“I’m tired of polite, weary of safe. I want to live dangerously—with a willingness to dig deep into the caverns of my life, mining the grief and greatness dwelling within my story and lived experience. I want to give voice to my story, allowing it to shape my present and future. I know that how I approach my story, or yours, is of utmost importance.” I wrote those words years ago in Listen: A Seeker’s Resource for Spiritual Direction, vol. 2.4.
This morning I challenged myself about that polite, safe voice I carefully cultivate in my work as a communications liaison with messaging for the public. I took a leap, in tandem with the Kauai Writers Conference where I’ll be in a week, and signed up for a six week online writing class with Laura Lentz via zoom. Today, for 180 minutes I connected with Laura and a little more than a handful of writers connecting from different time zones. We were led deeply with writing prompts in Sacred Storytelling, with today’s focus on the sacred of animal spirits as guides, and a 14-minute writing sprint. This piece is what showed up on paper as I let my pen write, and I wrestle deeply with saying goodbye to my dog, Kenai. The gap of knowing his time is close, and wrestling with when. His abominable spirit keeps rallying, so while I’d thought I’d have said goodbye sometime in these past 21 days, he rallied, and shown me, not yet.
Kenai
He came to me 13 years past, his stubborn Chessie spirit a gift from other worlds. It’s his time to leave soon, or so I thought, and his stubborn old ways guide and annoy me still. The way two weeks ago when I turned my back to him on his porch perch, and he disappeared … my left eye caught a flash in the woods of deadgrass colored brown fur chasing the wild turkeys I’ve befriended on the Friday evening after I’d finally purchased a bag of cracked corn feed. (I didn’t even know he could still run.) The way he craps in the house then looks at me as if, “how’d that happen?” and how I’ve evolved, even picking up his firm steamy shit with my bare fingers one morning when the paper towel roll was empty and I needed something fast.
Acceptance. Forgiveness.
Is this what you came to teach me my warrior pup? All those years ago—you lost and found surviving nine months on your own, and your story the Animal Planet producer called for, and I refused, even thinking it was a joke caller. You told me then, when we talked about it, I’m afraid to fly, you’re afraid to lose me again, we will do this together. Face the unmasked inner demon, I am by your side. I still said no to flying to northern Colorado and Wyoming from Alaska to film. You were in your prime back then, and we were both skittish about loss.
Now your nails need trimmed. Your hind leg drags, occasionally crisscrosses and trips you, your stubborn bull head tracks me, and you drag your broken body to follow me room to room, eyes only at rest when your lids close from gazing at me, or licking your Kong smeared with peanut butter.
Oh Mr. Kenai, you saved my life when Justin died. Your story is so much more than the Chicken Soup story—the truer one is your damb fidelity over the years of us living in these Alaska woods. Kenai, my boy, don’t depart the planet while I’m gone to Kauai, wait for me to come home.
The fierceness is our mutual angst of being lost. Fear makes us run. When your breath deceases, I’ll cradle you, bury my hands into your curly fur, tears streaming, being brave, whispering I love you, I love you, I love you, you did well my boy.
*Chesapeake Bay Retriever
In that same “Listen” piece from 2008, about I asked these questions of myself and readers, and offer them again this Sunday:
- How do I really live with authenticity?
- Do my own limited versions of reality imprison possibility?
- What will help me taste and listen to my life, offering me a capacity to stand still without judgment, in compassionate attention?