By Catherine DiMercurio
I have today off, and during my dog walk, I had a strange experience that led to a series of strange thoughts, which I sketched out with the pencil of words as quickly as I could when I returned home. It felt the same as waking up in the middle of the night to write down a dream because it seems so full of meaning and you do not want to forget. Maybe it will make sense later and maybe it won’t, but it feels important to try.
This morning, I walked the dog a little later than usual, because I had that luxury today, the luxury of time, and no set schedule. It was sunny, but cold, about 22 degrees. My dog is reactive, a label that I really didn’t know too much about before I adopted him. There is a lot I could write, and have written, about my pup and how he responds to the world, but for now, it’s easier to just say that we try to avoid seeing other dogs while we’re out. A barking dog behind a fence or another dog on a walk can make him jumpy. He pulls, sometimes barks, and it can be difficult to move him past the situation. If another dog is walking on a leash away from us, and we do not follow him, he is actually calm enough to be still and observe, and this is progress, so I reward him with treats. This morning had been rather peaceful, despite the fact that a fenced boxer barked—loudly, and long after we’d past. But my dog calmed himself with some eager sniffing of the path ahead, and I meandered a bit before turning us toward home.
And then we saw a coyote.
The coyote was running in that distinctive loping way down the street that we were headed toward. We were about to turn in the direction the coyote was coming from. We stopped, my dog and I, and both instinctively froze. The coyote turned away from us, probably didn’t even see us, and headed toward the golf course, and the woods near it.
More than anything, I was relieved that my dog had the good sense not to bark or draw attention to us in any way. I didn’t know what to expect, had the coyote turned toward us. Maybe the animal was young and had belated realized he or she was out past dark. It was 9:20 a.m. Maybe they were just heading home, same as us.
It was an unprecedented treat for me to watch this beautiful animal running in front of us. Small, grayish brown, casually quick, hurrying but not sprinting through the morning sunshine.
As much as my brain then turned toward getting home as quickly as possible—I was a little spooked, and so was my dog—part of me turned immediately toward meaning-making, as it usually does when something unexpected like this happens.
I began following two trains of thought simultaneously—one focused on the way happiness is not so much fleeting (as in, quickly disappearing) but fleet of foot (as in, quick and decisive), and one focused on the way so many of us are always on the lookout for signs from the universe.
It is hard to not see an unexpected visitor from the wild natural world, loping through the domesticity of the suburban street, as a nudge. Pay attention, the universe seems to be saying. I feel as though I am always wondering if I’m on the right track, so when something larger than normal unfolds in front of me involving an ambassador from the natural world, I feel as though the universe is reassuring me. This is your sign that you’re on the right track. But what I’ve been wondering lately is that when we are looking for signs from the universe, is it more accurate to say that what we’re looking for is a sign from ourselves? And wouldn’t it be true to say that’s the same thing anyway? Are we not brimming with the universe and does it not expand within us when we make room? Maybe it is guiding us from an internal rather than external vantage point and maybe those are designations that are meaningless to the universe.
With regard to happiness: how like this coyote is happiness and the way it moves through our lives and hearts, deliberately, softly. I want to say swiftly but then I think that the coyote seemed swift to me, but from the coyote’s perspective, how swiftly was it really moving? Isn’t that the same with happiness? The speed is relative. We have an experience and we feel happy and then it is over and the happiness might linger but soon we don’t feel happy anymore and our instinct is to chase it and get it back. But in the now-timeline of the happiness, it is expanding in all its fullness and etching itself in our memory and while we have a sense of it being over quickly, in so many ways it is still expanding within us, but when we feel the now-ness of it dissipated, we imagine that it has darted off, that it is gone. And I’m here to speculate that maybe this is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it doesn’t leave us as quickly as we think, and maybe we don’t need to chase it. Maybe it isn’t ours to get, it’s just ours to have for a little while, without acquiring. We are just stewards of it for a time, and we must make an environment hospitable for it.
My instinct is to dissect it all, pin it down, put it under a microscope, but instead what I’m trying to do here and in my own thoughts is to let these ideas move through me, and settle where they will, if they will, and enjoy the moments where I’ve been able to marvel at happiness loping through me and the universe stretching out and getting comfortable in the den of my mind. I worry that if I think about it too much and use language less ephemeral than metaphor it will slip through my fingers, through the bright but hazy instinctual way of understanding.
At the DIA this weekend with my honey I stared at the trees in Van Gogh’s The Diggers. What I love about those trees is that they both look like trees and they also look the way trees might look in a dream. Likewise this coyote was at once a now-coyote and something from a dream, constructed out of lines that hummed with color and life and meaning that you grasp only by not trying too hard to see it or hold it. It was something to wonder at.
What if our grandest purpose is simply to find ways to see and feel differently, dreamily, to lean into metaphor and let it shape us. In that way, do we become a part of something larger than ourselves? If we experience the universe in this way, can we understand our world, and our place in it better? And make it a better place? Imagine what it would be like if more people cultivated a sense of wonder instead of war, built a habitat for happiness in their hearts, so it had a home when it visited.
I hope something magical happens to you today, or soon, and you can feel, at least for a moment, the universe expanding within you.
Love, Cath
Chronicles of the Open Hearted 