Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (44 page)

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 Sundav 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 down 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.
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.
cold noses, No wings

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 naive 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
cold noses, No wings

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 bred 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