Summer Dog Days
I’ve been house sitting for the past week, caring for a dear friend’s dogs and chickens while they enjoy some time back home in the Midwest. I do admit to a small jealousy—long, lazy summer days and nights at the lake with deep fried cheese sticks sounds perfect right about now.
But I’m here. And I’m learning so much from these dogs, these gentle, persistent teachers. I turn forty in a few short months, but still, there is so much to learn. They don’t hesitate to dive right in, no syllabus provided.
This morning on our walk, I had a moment of recognition, my arms stretched out awkwardly. The younger dog was pulling me ahead, eager to to move along and smell the next pile of leaves. The older dog pulled in the opposite direction, resisting my encouragements to catch up with her younger sibling. I gave a gentle tug, not too hard. She is 16, after all—she’s earned the right to stop at whatever tree she wants, I guess.
Come on, Olive, let’s go.
No, she tells me, her weary bones holding firm despite increasing frailty. I’m right here, in this moment, smelling this tree, thank you. Jane can wait. Can you hear the eye roll?
So I wait, caught in the crosshairs of these competing endeavors—to leap ahead or to stay grounded in the present moment, however full of ordinary, even uninteresting muck it may be. I feel the imbalance, the tension in the leashes pulling me this way and that. I notice a small annoyance creep up: Can’t we just all walk along nicely at the same pace, Goldilocks style? Maybe I should have left the older dog home so I could take a brisk walk with the younger one. Frankly, I prefer the pace of the older dog. I’m not a trail runner, thank you very much.
In that moment, arms outstretched to the full spectrum of canine desire and ambition (which, let’s be honest, does not differ all that much from human desire or ambition), I just have to laugh. Another dog walker passed us and we smile, understanding that sometimes, it’s easier just to follow their whims. What’s the saying, ride the horse in the direction it’s going? How does that work again, exactly?
Here I’ve been this summer, sitting in a season of mud and feeling rather stuck, uninspired, and not particularly motivated to do much about it other than nap it off and hope eventually the mud washes away. I suppose it will, eventually. Or maybe not.
But these dogs show me that there are a thousand ways to move through life, none of them right or wrong. They just show up to the moment with their authentic selves.
I want to run, run, run.
I want to stop and smell this rock. Now this one. And wait, now this one.
They don’t beat themselves up over which is the better approach, or what others will think about their choice, whether it will hurt their career, or whether they’ll regret whatever choice they made. They are, as Mary Oliver writes, letting their soft animal body love what they love.
And what if I don’t actually know that that is right now? My life feels a bit off, unfocused, filled with an overcast grey Oregon fog, as steady as a slippery fish…clear as mud, as the Zen folk like to say. I tell people these days I feel a bit like I did when I was newly postpartum—beyond fatigued (is there a better word for that? I can’t think of one), most days unable to follow a clear train of thought to completion. I drag myself from one moment to the next and sometimes there’s a brief window of clarity when I feel present and grounded, and a lot of the time I feel rather floaty.
Well, probably time to go take another walk with the dogs then. Feel the tug of grounded, unfettered desire. It’s ok to not know where it’s headed. Trust that underneath all the mud, the roots are solid, they’ll hold. I don’t have to decide anything right now. Just show up to this moment.
