back toward the row of houses, finding an alley to chase down, and she was gone.

my first reaction was one of acknowledgement because, in fact, i knew she’d do that.  she’s done it to me so many times before in other locations on other walks, and, on those occasions, i fretted and pouted and worried and angered, only to have her return to me, some minutes later, safe and self-satisfied.

so i waited for a minute or so, to let them enjoy some free roam, and then i whistled to call them back.  needless to say, only one dog returned (the good dog).  so i whistled again, louder this time, and then called padme’s name.  repeatedly.  annoyingly repeatedly.  still nothing.  i felt a flash of heat rush to my head with the fear that she could bolt into the street and be squashed by a car, followed by a wash of calm that she surely knew better than to bolt into the street (having survived on the streets for lord knows how long).  then i agreed with myself to follow her trajectory and see whether i could find her on the other side of the houses.  as hank and i trekked through an alley to the next-over street, i saw no white dog with brown spots.  i called her name again and whistled a bunch of times.  still nothing.

then, out of the corner of my eye, i spied her emerging from one of the back yards.  she was approaching me from across a front lawn, but when she got within ten yards, she saw me, turned on her haunches, and high-tailed it in the other direction.

“ASSHOLE!” i screamed, laughing uncontrollably.

i realized at that moment that we were playing a game in which only one of us was having fun, and i determined immediately to change the dynamic.  now feeling calmed that she was playing in the interstices of the city block and not at all motivated to run into the street, i returned to the berm where i had released her earlier and just sat down in the grass.  hank, on leash, dutifully took a seat beside me, and we both laid down, stared at the sky, and relaxed.  intermittently, i whistled so that padme would hear where i was and know where to find me when she had finished her exploration.

i had been whistling in fits and starts for quite some time before i actually stopped to listen to my whistling patterns.  to my own fascination, i had been whistling one long whistle, followed by three or four shorter whistles, followed by a dozen or more staccato whistles.  sometimes i’d throw in an extra long whistle when i had the chops.  and then it dawned on me what i was doing.  tonight is the first night of yom kippur, and i hadn’t been to synagogue for rosh hashanah so i hadn’t heard the shofar this year.  the pattern of my whistling was mimicking the sounds of the shofar blasts that one is called to make in synagogue.  i was, as it were, blowing my own jewish horn.

the fact of this recognition took me aback and made me even more introspective than i had been earlier in the walk.  i realized that i was sounding a cadence of familiarity, one that had been ritualized long before i was born and one that i had absorbed into my own being so unconsciously that it surfaced precisely at the moment when it was preordained to be annunciated.  it occurred to me only in that moment that the sounding of the shofar might have been designed to accomplish the same goal that i was seeking to accomplish in that moment–the goal of creating a beacon of constancy and familiarity, instituted with integrity and bound together with love and fundamental understanding for those whose to whom its tractor beams might beckon.

today i finally understood, after forty-seven rosh hashanot in this lifetime, that the shofar is the abiding voice of the ultimate patient, loving caregiver who dutifully and consistently announces her everpresence and her unconditional acceptance of those who seek her wisdom and comfort.  she doesn’t chase.  she doesn’t demand.  she doesn’t anger or grow impatient.  she simply sends out her resonant signal, full of understanding and confidence that her message will be received and that those in need of her will find her at the midpoint on the path between their free will and her open heart.

all who wander are not lost.  some of us just need a little off-leash time once in a while.