Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (43 page)

types.
What we choose to look for heavily influences what
we will see. Someone seeking evidence of God's
mercy or goodness will see it; someone seeking the
faithlessness of men will find it. If all we look for
is proof that animals are little more than lovable,
pleasant jumbles of instinct
and conditioned behaviors, then that is all we will be able
to see. Believe in something more, and you risk being
scoffed at as naive, sentimental, foolish,
irrational. Why do these scoffs frighten us so? The
scoffers do not enlarge us or enrich our lives, and
yet we fear them and give them the power to make us shy
away from what our hearts pull us toward. Hungry
for connections with others, reaching outward from ourselves from the
moment of our birth, we somehow still manage to build
walls between us and those around us, to draw the blinds and,
huddled in the lonely darkness we have created for ourselves,
sadly wish for more.
Whether my beliefs about animals are a delusion
I've created for myself or an acknowledgment of what
actually exists is fairly irrelevant. I am
not as concerned with why I may believe what I
believe so much as I am with the effects of what I
believe. The effects of believing as I do
are good ones, ones that enlarge me, make me kinder,
more patient, more forgiving, more compassionate, more loving.
In short, I am a better human being for having
loved dogs and more specifically because of the ways that my
personal beliefs shape the expression of that love.
Ultimately, this belief in dogs as cold-nosed
angels has pushed me hard to explore myself and
to clear away more and more of the obstacles within me that
prevent life and love from flowing unimpeded through me.
Raised with the life philosophy that everything happens
for a reason, I don't pretend to understand the reason
or purpose behind all that happens in my world, but I
have faith that there is a grand design at work.
Choosing as I do to look for evidence of such a grand
design, I cannot help but find it. And what I also
find, perhaps only because I choose to look for it, is
confirmation of my belief that there's a lesson in every
experience, some valuable nugget of wisdom or
awareness or understanding or self-knowledge. Because of the power of
this belief, even the hardest, saddest, most frightening
times in my life have served me well as the rough ore
from which I have mined some precious gems. All around
me are potential teachers, every encounter a lesson
if I am only willing to keep myself open to this.

Though it may be easy to dismiss my
philosophy as the workings of a mind bent in rather
mystical ways, quantum physics reveals that
to an astonishing (even disturbing) extent, how we
focus our attention has
cold noses, No wings

tremendous impact on the shape of our reality, right
down to altering how subatomic particles behave.
Commenting on a quantum physics experiment in which the
behavior of electrons in an environment varied
depending upon what the observer was trying to measure,
Wheeler stated, "The observer is inescapably
promoted to participator. In some strange sense,
this is a participatory universe." The very moment that
we ask "What can I learn?" we become
participants and not merely spectators.
participating in the universe
To ask "What can I learn from you?" is to open the
door to an entire world of possibility in which our
dogs can and do serve as our teachers. This is a
participatory universe, and this simple question declares
our willingness to participate in a very specific
way. Much earlier in this book, I wrote that in
order to hear what your dog might have to say, you have
to take the first critical step of accepting
that he has something of value to communicate to you.
Block that most fundamental belief, and chances are
good that even if your dog began speaking to you in
plummy, cultured tones and the queen's own
English, you'd not be able to hear him. Equally so,
until we have opened ourselves to an acceptance of the
spiritual being in canine form we may block up our
souls' ears. If our assumptions about dogs and
other animals do not include the possibility that these
are voices that might carry important messages
for our lives, then we may not be able to hear them. Not
because they are speaking in mysterious ways beyond our
comprehension, but because we have blocked ourselves to the
possibility that there's something to be heard.
When we ask "What can I learn from you?" we can
suddenly hear and see in new ways. What was once
unintelligible or meaningless becomes fraught with
potential, pregnant with possibilities. A
whole new world of communicating with our dogs and other
animals unfolds before us. And something amazing
happens. You see more than you ever did before, and the
animal now responds in ways you did not expect
were possible, ways you did not anticipate or even
ways you had hoped for but could

never elicit before this. Inevitably, you come to wonder
what exactly has brought about this change. Perhaps, you
ask yourself, the animals have sensed this change in you and
responded by offering more? Have the animals changed,
or-uneasy possibility-have they always been this way?
My experience is that both are true. The animals
in and of themselves are exactly as they have been all
along, just as waterfalls roar whether we stand at the
cliff's edge or not. At the same time, we are not
who we have been all along, which in turn means that in
the context of their relationship with us, the animals are
also in a new place. One simple question shifts the
entire spirit of what happens between us and an animal.
We find ourselves living the truth of the Arapaho
saying, "When we show our respect for other living
things, they respond with respect for us."
This wondrous and good change is the result of a
profound shift within us. "We create ourselves by how we
invest the energy of our attention," Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Finding Flow.
A shift in our focus, a new or renewed
investment of our life energy-our attention-creates
new realities. Our focus alters our
perceptions, our perceptions inform and alter
our behavior, our behavior in turn affects the
experience and behavior of others, and we then have new
perceptions, which lead to shifts in our behavior. And
so it is that we create our reality. New questions
arise, because new choices present themselves. Both we
and our dogs have new options for how we will behave.
We encounter new responses; we offer new
opportunities.
When Badger came to live with us, he had a
repertoire of behaviors that, though few in number,
had been successful ones, at least in his experience
thus far. Asked to do something he found unpleasant
or senseless, he would simply stiffen and show his
teeth, an impressive dental display against his
dark brindle face. Until meeting me, this had
proven to be a rather successful ploy; most folks
he had known would simply back off instantly.
To Badger's great puzzlement, I did not
respond to these toothy warnings as he expected I
might. Though I acknowledged with some sympathy how
difficult he was finding my requests, I did not
back away. Initially, he seemed to think that I
had inexplicable moments of intense density that left
me unable to comprehend his very clear signals.

