Part II: Day 49: This Morning, This Cool, Rainy June Morning

6 a.m.  It's cool and damp out here, sweater weather for the dog's person, comfort weather for the dog with the thick black fur coat.  We contemplate purple pansies, pink snapdragons, gymnastic squirrels, groundhog mamas and their young, and invite the great blue heron to bring his girlfriend over for our appraisal.  The wind stirs the poplar outside the studio and a branch bows down to us in an unsteady way just as I bowed last night in yoga class in sun salutations with knees slightly bent--cool nights bringing me unusually tight hamstrings--and I say, this is the life I was meant to lead.  We listen, we watch, and I wrap myself in a blanket and drink coffee.  Our dog hates heat and if cool is what she wants, so be it.  I say, I'm in: let's go for summer-lite.  Let there be lettuce and asparagus, let there eventually even be corn and tomatoes, I certainly don't want our farmers to suffer, but if this lovely dog likes a mild cool morning with nary a bug, what's the harm?

We watch the mist swirling above the river and I think I can see fish or creatures imitating them riding the current.  The hammock swings empty in the yard; no one wants to lounge there and read in this weather.  I picture the August me out there with sunglasses and a book and I hope there's an August Zoe too, underneath that hammock swatting flies away.  But hope, Thich Nhat Hanh says, is dangerous.  It makes me forget that the perfect moment is this moment right now.  It makes us chase things we can't see.  It makes us put our happiness in hock. 

And right now the dog is eating, walking, running, playing, cuddling, smiling in her doggy way, and she knows this is her world so of course as the day wakes up and people get to work she will supervise the construction going on across the river--across her river.  Right now the dog is beside me sharing a new day, this Tuesday morning.  This is our moment, and although I want a million more of these I will horde the ones I have by writing about them here and now.

Namaste, gentle reader.  Namaste.

Day 87: The Time Travel Meditation

I used to walk with my dog and plan the ideal schedule.  When would I teach?  When would I write?  Before she woke me from my trance I would debate Fridays off and Thursday marathons, and Thursdays off to make the weekend less onerous even though Friday would be packed.

Living this way I often had to be shown the first spring buds, the trillium march, the stealthy approach of Angry Bicyclist Man who hates jumping dogs, but eventually, I wised up some--not a lot, but a little.

So I know now that the now is the be-all-and-end-all, but still I like to mix it up the way I imagine certain physicists do and think of the past, present, and future intermingling as in some fantasy theme park where your long-dead fourth grade teacher works the fried dough booth and the friend who will gossip with you in the home is skittering by on roller skates with a rat terrier in her arms and some kind of shiny violet ribbon trailing off her hair like a kite string.

Imagine it's a century from now and you get to go back and relive a day.  You're a ghost, but no one knows it.  The characters of this story are the people from your ordinary life now.  You don't return to a sunset clam bake, a wedding, a falling-in-love or spying-a-lion endorphin high.  It's a coffee, toast, drive, work kind of day, full of mundane conversations with people you don't pay complete attention to now, and prickly little problems that can sometimes be solved, just like that.

Just think, first, how happy you would be to see your old self.  Hello, feet.  Hello, hands.  Hello, soft belly.  It was nice to be in there, wasn't it?  We had a good run.  Thanks for the good work.

Then there's the person who used to bug you if you hadn't slept enough because of a few unconscious tics, hair tugging, maybe, or the repetition of the word "relatable," which you could never bring yourself to say isn't really a word.  Imagine this is the first person you run into.  You've been dead for a long time.  Here's someone you sort of knew.  You're beyond delighted.  Hello, you!

And maybe there's this person who said no to every great idea you ever had.  Your gate-keeper/cop who moonlights as the accountant.

Maybe that person was you.

There she is, lumbering along, keeping the peace, and you understand now that it isn't easy to do this work, bringing gravity to the world when everyone wants to fly, and this person is just another mortal who likes a hot bath at the end of the day and a good book and maybe some green Thai curry shrimp on jasmine rice.  The burden of carrying the weight of all those dumbass dreams has made knots form beneath each scapula, her stricken wings.  You are so moved by the sight of her you want to give her a back rub.

How sad for all these people who don't know that they're all so ten-decades-ago, that they will dissolve, as you did, and their preoccupations will fade, and all that will linger is the love--I have started to believe this is really true--and a few glimmers of images from the quotidian that fly up into collective memory: violet ribbon, trillium, toast crumbs, the dog jumping to greet the man on the bike.

When students come to me about big decisions, a choice between this or that, I ask them two questions.  Imagine you chose this.  Live with that for a while.  Do you feel peace?  Then do the same exercise for choosing that.  And finally: what's the kindest thing you can do for your self of thirty years from now, a middle-aged person who would prefer not to have regrets.  And what about the deathbed you?

Maybe that's more than two questions.

Outside right now what looked like a foot of snow, ample enough to stop flights going out and mess with many people's plans, is starting to melt a little.  Things that insisted fiercely give way today.  It's so nice to wake up to beauty, even ordinary beauty: coffee, toast, snow, and pages like fields of snow waiting for the dog to run all over them.

Namaste, gentle reader, Namaste.

Hello 2012 self.  It's nice to be back!  Nice necklace.

Day 37: The Goblet is One-Third Full Meditation, Or: What I'm Learning from Writing this Blog

It's Friday the 13th, a day I'm fond of because, perversely, I always think the number 13 brings me good luck.

