This is Lacey.
She would like to lick your face and eat all the acorns in the yard.
She does not wish to be left in her puppy palace during breakfast.
She is a tiny spiritual teacher sent to disabuse me of the notion that I am in control of my life.
I am not new to dogs, but I am new to training puppies (my childhood dogs ran free, under no inspection but the moon’s, until the day they got hit by cars), and I can say that I have found the experience not entirely dissimilar to raising human infants—or teaching human adolescents, for that matter. She cries for reasons I do not understand. There are limited opportunities for me to go to the bathroom. I live in a state of constant vigilance, ever scanning the perimeter for items she might deem too delicious to leave intact.
And she makes me feel connected to the highest order of the universe.
A puppy, much like a baby, is GREAT for hacking away at the old ego. Neither one cares very much about your behavioral psychology classes or your preparatory Pinterest boards. They laugh in the face of nap schedules and pee on the floor of operant conditioning. And sure, they are fresh from communion with God and uncorrupted by this world, etc., and that’s nice for soul work too. But mostly, they reconnect you to the divine knowledge that YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF THINGS. And that all the rules, structure, and universal order you live by is just stuff people made up to deal with our lack of bossness.
For example, there have been times I found Carlo Rovelli confusing (which is fine because, as we have established, I purchased this audiobook primarily for the Cumberbatch), but nothing drives home the artifice of human-constructed time like saying, “You can’t wake up until 5:30,” to a puppy. What is 5:30? What is, “I’ll take you out in five minutes?” The dog knows but one time, and that’s right now. And right now = crate. I could treat her every day at 5:30 on the dot, I could sync the heartbeat of her Calmeroo puppy with the atomic clock, I could read time zones from the world atlas to her all night, and all she will ever know is… Still in the crate.
That is some presence right there. That is the kind of presence I have spent a great deal of time and money trying to learn over the past couple of years. What does it matter what is going to happen in five minutes? Or what people with treats in their pockets tell me is going to happen in five minutes? There’s some good Eckhart Tolle in there someplace, and maybe the Budda too, something about having no past and no future, but I’m too tired to find passages now. Because PUPPY.
Anyway, she’s a magical, slightly stinky little 1UP in my path to consciousness. Happy belated International Dog Day.
