Tag Archives: animals
Trustworthy
Sometimes I wonder if I’m cheating by calling my morning sit “meditation”. My mind tends to roam free over my “problems.” Usually first the problem of trying to buy a house, and trying in my mind to fit the available properties into my requirements, and then pleading with myself to let it go and wait for the right thing to happen. It’s not like I can turn these houses over in my mind hard enough to turn them into something they’re not.
Continue reading TrustworthyFeed Me
The Pine Siskens showed up this week. I’d heard that it was an irruption year, but this is the first I’ve seen them during morning meditation.
While I watched yesterday, a House Finch, a bit larger than the siskens, approached them and began making what seemed to be begging motions, mouth open, at them, while they grabbed sunflower chips off the fence.
It seemed too early for the finch to be a juvenile. Tonight I consulted the Sonoma County Bird Breeding Atlas and see that April 6 is usually the first nesting date, so it was indeed an adult.
It’s funny to me. Why not? Who doesn’t want to be a baby sometime? Maybe even the finches grow weary of being a grownup.
Shelter in place
The new pup is as sweet as the young Laika was, and maybe twice as stubborn. Liesl will require me to be stronger, another good teacher of boundaries. Being so much smaller, though, she’s easier in many respects…I can simply pick her up, and she travels well. If we ever get to travel again.
Continue reading Shelter in placeAnimals Among Us
I’m luckier than most, I suspect. I’ve loved animals my whole life, but I grew up understanding that to take them in as pets, to take delight in delighting them, is a privilege. So when I came to Ghana, I was not shocked or even surprised to see how animals are often treated here.
Continue reading Animals Among Us
Summer’s Cauldron
The days are roaring forward towards the summer solstice, almost without me some days it seems. No word from the PC yet about medical clearance. I try not to think about it too much, but hope to hear something in the next few weeks; I’m at the average-time-of-wait for that.
Why I Like Raptors
Fox Medicine
Not long after my sister was born, when I was two, my parents heard that a mother fox had been killed nearby and there was a litter of fox kits. My mother bundled me up so Dad could take me to see them. Somehow, we came home with one of the kits. It’s easy to imagine a toddler me, babbling with delight over the baby foxes, and somehow also easy to imagine my father giving in to the impulse to bring one home with us. Kippy became a pet.
There was also a puppy, “my” dog, Puff. They tell me that I would shuffle around the house in my footed pajamas, Kippy hanging onto one ankle and Puff the other, growling and tugging furiously as I dragged them over the hardwood floor, laughing.
As Kippy got older, she was put away after each playtime, into a pen on the screened-in porch. One day as Mom was putting her back in the pen, Kippy bit my mom. After that, Kippy had to live in a pen in the garage, and our play times were over. When I was five, we moved to another house. Kippy did not come with us. (You knew it wasn’t going to end well, didn’t you?)
I don’t have a really conscious memory, in the usual sense, of playing with Kippy. But I know that there are feelings I have when I remember that time. Feelings of warmth, of sunlight on wood floor, and a very strong sense of play. I have an unmistakable sense of hearing a sudden noise, and all three of us turning our heads towards it. It was right and good back then to be a sensitive creature. Fox is able to remain unseen in plain view, the protector of the family. As you might suspect, I have great affinity for the fox clan.
I can’t tell you why I need wild nature, quiet places, and connection with the furred and the feathered. I only know that I do, and I need to keep remembering and honoring that, and to reject the guilt I sometimes feel over needing that as the daughter of people who never got such choices in life. I need to remember to pull myself away from the computer, the chores, the endless parade of crap that I get entangled with, my futile worrying and planning and arranging to make everything come out my way, in constant search of instant gratification or ego strokes. To get outside…out out out.
There used to be a me who had no trouble living in the here and now, a me who played with a fox and a dog, a me who was perfectly content in a perfect world.
She’s still there sometimes; I find her maybe watching a family of White-tailed Kites in a tree, or listening to the delicate sound of pelican wings overhead. She is the best part of me.
Something for the Child Within
During my first year or so of therapy, I used to dread each appointment. I wanted to go, but I still dreaded it. I’d spend a fair amount of time thinking about what subject I might want to bring up and talk about. I was, I guess, trying to be in control of it all.
About three months into it, my shrink suggested that I spend some time thinking about the question of “what the child within wants.” I figured I knew the answer already. We want love, right? We want to be held, we want affection. The answers seemed trite and unhelpful.
The next week, I was back in the chair and started, as usual, trying to take control of things. But something happened, and I veered off-course. I heard myself saying, without any plan, “You know you said to think about what the child within wants? I think it wants a dog.”
I had been thinking a lot about a coworker’s dog, a big affectionate chocolate lab. Another coworker brought in a puppy that belonged to a friend. The happiest parts of my days were when I could hang out with those dogs.
My shrink didn’t tell me to go out and get a dog. He listened to my exhaustive list of reasons why it probably wouldn’t work to get a dog. He did make a suggestion: go to the pound and look at the dogs there. Don’t go to get a dog, go to observe your feelings. Just see how it feels.
And so I did. I went to the then-new shelter on Route 12 and looked around. I didn’t pursue adopting any or filling out any forms, I just tried to see how it felt. I still have a journal entry from it. I wrote that when I left, my heart was beating fast and I was feeling guilty for not telling my husband that I planned to go look or that I was interested in this at all.
I spent some more time with the idea, and eventually did get up the nerve to begin talking about it. Things feel into place; the landlord and the husband both approved. I started building a fence.
On a Saturday morning, April 8, 2006, we headed for Ukiah to see a dog named Sebastien. I remember being terribly hungover. When we arrived, we found that Sebastien had just been adopted, so we looked at Bart. Bart wanted nothing to do with us, so the staff asked me some questions, and came back with “Roxy“, a very scared Shar-pei/Black Lab mix.
The rest, as they say, is history. And tomorrow, I will have to give my beautiful, confident Laika Lou a few extra treats to celebrate our four years together so far.
I hope she is happy here; the past year has been tough, and I’ve asked a lot of her.
Sometimes I’m so busy doing all the responsible adult things I must do, that I forget that she might like a little attention.
I forget to play. I forget to stop and stretch. I forget that everyone needs to run hard once in a while and then have a little nap in the sun.
And when I forget, she’s there to remind me. A delight to both the child and the adult within.