January 22, 2021 - Letting go - Ode to Max

 I put Max down yesterday at about 3 o'clock at Dr. Amos' office.  The dreaded hours leading up to the appointment time weighing on my body like an avalanche, anticipating the action that every fiber of my being wanted to resist - letting him go. Maybe "let him go" is the right way to put it, rather than "ending his life."  But giving consent to end his or any being's life seems - wrong (is there a stronger word?).  We tell ourselves and each other that it's the right thing to do, the humane thing to do.  In fact, we ask, "how could you NOT do it?"  Is that right? Do we humans have the right to make decisions about another being's life?  I think the shocking, traumatic part of this for me is that if I'm really brutally, painfully honest, it's a relief in the end.  I don't have to bear and abide with the suffering, and the messy inconvenience of illness and dying. I no longer have to mix up a "slurry" (even the word is gross) of food to inject in his mouth.  I don't have to clean out the food trapped in his mouth around the vicious and predatory tumor there, or follow the blood laced drool droppings to clean them up.   I don't have to endure the fears that come with checking his breathing through the night.  So is it my heart that I'm being 'humane" to, or his?  Is life only worth living when you have the full ability to enjoy it?  That's what they say too: "if he has no good quality of life, then it's time."  Really?  Is that right?  Maybe it's true for animals and there are different rules for humans?  (And maybe that is obvious to everyone and I'm missing it?)  I am obviously perplexed by this dilemma, or, I mean that I find it to be a dilemma, and I feel guilty because I know it was the way to relief for me, and that feels awful. (Oh, but what I'd give for another chance to give him his water with a squirt bottle and hold his little body while there, on top of the washing machine, while he gratefully lapped it up, or mix up that slurry for another meal, and the blessings and joy that comes with nurturing another.)  But...

Can I tell you that as the tumor bloomed on that jaw and into that tiny mouth, so also did our intimacy, this dog's and mine. This plucky little Jack Russell, left at the shelter at almost 12 years old, who bonded with me immediately - my shadow really - started needing me in different ways.  And in the ways that giving and receiving are seamlessly intertwined, we entered a more "divine exchange." 

Because of the growth in his mouth, it became harder and harder for him to eat and drink, tongue displaced and mechanics of lapping upended. So, I started using a squirt bottle to give him water.  I would put him up on top of the washing machine (he was so portable) and spray water into his mouth. Now there's an interesting side note to this squirt bottle. It is the one I used to scold him when he would snarl and growl when Harold (the elder Jack Russell Terrier who's household this was way before little Max entered the scene), tried to claim some space and closeness with me!  Rude, right?  But that trusting little guy seemed to know that I was no longer scolding him with water squirts but was allowing him to hydrate.  I have to say I loved those moments every day, stroking him and holding him while he seemed to know exactly what to do with these new mechanics.  I can't really describe that sweetness and the way it was coupled with heartbreak, but it was deep, and it felt like a privilege, a gift.  Other interesting "delights" (to borrow from poet Ross Gay's illuminating Book of Delights) were mixing up that smelly canned food and Max feeling well enough to chow down!  And the days when it must've just been too hard to eat, and I used a syringe to get it closer to his swallowing. There were the days when I would take him to the vet's office to get fluids, and the delight on the faces of the vet techs and receptionist (and vet too if we saw him) when Max arrived - delight despite the drool-y, and yes, smelly appendage, bigger each time we dropped by; the "magic" of fluids that made him feel so much better, hungrier and ready for more walks...until it didn't.  

We had days and days - more than I thought we'd have - of saying good-bye and also of saying hello...to each morning.  So many woods walks, with his being a dog.  Just...being...a...dog.  True to his dogness. 

