Feeling What is True

A few days ago, while driving(?!), I found myself in a festival of mindlessness. I was still 10 miles from home, but my mind was already there, teasing out the scenarios that could greet me. I was thinking specifically about my dogs, and the different things they were capable of chewing, and, darkly, how they could dart in front of a car or escape the yard and onto the highway.

I spent those miles in a worry cycle when I could have been enjoying the view, or feeling the good effects of the satisfying day I’d just spent outdoors. Obviously, whatever scene I might encounter at home would not be improved by my having imagined every possible dumpster fire. 

Ironically, I had just finished a gorgeous day at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, host of our second annual “TRYathlon.” This event drew nearly 300 local registrants to practice mindfulness and yoga, and join in a fun, untimed 5K hike before retiring to the after-party at Piste. I had plenty to be grateful for: how big the smiles were, how gorgeous the setting, how the joy of connection with community felt. Instead, I was elevating my blood pressure by thinking about how people just drive too fast through the neighborhood these days and all the perils that precipitates. 

You see, at home I have what animal adoption and shelter experts call a “foster failure,” where you agree to foster an animal and insist you won’t be keeping him. Mind you, I already had Roxy – a 10-year-old white fluffball who taught me that I am capable of love under perplexing circumstances. I was embarrassed by this until I realized what unabashed devotion (hers, then mine) feels like. And I share custody of Apollo, who is my favorite skiing and hiking companion and whose thousands of shared miles have kept me from despair in the worst of times, and doubled my happiness in joyful times. He’s 11.

Using questionable judgement, I had shared with my friend Amy that I might be ready to look for a young dog, one who could hike and was small and didn’t shed too much, and certainly, certainly didn’t drool. Amy happens to run PAWS and the Driggs animal shelter. It took about a minute for her to have ideas. 

So…Hector. He is 88 pounds. He is a black lab mix who sheds. And while he doesn’t drool, he is often on the verge of it. He spent the last year in a shelter, and he moves funny and probably won’t be up for long hikes. But he sometimes comes over to the dining table, where I am eating actual people food, and sets his gentle head on the place setting two chairs over. I find this very polite.

For more than a week, I told Amy and my study-abroad-bound sons that I was just fostering and that he was too big, and he couldn’t go deeply into the mountains with me, and, well, the shedding. But the truth is, my heart had already decided and was just waiting for my head to catch up. I should have known when I started Googling new vacuums.  

When I pull into the driveway, three dogs spill out to greet me, alive and happy. I worry that Hector will one day carry the house with him when he needles through the tight squeeze of the current dog door. Roxy is not impressed, and Apollo, the former big dog, 20 pounds lighter than Hector, wonders why a bear is allowed inside.  

On inspection, the mudroom appears a little weary, a chew toy decapitated and its fluffy stuffing in clumps all over the floor. One book, smugly on my bookshelf that morning, lies in the middle of the floor—Real Change, by Sharon Salzburg. Hector had stamped his approval in the form of a faint tooth print on the upper right corner. Subtle. Even the dogs are telling me what to do with my life right now. I find them wiser than people, so I’m inclined. 

I look down at the book, and my thumb rests on a section about forces beyond our control, which is to say, pretty much everything. I realize in that moment that I did have business bringing this gorgeous mutt into my home, because already my heart was bigger than the dog door, really pretty big when you consider I am not all that imposing, physically speaking. I can’t control all the things that are so much bigger…like the way a heart moves.  Or my sons growing and flying. The lines that appear around my eyes. The pain of hunger, fire, loneliness. The impermanence of everything. But I can look a situation straight in the face and feel what is true.  

Hector stays. 

Apollo, Roxy, and Hector