Another Birthday

living between the already-gone and the not-yet-here

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

The cherry trees are blooming along my street. At 7:30am I walk Tjikko out the backyard gate, down the driveway, and around the block. Approaching our house from the other side about ten minutes later, I step carefully onto the sidewalk, keeping him close to me, when he suddenly turns and lunges into the street. I instinctively drop to my seat on the sidewalk. I can’t hold him, so I drop the leash and he runs across the street to greet the neighbor who is walking two small, white dogs.

That part doesn’t worry me. The street is narrow and quiet, the neighbor and her dogs are friendly, and so is Tjikko. I slowly stand and start hobbling across the street, mumbling something about my knee injury. It’s easy to grab the leash again but very hard to pull Tjikko back across the street. He was so enjoying meeting and greeting those dogs.

The neighbor and her dogs go on their way, but then another neighbor and his large black dog round the corner across the street. I sit down again—a necessary posture for managing Tjikko in this moment. After that pair moves on, I carefully stand and walk him the few remaining yards to the end of our driveway, when another dog and handler appear across the street, this time at some distance, thank the benevolent universe. Moving as quickly as possible, I escort Tjikko safely up the driveway and through the gate.

By this time I am crying. It’s my own safety that concerns me; I have little fear for his.

I’ll add (defensively) that usually I don’t have this much trouble managing my dear little, high-drive, mini Australian shepherd. A combination of factors—the close proximity of the two little dogs, their sudden appearance and Tjikko’s seeing them before I did—drove the challenge of that trigger way beyond his grade level for reactivity calming, which is, oh, maybe high first grade, after many months of training. He does well with indoor training, but so far none of it has transferred outdoors.

Andrea, the creator of the online training course I’m using, understands:

You know that moment…

Your Aussie is perfect at home.
Listening, focused, glued to you.

And then you step outside and it’s like…

“Cool cool cool, I don’t know you anymore.”

Suddenly every leaf, smell, and moving object is way more interesting than you.

Tjikko, enjoying his Nylabone

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I get an email every day called Your Daily Dose of Kindness, from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. More often than I would expect, the meme of the day synchronizes with what’s alive in me, for example, yesterday.

Liminal: The transitional space between who you once were and who you are becoming. — randomactsofkindess.org

A year ago I didn’t feel this in between-ness. Sailing into my eighth decade, I mostly knew who I was. Not anymore.

It’s partly about the knee thing. The day after my management-fail incident, I had my first physical therapy session and it was encouraging. There’s been improvement already, and I can believe in my ability to return to walking in a way that feels “normal.” For the past month I’d been worried about having to choose between knee replacement surgery and a permanent slowing down, walking less, and hiking not at all.

What’s so bad about all that? Nothing, of course. It’s all part of my future, whether it comes as the knee disability or something else. My body is aging, and as long as I’m lucky enough to live, it will break down—gradually, or suddenly, and many times over.

Anyway, the knee and other physical changes aren’t all of it. The past year has changed my mind and spirit as well, and I wonder, who am I now? I’ll explore the changes and the question in future posts.

To start: For my Facebook profile many years ago, I wrote that I was a “spouse, mom, yogi, musician, and seeker of wisdom, adventure, and excellent coffee.” I’m still a spouse (though I like “partner” better) and the mom of two awesome young adults. I could call myself a “dog mom” but I’m really a dog handler-in-training. The other stuff is still mostly true, but different, in ways that I hope to discover as I attend to my inward journey over the coming months.

A year ago, this prayer resonated with my spirit:

I take a lantern to god like the hermit in the tarot and I say – let me find my way in this solitude. I see that spring is upon me but I also stay with one foot in the winter world. I pray for daylilies and irises while also honoring what has died and yet to reemerge. — Look About You: A Book of Ordinary Prayers, by Cody Cook-Parrott

That’s the entry for March 27th in Look About You, and it still resonates, especially since I pulled the hermit card yesterday. This week I’ve also been contemplating the poem by Rumi that Pádraig Ó Tuama quoted in his post.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
 then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
 go to the limits of your longing.
 Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Pádraig Ó Tuama then asks his readers, “Which line is working something in you?” For me, it’s this one: