It's such a great depiction of how growing up around animals changes your life. Just reading it brings me back to when I was a kid trying to teach the kittens to use pencils and chasing the dogs around the house outside until we all collapsed with sheer exhaustion.
I hope that it brings back the same memories for you ... or ... ones similar to mind but from your own past ... you day dreaming about my childhood would be a bit creepy.
The Tao of Dog
By Belinda Recio, Organic Spa magazine
As a writer, I have the good fortune of being able to work at home, which has many advantages. But the greatest advantage, by far, is that I get to spend a lot of time with my dog. At first glance, it might not seem like Spooner is very good for my productivity. After all, he has a persistent habit of periodically interrupting my work by pushing my hands off the keyboard with his snout. Once he succeeds in breaking my concentration, he dives into what is known in dog world as a“play bow.” He lowers the front half of his body onto the ground, keeps his back end raised, and wags his tail like there is no tomorrow. This is dog-speak for “What are you waiting for? Come play with me!” A play bow invitation is very hard to resist, and so I often find myself taking unplanned breaks in the backyard.
As anyone who works at a computer all day knows, sitting at a keyboard has its health risks. Prior to sharing my life with a dog, I didn’t take the breaks my body and mind needed. My body needs to move and stretch, and my senses need engagement with nature. Before I had a dog, I was often so focused on my work that I didn’t even notice the weather, let alone which perennials were blooming or which birds were singing in my own backyard. So much for working at home! I might as well have been confined to a stuffy cubicle for all the attention I was paying to the world. But Spooner reminds me to get outside, breathe some fresh air, soak up some vitamin D,stretch my muscles, and actually notice what’s happening around me. I might spend a little less time at the computer, but the time I do spend working is more productive because the breaks revitalize me. Spooner hasn’t just changed the way I work–he has also changed the way I walk. Although I can appreciate a brisk“power walk” to get my heart rate going, there’s also something to be said for a meandering, Thoreauvian stroll. When we take our daily walks, Spooner looks at, sniffs, listens to, tastes,and touches nearly everything he encounters. Now, I take my cues from him, and when I walk, I try to engage the earthly world with all my senses. Before Spooner, I had become so trapped in my mental abilities of abstraction and analysis that I often forgot to stop and smell the proverbial roses.
This is what dogs–and other animals–do for us: They help us to come to our senses-to regain an honest, primal consciousness based on experience, not abstraction. In her book, Animals in Translation, author Temple Grandin theorizes that one of the big differences between people and animals is that animals don’t have all the complex defense mechanisms that people do. Animals don’t repress their fears, or deny what’s going on around them. Spooner certainly engage scoping strategies (like not making provocative eye contact with big, unfamiliar dogs we encounter), but he doesn’t “lie” to himself about the dog not being there. If I find a chewed-up sneaker and look at Spooner, he doesn’t “pretend” he didn’t do it. Instead, he lowers his head in confession and apology. Though our human world undoubtedly requires a certain amount of pretense and repression in order to cope with the constraints of culture, most of us would benefit from the kind of uncomplicated honesty that dogs practice.
Walking and playing with Spooner helps me gain perspective on what’s really important in life. Spooner wags his tail like there’s no tomorrow, because for him, there really isn’t a tomorrow. For dogs, life is all about the here and now because they are natural Zen masters, living in the moment from the day they are born. Unfortunately, for most of us, it takes a serious crisis before we try to live for today. But dogs can help us to remember that age-old axiom: Worry won’t spare us any sorrow tomorrow, but it will sap today of its joy.
Speaking of joy, I recently had the pleasure of howling with Spooner. I was joking around with him (dogs have a great sense of humor) and started howling. Before I knew it,Spooner tilted his head back in wolfish majesty, pursed his black velvet lips, and let out the most amazing howl. It was so beautiful and primal that it took my breath away, but just for a moment. I then immediately joined him and we howled in harmony for several minutes. Of course, I know that Spooner is not a wolf, but let’s remember that every dog’s lineage goes back to those howling ancestors. Most scientists who study wolves speculate that howling strengthens and reaffirms the social bonds between pack mates. This may be just a theory, but tell that to Spooner, who, once we finished our duet, covered me in big, sloppy dog kisses. The lesson here? Find ways to harmonize with your pack.
There is much we could improve about our health, both psychologically and physically, if we followed the Tao-or way of dog. Perhaps the most important lesson relates to how we treat one another. People tend to forget how much family and friends matter to them. Work deadlines, financial pressures,multi-tasking–these facts of life often prevent us from remembering, let alone expressing, how much other people mean to us. Like dogs, we are pack animals, and most of us really do need a pack to be happy. But unlike dogs, we often forget to treat other people in ways that reflect our warm feelings for them. Dogs are always happy to see their family members and friends, and they always express this happiness. This is one of the reasons we like dogs so much–they never let us forget how much they love us. Imagine how much warmer the world would be if we could do the same for one another.