(Written on December 23, 2020):  Christmas eves eve, a favorite day for anticipation; for waiting; for communion.  The sunrise is gold and pink, glittering, shimmering layers of clouds on the egg shell blue sky.  The morning comes again and I wake up with the coming sun, not at 5, 6, 630 or 645, but 7am - right before the dawn, when the light is coming.  I have hopes of waking up way before that, to anticipate its coming in the darkest dark of the night, right before dawn.  But I'm cocooning then, and dreaming dreams, and checking on the warmth and breath of "puppy" next to me, feeling his warmth and the sweet softness of his tiny, wirehaired belly which just fits in my hand.  All those years of giant dogs, bigger than me, me hanging on and spooning those two giant lumps of fur.  Now, I tuck this tiny loaf of Jack Russell bread next to me- maybe small in poundage but a mighty magnificent presence.  A sturdy, toughness, accompanying me through different chapters of grief, "rescued" from the SPCA after Maggie, the last of the Pyrenees died; grief of Harold, the longest, faithful, companion who was with me through thick and thin for 14 years;  and now through COVID, job loss, and awakenings - new beginnings. This dog has accompanied me to the woods, to the earth, to the ground where I've revisited and re-cognized my place in it, and on it.   Walking and walking,  we've felt the earth beneath us, layers and layers of falling leaves released from the trees as part of the circle, laying down more earth and dirt and ground that carries us, envelopes us.  We felt that welcoming, me and this pup - the pup who firmly requested that I stop and look and absorb our surroundings as he sniffed and marked and padded one place on the path after place. Because of his insistence,  I stood and looked, not just at the path ahead, but at a  360 view of the patches where we stood, and stood, and stood.  And every time I had to force myself to stop.  I was already so far down the path in my mind, and so driven to get farther down the linear line of it that I didn’t even know where I was.  I wasn't seeing what was accompanying us, ever changing through photosynthesis, the moving air, the trees, life cycle of contributing leaves to the carpet of ground, the critters. But because of the pup who's ever embedded in his very, every moment I slowed down, stood nearer to still, turned around, gazed up, gazed down, took breaths with intention to pick out a scent, watching the tiny canine show me how to be in communion with his moments, nose buried in the leaves to pick up those scents, paws padding on all the textures of the patch of ground, making a physical mark to say "I'm here too" joining all the "previous nesses" of being here, ears attuned to anything below the surface or around the corner, tree, rock, creek.  Only in my impatience, only in my captivity to linear time seducing me to accomplishment, achievement, social media proof through photos to communicate that "I'm here" and "look what I did today" does that pup heed my bidding by the pull of the leash, and in loyalty and trust he follows me in a straight line down the path, the well worn path made by all the other humans bidden by linear time, yet, seeking soul time. 

We came closer to soul time in our hammock, by the water, pup so easily settling in with me, as I tried to slow down and "be found" by the life around me - life that was before me and will be long after me and maybe life that I've been in union with before, during and after earth life.  Life that birthed me to earth life - from which I come, live and go. 

Ross Gay, Cynthia Bourgeault, Advent, maps

(Bear with me through these rough drafts, where I'm trying to make sense of things, which if not shared now, will never be. I love my friend Wess Daniel's concept and site called Nurse Log where he explains that " a digital garden is a place in-between your personal notes and final publications on blogs and articles. It's a place where ideas get worked out, articulated, and grow into something more useful later." (I'm brazenly stealing this concept!)  

I'd like to share a "delight" (thanks Ross Gay, The Book of Delights and Maia Dery for sharing Ross Gay)…a delight in the way that stumbling around, even in the ether of the internet can reveal beautiful fragments and snippets to weave into whatever you might be creating, and breadcrumbs that point the way towards somewhere you might be headed, which might be right here, right now. This recent internet revelatory delight was a short Advent message (I know...it's February now) offered by Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom teacher extraordinaire (who I also stumbled upon when I needed her most - when I was ready for her).  I love Cynthia's combination of sharpness and softness, her way with words, her strength and humility, and the way she stays with "unknowing" while illuminating so much that was previously in the shadows.  I'll note for friends unfamiliar, that this is a pretty polished video for Cynthia, who is so refreshingly unpolished. I'll also say that she is a Mystic within a Christian framework, but that framework is Wisely permeable, with elegant fluidity. 

I keep finding Cynthia's B's teaching and sharing to be full of such unexpected delights.  I say unexpected but what is, I think, actually going on is that she keeps blowing the dust and dirt off of truths that are fundamental to Love and being human.  This Advent message, for me at least, captures so much about what spiritual "consent" is about, as coupled with "action," and how deepening embodiment of our humanness unlocks our souls to join in the cosmic dance (Thomas Merton). When listening to Cynthia's Advent message, poet/writer Ross Gay and his Book of Delights came immediately to mind - a confluence of delight all on its own!  Ross Gay's beautifully and generously shared ways of attending to found moments, objects, words, breath, movement, looks, touches, light and darkness in his everyday, seems an extraordinary way of mapping meaning. Consenting to these delights, letting them have their way with him, seems a courageously participatory way to live...letting go, being found, being vulnerable, saying "yes" - not knowing which way the delights will take him - a sort of free fall with faith that something is holding it all together.  

 From his interview with Krista Tippett in her OnBeing podcast: "But in the process of thinking about it, I have really been thinking that joy is the moments — for me, the moments when my alienation from people — but not just people, from the whole thing — it goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous. And I love that mycelium, forest metaphor, that there’s this thing connecting us. And among the things of that thing connecting us is that we have this common experience — many common experiences, but a really foundational one is that we are not here forever."

