March, Fourth week :: 2021
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The new dog, Laika, is a little sensitive. She’s supposed to go to work with my daughter every day but a vet’s office is full of strange dogs and people and noises that make her anxious, so she has to stay home with the rest of us on workdays. I’m not really a dog person, or rather, I like dogs just fine when they belong to other people and not so much when they are my responsibility, but for most of the day Laika is quiet and sleepy and as unobtrusive as the cats, so we get along fine. A couple of times a day she stares at me with the saddest possible eyes until I take her out to the (unfenced) woods so she can explore without getting lost. On Laika-days I am forced out of my homebody-ness and out under the trees in all kinds of weather, something I’ve never been able to do consistently by my own willpower. Which means the dog that I did not really want has become a facilitator of something important for me.
Today while we were tramping around in a different part of the woods I found four plastic jugs full of water tied together with baling wire and buried in the leaf litter near a downed tree. There were rumors around town last year that a couple of homeless men had been sleeping in the old gravel mine that butts up against our property. This is the size of town that knows exactly who the two homeless men are and how they ended up sleeping in the old gravel mine, so I had an instant mental image of those jugs slung over the back of a particular bike on their way to and from town. No one had disturbed the buried jugs for some time, so while it’s mildly upsetting to think of strangers (neighbors?) sleeping in my backyard, I wasn’t really worried as I dug them out. I was wondering instead where the men are now as I haven’t seen them for months. The plague year has closed me in on all sides, put me on the defense, outstretched my compassion.
This week I was listening to Bayo Akomolafe talk about this feeling of overwhelm and how continually focusing on how to solve the world’s problems may be limiting us. Perhaps, he asserts, it is possible to use uncertainty instead. I have plenty of practice with uncertainty: I don’t know what to do about the water bottles in the woods or my homeless neighbors or gun violence or species die-off or the mess of late-stage capitalism. But when Laika draws me out under the sky and the rain hits our skin and the squirrels dash through the Fir branches and the Cedar shelters this tiny cache of human need I am suddenly aware of my connection to this great, groaning, speaking, moving Being that is Us, our world. “This world is promiscuous,” Akomolafe says, “it dances here and there, and new paths are always emerging.” It is in the listening, the connection, the waiting, he asserts, that we may be able to see the new ways of healing the world is devising for itself. Our culture abhors an unsolved problem, knows only the success of production and action, but for centuries there have been people who faced the world’s needs by retreating to lonely places to pray or chant or learn from the land. Maybe my daily visits to the trees are tapping into that quiet energy, maybe this nervous, sensitive dog that needs the woods is a deep calling to come away and learn. If so, I say yes.
Gathered from this week:
~ Robins - by Peter Johnston. A lovely little film that will help you exhale.
~ Hedgespoken Picturehouse - Are you tired of streaming, polished, image-heavy stories yet? Tom Hirons and Rima Staines have brought their traveling, off-grid, story caravan online for live storytelling. I haven’t listened/watched this yet, but I have plans for tonight with a glass of wine and my pjs. UPDATE: I listened this evening and it is marvelous! <3
Don’t miss Rima Staines’ amazing artwork either.
~Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners
I hope you find some quiet places for your soul this week. And as it was Mr. Rogers’ birthday on Saturday, let me just say, “I like you just the way you are.”
Peace and love,
tonia
