My beloved 11 year old daughter is now in doggie heaven, chasing butterflies, ground squirrels, rabbits and scratching furiously in the celestial dirt for “divine” insects. She has found her brother and sister, also delightful dachshunds, and they are comparing notes with each other about the parental “mistakes” they were subjected to down here. In a text I just received, she told me that all of them completely forgive us and love us dearly. She also told me she already put in my request with Dog that a place be reserved for me and their mother as “Doggie heaven” sounds like a better idea to both of us! Lassie told her to tell us that She would “keep us in mind.”
I had a nice talk with this darling little girl this morning before we took her to the vet. I told her how she had continued the lesson in loving in which her two predecessors had already done the “heavy lifting.” For I had learned through them, and in my marriage to their mother, that love is not so much a thing that you “do” as it is something that you are “open to” and thus receive. A 13th century Persian poet Rumi said it is what happens when you discard all the barriers you have constructed to keep it from happening.
With these three doggies working in consort with their mother for the past three decades I have learned that the heart offers evocative potential, an infinite source of riches which cannot be accessed without the ability to recognize the resistance that Rumi noted. When the heart is open…Toni Morrison described it as “petal open”… it is full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare) and a Divine work of art like a puppy, or a delicate tulip, or a beautiful sunset, or a lovely wife can “evoke” a Divinity that has always been there. This experience is what the spiritual tradition of my background termed, “the Spirit of God”; and that notion is now profoundly meaningful to me.
There is an absence in my soul this afternoon. This absence can be described as an “Absence” for it is during loss that we can feel a dimension of our heart that is closely akin to the Divine. For this experience can bring to our awareness…on a deeply emotional and experiential level…the profound connection that we can have with the whole of this world if we find the courage to “lose our mind and come to our senses.” (Fritz Perls, saw “senses” as the “feeling” dimension of human experience.)
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