And from his Book of Delights, essay 14:  Joy is Such a Human Madness: “Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.. And that’s a joining — a “joy-ning.” So that’s sort of how I think about it....For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

So I've been thinking about this concept of Mary's consent - her saying yes - and how it's related to our everyday, ordinary lives, full of opportunities for consent, courage, joining, action and even, to use Ross Gay's word,  annihilation. Mary is, in a deep way, the "why" of the (Advent) story.  Cynthia says that "in her bearing, she models, in this richly feminine and gentle time of annunciation, gestation and child birthing, she models what it means to be an active co-creator and participant in a world in which the treasure of God was not sent as a remediation of sin, but a crowning revelation about what it means to live with one foot in the finite world and one in the infinite bridging the gap in our hearts." 

In the video, Cynthia shares the poem Annunciation by Denise Levertov  in which the poet paints a picture of the psyche/state of being of a person (Mary) we often see as a model of passive surrender...."but she (Mary) illuminates an active participational intelligence.  Mary, modeling courage...the way of the heart."

(from Annunciation)

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.

       The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

Cynthia says that Advent is when we typically think of ourselves as waiting.  But Levertov's poem offers this wonderful flip...God is doing the waiting: "the contemplative act of courage and contemplative intelligence is indeed an act of seeing, participation, a yes that is not passive but active."

In this Advent message, Cynthia goes on to say that "it takes the whole power, profundity, human depth, physical depth of the God bearer-the earth, our planet-to bring forth in human form what the always uncreated, brilliant light of love is like." So, she shares her hope that during this time (she's speaking of Advent)  "may it not be just in a stable without... but within your own heart in your own human flesh and form that the rays of this uncreated light may shine forth in you and radiate your entire ordinary life with the glow of the eternal from which it is always emerging and into which we are always returning." Further, she says "suppose this world isn't a mistake, a myth, a fall but suppose it's precisely these conditions of fragility, finitude, density....which allows the divine heart when it is focused and brought to radiance in the heart of a human being who is actively, courageously, intelligently receptive. Then we have the real co-creation of the "Christ,"  (and the meaning here is...) the infinite love in finite form.

And so, Ross Gay shares his gorgeous mapping tools of attending to the physical, the "God bearer - the earth, our planet" and abiding with daily delights, full of  "fragility, finitude and density." Keys to this map are described so well by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers in her review of Gay's book (for Orion Magazine):  "His delights are wide-ranging and unrestrained, the greater of them often interrupted by smaller ones in a chain of digressions. These smaller delights, tossed off on the way to somewhere else, serve as unobtrusive reminders of delight’s many textures and the fact that, although omnipresent, delight isn’t universal. Some of Gay’s delights beckon and invite, their doors thrown open in celebration. Others stand like rocks in a stream, bearing an enduring, almost obstinate, witness. Wherever Gay finds his delight, he offers intimacy, rapport, and an open invitation to explore its many guises: joy, wonder, pleasure, sorrow, justice, revenge, anxiety, tenderness, caretaking, relief."

Montgomery-Rodgers goes on to beautifully describe the ways that Ross Gay shares his "map" to the way of the heart:  "As he grapples with this definition, he revels in basic connections: our role in the nutrient cycle, the wash of food that nourishes our animal bodies, the wildernesses between us, and the hope that we might join them together. Gay is fascinated with nature and human nature alike, and, amid his curiosity, there’s a persistent return to the idea of gardens. Whether discussing a literal act of horticulture or its metaphorical extension, Gay uses cultivation and tending to question how we create and connect our interior and exterior spaces. Bindweed and procrastination, floral prints and masculinity, the Grim Reaper and lawnmowers, bouquets and public statues, plant cuttings and lineage: the garden emerges as a perennial place for delight’s praxis, his “thumb and forefinger caressing the emergent things free.” 

Gay gives us this gift not just as a map but also as a heart opening practice.  He writes in the preface to The Book of Delights "It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights, I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

And so, Cynthia's meditation on Mary's courageous consent to participate in the earthly God-bearing act of pregnancy, birthing and motherhood, to the complete wilderness of her "unknowing" and her attending to the sacred ordinary-ness of her life, intersecting with my recent immersion into the works of Ross Gay, are together - wildly - helping me journey on, mapping meaning through these times "to which we have been assigned" (to quote my beautiful friend Carolyn Toben) of breaking apart, of breaking open. 

From Annunciation...(full poem below):

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–

but who was God. 

----------------------------------------------------------------

Annunciation, by Denise Levertov

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished, 
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.

       Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.

       The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

                  ____________________

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

         Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

                  ____________________

She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–

but who was God. 

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

                  ____________________

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.