Balance is the point, I guess. For those of you, who like me, are fully committed to supporting our beloved animals in fulfilling their passions.
Sweetgrass, the Workaholic Dachshund, is a grassroots kind of female.
Need I say more, except that it’s pretty obvious why she chose her name.
She loves digging down to, and beyond, her grass roots. The sweetest thing
on earth to do, in her opinion.
I could go on and on with silly stuff about my tiny but mighty friend, so I
will, as a sweet respite from today’s global horrors…
I worry about Sweetgrass, sometimes. Her passion to dig, to get to the
bottom of things…to search out empty underground rooms vacated long ago by
gophers, snakes and whoevers, is disturbing, at times. Where do you draw the
line between full-on passion and obsession?
I drew the line the way too early morning she woke me to take her outside.
She stood silent by the bedroom door. Silent as a daddy long-legs tiptoeing
over my comforter, she vibed me with an intent so sharp that it cut through
the rare and delightful dream I was in.
Out of my dream, groggy with effusive apologies to her for having taken her
for her last out and about too early the evening before, I stumbled off my
futon mattress onto the floor in total duress about the terrible stress I
had caused her.
Threw on my robe, my coat, my hat. Pulled on socks, slipped into slippers,
put on gloves, and carried her down the stairs, stumbling again, not
floating the way sleepwalkers do.
Fumbled with her jacket, her harness, her leash, all the necessities to keep
her warm and protected from the big hooting owl—plus the raccoons, the
skunks, the deer and the coyotes she would chase—and carried her down the
porch steps that grew steep during dark hours. Plopped her gently down on
stiff grassy ground.
Her twelve pounds dragged me straight on and on through the cold, damp dark,
finally to a place in the grass, where she sniffed and sniffed and sniffed
with the veracity of some unheard of prehistoric bestial phantom attempting
to snort the entire planet of dirt through her inflated nasal canals.
Then, she did something weird whilst the whole world slept, or at least, the
birds still did.
She pawed. She pawed and pawed and pawed and kept pawing. Not like a normal
dog on the trail of a gopher, or a cat in a litter box in a rush to extract
bladder fluid or a colon deposit.
Sweetgrass was on a mission. Not to relieve herself as first suspected, but,
to retrieve some wayward primal ancestral memory buried within the deepest
recesses of her nose.
Something had woken her up and off our mattress to stand by the door, her
portal to some known or unknown thing. She later told me the sudden urge was
to find for real what she smelled in a dream she had been playing out,
shoulder to shoulder with my own that morning.
My canine friend did nothing at that bone chilling hour, but dig and dig and
dig through the rigid earth with a fury that ran her passion to the ground,
a fury so possessed, the ground softened and seemed to yield to her, sacred
hidden spaces no one else had yet plundered.
That, at 4am, mountain lion time where I live, is a bit too obsessive. Way
too early for unwavering passion. Passion is for daytime and nighttime. Not
for no time, when the veil is thinnest between worlds, when we lose
ourselves in one or the other…though I do like the idea and the occasional
experience that goes with that.
So what’s the point of this?
Balance is the point, I guess. For those of you, who like me, are fully
committed to supporting our beloved animals in fulfilling their passions.
Sometimes, we just have to say, no, to them.
Kills me to say that. I hate denying Sweetgrass her way to feeling fully
alive.
End of story.
Yet, I wonder if I had not deprived her that cold morning, of following her
nose leading her heart to the limit, what she would have discovered. An
insight, a carcass, an ancestral tailbone fossil, ancient stardust, a way to
know herself more deeply?
A way for us to understand more the power beneath the roots of our
obsessions, deep below our primal fears? The power of burrowing into the
extreme truth of who we are? Of where we begin and where we end, if at all?
Return to: Animal Stories