The peace that passes all understanding... most of it, anyway.
Homer seems to have it. (He's my sixteen year old cat dying of kidney failure, for those playing along with the home game.)
It's an animal thing, really - this capacity for inhabiting the sacred right this very second. In fits and starts, my awareness of it is mostly cued by external factors.
I think it's human to ponder choices that aren't ours to make like whether we leave this life likethatfastwhoosh or in a more lingering way, with a heads up, as it were.
(A few days ago, I overheard several teenagers discussing the massive heart attack vs long drawn out disease scenario. Good points on either side. I refrained from suggesting statistics that stayed clear of these rather limiting death causes. Might as well let the kids have their dreams.)
If proximity to him in these last of his days can teach me any of it, I'm willing to learn. It's not time for dipping down into the big sadness. Besides, the big gulp of grief isn't anything you can spread out to reach the edges of the bread like butter that's too cold. It'll come in heaves, with jagged edges and then softly, too, because it's the nature of grief: unfixed and never triumphant because the bigger the grief, the greater the love has been.
I know people who think that loving animals is an affectation borne of weakness, a tendency to instill fantasy where mere animal interaction exists. They're right in this regard: It's their truth. And in a way, because I have spent two-thirds of this life, thus far, on the other side of that place where animals crack you open and light you up.
So here's to unfixed spaces, to not knowing exactly when those things will hit. We know enough to watch for signs and enough not to stray far from here until it happens.
And because it's a photo pretty enough to be a painting, indeed, almost an impression of one, we will leave you with a shot of one of our favorite animals we've never met: This is Chico, who belongs to Wesley and vice versa.
Because, in the end, it's all about the wagging.
It's an animal thing, really - this capacity for inhabiting the sacred right this very second. In fits and starts, my awareness of it is mostly cued by external factors.
I think it's human to ponder choices that aren't ours to make like whether we leave this life likethatfastwhoosh or in a more lingering way, with a heads up, as it were.
(A few days ago, I overheard several teenagers discussing the massive heart attack vs long drawn out disease scenario. Good points on either side. I refrained from suggesting statistics that stayed clear of these rather limiting death causes. Might as well let the kids have their dreams.)
If proximity to him in these last of his days can teach me any of it, I'm willing to learn. It's not time for dipping down into the big sadness. Besides, the big gulp of grief isn't anything you can spread out to reach the edges of the bread like butter that's too cold. It'll come in heaves, with jagged edges and then softly, too, because it's the nature of grief: unfixed and never triumphant because the bigger the grief, the greater the love has been.
I know people who think that loving animals is an affectation borne of weakness, a tendency to instill fantasy where mere animal interaction exists. They're right in this regard: It's their truth. And in a way, because I have spent two-thirds of this life, thus far, on the other side of that place where animals crack you open and light you up.
So here's to unfixed spaces, to not knowing exactly when those things will hit. We know enough to watch for signs and enough not to stray far from here until it happens.
And because it's a photo pretty enough to be a painting, indeed, almost an impression of one, we will leave you with a shot of one of our favorite animals we've never met: This is Chico, who belongs to Wesley and vice versa.
Because, in the end, it's all about the wagging.
posted by Dustin at
2:02 AM 
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