Category: Dogs

Everything Happening At Once

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photo by Nate Gibson

Remember that meadow up above the ridge
where the dog ran around in circles
and we were tired from the climb up
and everything was tilted sideways
including the running in circles
of the ecstatic dog his bright tongue
lapping at the air and we were
leaning into the heart of the field
where no battle ever took place
where no farmer ever bothered
to turn the soil yet everything
seemed to have happened there everything
seemed to be happening at once enough
so we’ve never forgotten how full the field
was and how we were there too and full
~Tim Nolan “The Field” from The Field.

The hill on our farm is
for running,
for sunning,
for lolling,
for rolling,
for lapping,
for napping,
for pondering,
for wandering.

Walking the field
with two dogs so willing,
life is full,
and always fulfilling.

Reading the World

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Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.
~Danusa Laméris “Night Bird” from Poetry

These days, I tend to read meaning into nearly everything.

Somehow, I imagine a purpose for whatever takes place, whether quotidian and mundane, or the dramatic and unforgettable. It seems to me I should derive meaning from all around me, learn from it, be inspired by it, or grieve over it.

How do we live out the days we have left – an unknowable number?
I want to not miss a thing, knowing, through inattention and distraction and carelessness, I have missed so much over the past seventy years.

Even so, here I am now, reading the world for all it has to offer – even the fine print – trying to make sense of the messiness, the orneriness, the unexplainable, and the breathtaking.

Surely it is the only way to know what is true. I need to witness it all, and wonder.

Out of a Misty Dream

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They are not long,
The weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long,
The days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
~Ernest Dowson “They are not long…”
“Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam”
(Our brief sum of life forbids us to embark upon a protracted hope)

photo by Joel DeWaard


When I consider the bittersweet brevity of life,
I don’t think how much I will miss wine and roses.
Eventually, when I pass through the gate,
it will be other loves that determine my path
into the misty night:

My husband’s kind eyes and gentle hands
Hugs and snuggles with grandkids
Worship and prayer and potlucks with church family
Just-baked bread and dark chocolate
The smell and sound of long-awaited rain
Ponies and puppies
Scent of sweetpeas and taste of green peas in the pod
Tunes of bouncy bluegrass and familiar folk songs
Birdsong in the morning and frog chorus at night
Wistful sunsets, and more so, welcoming sunrises

and ever so much more…

We are called forth from here to a hope beyond imagining.
This is only a taste.

photo by Josh Scholten

A Dog’s Life

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Yours a dog’s life, do you moan?
Courage, brother! cease to groan.
Many men, as on they jog,
Live much worse than any dog.

Yours a dog’s life? Then, my boy,
It’s a life crammed full of joy!—
Merry breezes, meadows fair,
Birds and brooks and sunny air.

Dogs? why, dogs are never sad!
See them capering like mad!
See them frisk their jolly way
Through the livelong laughing day!

Dog’s life? Then you’ll never rust.
Dog’s life? Then you’ll hope and trust;
Then you’ll say in jaunty glee,
“Bones have been, and bones will be.”

Cheery, active, trusting, true,—
There’s a canine goal for you!
Live a dog’s life, if you can:
You will be the better man!
~Anonymous

photo by Nate Gibson

I had a dog
  who loved flowers.
    Briskly she went
        through the fields,

yet paused
  for the honeysuckle
    or the rose,
        her dark head

and her wet nose
  touching
    the face
         of every one

with its petals
  of silk,
    with its fragrance
         rising

into the air
  where the bees,
    their bodies
        heavy with pollen,

hovered—
  and easily
     she adored
        every blossom,

not in the serious,
  careful way
    that we choose
        this blossom or that blossom—

the way we praise or don’t praise—
  the way we love
     or don’t love—
        but the way

we long to be—
  that happy
    in the heaven of earth—
        that wild, that loving.
~Mary Oliver “Luke” from Dog Songs

More than once I’ve seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
what if she doesn’t come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she’s gone
and I’m tied to a post surrounded by people
who don’t look or smell or sound like her at all.”
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It’s almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
~John Brehm from “If Feeling Isn’t In It”

photo by Brandon Dieleman

We all need to know a love like this:
so binding, so complete, so profoundly filling:
its loss so empties our world of all meaning,
our flowing tears run dry.

So abandoned, we woeful wait,
longing for the return of
the gentle voice, the familiar smile,
the tender touch and encompassing embrace.

With unexpected restoration
when we’ve done nothing whatsoever to deserve it-
we leap and shout with unsurpassed joy,
this world without form and void is made whole again.

They All Know…

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The squirrel sticks its head from the tree’s knot,
shrieking directions, a village gossip with a huge
plumed tail. It moves down the scalloped bark, swaying
on tiny nails, and stops, eye-level with my swollen belly.
A black blur of bird swoops, the velvet of its wing
against my cheek. It nests among a ruckus of robins,
less interested in being fed than being heard. Around
the curve of the road, I near the farmer’s fence. His
mare lowers her fan of lashes. In the pond, a fish flips,
exposing its silver stomach.
~Tina Barry, “The Animals Know” from Beautiful Raft

photo by Harry Rodenberger
video by Harry Rodenberger

It has been over thirty years since I carried a child in my belly. Each time, I remember having the feeling our farm animals knew I was “expecting” even before it became obvious. Maybe it was because I was so overjoyed, I carried myself differently. After experiencing a miscarriage and two years of infertility workups, it felt almost magical being pregnant. It seemed as if our invisibly growing baby was already welcomed by all the creatures on our farm and were celebrating the anticipation along with us.