Puzzled by my bouts of stupidity, it occurred to him that perhaps
he needed to emphasize his point, and he did so
by peeling his lips so far back from his teeth that I
thought the lips might meet atop his muzzle.
(his response would have been comical if not for the
grim reality that this behavior, in most homes,
might have resulted in his death as an aggressive
dog.] That failing as well, he would usually sigh
and cooperate, pleased though a bit puzzled by my
enthusiastic praise and the tasty rewards. This was not
how he thought the world worked, but as time passed, the very
fact that I did not respond in the usual ways
led to new possibilities of how Badger could
respond. He still has his moments where he grits his
teeth and resists, still flashes his teeth at us in
annoyance from time to time. These are, after all, old
habits with a long history of success behind them.
Slowly but surely, replacing these habitual
responses is a new thoughtfulness, a pause
to consider what's being asked, a weighing of how
persistently we'll ask, and finally, a cooperation that
may be grudging but that is, most of the time,
voluntary.
In opening to the possibility that more may exist, we have
primed ourselves to a greater receptivity of what has
always been before us. It is as if we were comic
figures, stooges groping in the dark and claiming that
we cannot see-only to realize that we had our eyes
closed. When our eyes are open, new options
spring into existence, and from that moment on, our
relationships with our animals take on new
dimensions and greater depth.
This is not a painless or certain process.
New is not synonymous with
better,
and exploration is at times tiring and confusing. Though
the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and others around
us is a welcome one, it is not without price. We
are held accountable for what we know. Nothing more,
nothing less. But with each increase of understanding,
awareness and knowledge comes a corresponding increase in
responsibility. Weary at times of this new
responsibility, we may long for the old,
familiar way that did not require so much of us, and
we may forget that it was some lack, some unease within
us that prompted us to crack open the door of

possibility and let in the light from this new
world. Slowly, with stumbles and wrong turns, we begin
to find our way and more easily shoulder the
responsibility.
And as we learn to walk in this newfound awareness, we
must be
careful. Included within the possibilities that lay
before us is also the possibility that we will mistake the
grace within the message for the goodness of the messenger,
confuse the value of the lesson with adoration of the
teacher.
saints never need housebreaking
Acknowledging and honoring our dogs as our teachers
does not mean that we place them on pedestals where
they can do no wrong. If we do this, then we have
missed the Buddha nature of the dog-missed the
entire point that, as a Zen saying notes, "After the
ecstasy, the laundry." Life is an oddly
complex blend of the lofty and the laundry, an ongoing
tug-of-war between the magnificent heights our spirits
may soar toward and the mundane realities of more
earthbound realities like grumbling tummies and a need
for a warm, dry place to sleep. And while it is quite
interesting, and I believe important, to live with
an awareness that the dogs at our feet are
spiritual beings, just as we are, just as the birds outside
our window are, we are also bound to acknowledge that these
spirits are held in physical form. I may find
great joy in contemplation of Grizzly's spirit, but I
also must teach him not to vault from the open car door
until asked. Pondering her dog nature does not
relieve me of the responsibility for trimming
Bird's nails or teaching her good manners.
Left unsupervised or uneducated, these generous,
kind spirits we call dogs may rummage through your
garbage, chase and perhaps even kill other animals,
clean the litter box for you, roll in dead things, and
in short, live life by very canine guidelines.
While I remain grateful for what dogs make
possible in my life, and while I welcome the
lessons they have to bring, I will not put them on a
pedestal as beings superior to me. The only thing that
belongs on a pedestal is a completed work, something
finished, done, as good as it can ever be. No living
being deserves confinement in such a lifeless space; it
is not something you do to anyone you love. Placing
anyone on a pedestal implies sainthood, something
possible only with finished lives, lives that weighed
as a sum total were found to be far more heavily

weighed toward the good and light than the
lives of most. While many
dogs I know can draw their last breath and have the people who
knew them say without hesitation that the dog lived a
blameless life, this kind of sainthood is possible
only when a life is over, when the mistakes have
been made and the lessons learned. If we assign
them sainthood before their lives are completed, before we
have lowered them into the grave or cast their ashes to the
winds, then we have blocked ourselves from participating in
the dynamic flow of their lives, and we may be
denying our own responsibility as participants in
their lives.
An animal to whom we have attributed sainthood
or moral superiority would not need-nor would we
dare to apply-reminders that living with humans
requires certain manners, agreement to abide by
(what must seem bizarre) rules, and an inhibition
of many natural behaviors. A balanced
relationship of respect, trust and compromise is not
possible with a saint, nor is there any sense in such
a relationship of the responsibilities that we have for
providing leadership and supervision. And this is a very
real danger of viewing animals as pure,
wholly good and morally superior to us: We will fail
them terribly precisely because we have not honored who
they are as complete beings but have merely placed them on
a pedestal so that we might admire what we would like
them to be. No pedestal, however generously sized,
permits freedom.
The real animal, a spirit housed in physical form,
inhabits the real world just as we do. However wise the
spirits may be that inhabit our dogs' bodies, we
cannot forget that these are not saints, but souls here with us in
dog form, not as wild wolves or even the sparrows
that flit outside our windows without need of our
assistance or guidance.
reaching for the god in all
I have developed an odd form of dyslexia in which
meaning to type god I instead type dog.
For a while, I brushed it off as simply a
bizarre habit born of a year where I wrote almost
daily about dogs. That was followed by a phase where
I actually grew mildly concerned that I was losing
my grip on reality and perhaps taking the topic of