Yesterday marked the one-third point in my project, "Winter with Zoe: 108 Meditations on Love, Dogs, and Mortality."  I don't want to say that the time has flown because I'm trying to wrestle time down onto the mat and not let it run away from me as it likes to do.  But it is amazing how quickly we can zip through 36 days.

When I began this project, it was the last week of classes for fall term at St. Lawrence University, where I teach creative writing and environmental literature.  On Day Three: Pub Stress Break at the Chapel, I brought Zoe to campus for a dog-and-student love-fest.  That seems like a long time ago, now.  The winter solstice arrived when I was maybe two weeks into the project, and just yesterday I noticed that the sun didn't set until nearly 5. Did you see it?  It was very pink despite the ice storm we had here.  Streaks of brightness across a riverscape of nearly monochromatic black and gray.

I'm writing "Winter with Zoe" because I've been made to answer an awful question: What would you do if you found out someone you love, a family member, might have only a year or less to live?  How would you want to spend that year?

And what if that loved one was a dog?

What would you do differently?  What new things would you want to learn?  And what activities would you cherish more than ever?

Dogs tie us to the present, to living mindfully.  They show us that what is right in front of us--river, blue heron, snow, fleeing squirrel--is a now you see it, now you don't affair.  Dogs remind us that all we have is now.

In other words, dogs are Zen masters, with tails.

This summer, after I returned home from travels and teaching in France and India, I was eager to remind myself again of the beauty of my community, the North Country of New York State.  Through daily meditation, writing in my journal, and now in this blog, I hope to savor every day I have with Zoe, my dog, and indeed, every day I have on this earth, period.  I'm not in any hurry to grow old.

If you are new around here. other pages and posts explain the concept of doing something that enriches your life for 108 days straight, which is the number of the beads on a Buddhist mala and, I think also, on the Catholic rosary.  In August-December of 2011, I meditated every morning and wrote in my journal about what was going on--work, Zoe's health, dog walks, nature, discoveries--and I found that this process of sitting in meditation and writing for a few minutes each morning made me a lot less hyper and gave me an equanimity I'd never known before.  My insomnia went away.  I was rarely a grump.  I noticed beauty more often.  I taught better.  I wrote better, I think.  I enjoyed mealtime more.  And I had more fun with the people I love.

(See Day One: Why 108 Days? which is also the first official post.)

Some friends reading have told me they have launched themselves on their own 108-day projects.  One person is writing.  Another is keeping a journal--her first in a long time.  A few others are meditating as well.  If any of you who have been reading are doing something like this yourselves, please write in.

When this journal began, In December of 2011, I was beginning a second 108-day series, only this time instead of journal entries, I'm writing mini-essays and living life out loud in a way that still surprises me, and indeed seems out of character, but is widening my circle of friends and community in ways I had never expected.

Most of the people reading are from the States, but I've found out how to check the audience, and there are people in France and India who tune in (some of them, I think, are friends I made in these places) but also, for some reason, quite a few people in Russia and the Ukraine have been following the story from the start.  (I like to think some of them might be distant relations: my grandmother was from Bellarus.)  I have people reading regularly in the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Canada.  Yesterday I had a reader from Israel and another from Morocco.  Just a minute ago, someone clicked in from Brazil.

Sending a post out into cyberspace is like that message you throw in the bottle into the sea, not knowing where it will wash up, only in this case, the results are immediate.  It's very exciting.

I understand what a luxury it is to have a dog and to love her to such excess.  And to have the time (sabbatical!) to explore that love on the page.  Time is the one thing we all have too little of--human and canine--no matter where we call home, or the condition of our health, or how we spend our days.

Writing this blog has also made me feel much closer to my students, many of whom love their dogs to excess as well.  For the young, loving pets is a way of coming to terms with their own mortality, which is hard to do when you are in college and you feel like every amazing thing is still before you.  On three occasions so far, I have invited talented student writers to guest-post for me.  For a recent example of a story of dogs and family and coming-to-terms, read Day 35: Rebekah's Dogs Teach us about Family and Caring.

In fact, until last week the post that had received the most "hits" was written by another beloved student of mine, Lettie Stratton, whose piece was not about dogs but about living mindfully. (Day Eight: Lettie Discovers the Zen of Orange-Eating.)

In my attempt to live more mindfully in 3-D, and here on the page, I'm exploring the beauty of the quotidian, the sacred in everyday life.  I'm writing about walks with Zoe, about tasty meals, about meditation, nature, people we love, students and teaching, and I'm also writing about places we've been--France, in particular.  Although Zoe's diagnosis is something to mourn, she's living well and we're having an excellent winter together.

Some of what I'm writing will probably go into a book, a dog memoir.  And some of what I'm writing will probably go into my ongoing travel memoir.  This blog is allowing me to rehearse my thoughts, and it's so nice to have the immediacy of the internet to do this.  My normal way of writing is to sit alone in my corner for five years avoiding sunlight and perfecting a paragraph before anyone sees it.

I'm spending this winter with Zoe learning, anew, how to live.  I feel so lucky to have the time to write this blog, and I'm very grateful to you, gentle reader, for reading, sharing, and sometimes sending in a comment.

Zoe is right next to me as I write these words.  I have to go now because she is very cute and I want to pet her immediately, instead of writing about her.

Photo by Tara Freeman