While I was pregnant with our first son, after such a long wait for parenthood, we bought a new dog, Tango and moved to a farm from the city. She was a year old and had never been around babies, so we weren’t sure how she would adapt to both new surroundings and new owners. As we drove six hours to her bring her to her new home, she happily settled in for the trip lying on my bulging tummy, pummeled by kicks from a baby she would soon meet face to face.

She loved him as soon as she saw him.
She had known him and understood him as he grew inside.

Now, decades later, our family’s next generation is fulfilling their own hopes for the future: we have four cherished grandchildren in addition to the two we are now waiting to meet — one will be any day now.

The expectation of new life is so sweet. All that lives and breathes anticipates this new soul budding and about to bloom.

Somehow, they just know…

Howling at the Moon

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We stand creekside. It’s tomorrow
somewhere else and we’re discussing
if we’ll have a tomorrow together.
Coyotes howl in the woods behind us.
We keep waiting for one
of us to save the other, but we’re quiet.
We can leave here still
a family or we can walk separate
directions. We listen to the chorus,
coyotes and baby coyotes, a tornado
of cries as if they’re circling.
~Kelli Russell Agodon “The Moon is a Comma, a Pause in the Sky” from Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room

Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
N. Scott Momaday in House Made of Dawn

On summer nights, with light just fading from the sky at 10 PM, it will be only a few minutes before the local coyote choristers begin their nightly serenade. This can be a surround-sound experience with coyote packs echoing back and forth from distant corners of farmland and woodlands below the hill where we live.Their shrill yipping and yapping song, with hollering, chortling and hooting, is impossible to ignore just as it is time to go to sleep. Like priming a pump, the rise and fall of the coyote ensemble inevitably inspires the farm dogs to tune up, exercising their vocal cords with a howl or two. It becomes canine bedlam outside our windows, right at bedtime.

Coyotes send a mixed message: they insist on being heard and listened to, yet are seldom visible. In a rare sighting, it is a low slung slinking form scooting across a field with a rabbit in its mouth, or patiently waiting at a fence line as a new calf is born, hoping to duck in and grab the placenta before the cow notices. They are not particularly brave nor bold yet they insist on commanding attention and ear drums.

Irritating not only for their ill-timed concerts, they also have a propensity for thieving sleeping chickens from coop roosts in the night. I know a few prominent politicians who are just as noisy and sneaky at the same time. They too know how to take care of themselves in a dog-eat-dog world, primarily by eating whatever they can get their jaws around and carry away, no matter who it may belong to.

Perhaps I should be more understanding about wild canines gathering to giggle and snigger in the dark at their own silly stories of the hunt. Maybe I only wish to be let in on the joke.

Just once I want to howl back, plaintive, pleading, pejorative as just another bozo the clown adding my voice to the perpetual nocturnal yodeling – hoping somebody, anybody, might listen to what I have to say.

Evening Out

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Another word I love is evening
for the balance it implies, balance
being something I struggle with.
I suppose I would like to be more
a planet, turning in & out of light
It comes down again to polarities,
equilibrium. Evening. The moths
take the place of the butterflies,
owls the place of hawks, coyotes
for dogs, stillness for business,
& the great sorrow of brightness
makes way for its own sorrow.
Everything dances with its strict
negation, & I like that. I have no
choice but to like that. Systems
are evening out all around us—
even now, as we kneel before
a new & ruthless circumstance.
Where would I like to be in five
years, someone asks—& what
can I tell them? Surrendering
with grace to the evening, with
as much grace as I can muster
to the circumstance of darkness,
which is only something else
that does not stay.
~Jeremy Radin “Evening”

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving  
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing  
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us   
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

So much of our living is preparing for rest and here I am, fighting it every step of the way.

I resist it mightily:
like my toddler grandson fussing about taking a nap, 
or a youngster devoted to screen time and unwilling to surrender to darkness,
or a parent trying to eke out the last bit of daylight to get the chores done. 

I am comforted by staying busy.
Yet, I was created in the image of One who remembered to rest. 

So must I be “evened out” by Him.
The evening comes – there is no stopping it –
I am to settle into it, to breathe deeply of it,
to close my eyes and drift on the comfort it brings.

When the evening falls
And the daylight is fading
From within me calls
Could it be I am sleeping?
For a moment I stray
Then it holds me completely
Close to home – I cannot say
Close to home feeling so far away
As I walk the room there before me a shadow
From another world, where no other can follow
Carry me to my own, to where I can cross over
Close to home – I cannot say
Close to home feeling so far away
Forever searching; never right I am lost in oceans of night.
Forever hoping I can find memories
Those memories I left behind
Even though I leave will I go on believing
That this time is real – am I lost in this feeling?
Like a child passing through
Never knowing the reason I am home –
I know the way I am home – feeling oh, so far away

Abendlied (Evening Song) translation
Bide with us,
for evening shadows darken,
and the day will soon be over.

To Be Seen Through With a Glance

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…whenever you mark a horse, or a dog,
with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye,
be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant,
tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man. 
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
They see through us at a glance.
But there is a touch of divinity ….
and a special halo about a horse…
~Herman Melville from Redburn: His First Voyage

There are some animals (and people) who will not look you in the eye.  It may be a reluctance to appear too bold (as direct eye contact can imply), or it may be a reluctance to expose too much of their own inner world and feelings.

Because eyes don’t lie.

When you empty yourself into another being’s eyes and feel both understanding and understood, that is a touch of divinity at work. 

The eye is a mirror, a gazing ball and a collecting pool to reveal,  reflect and absorb. May we take the time and gather the courage to look deeply for the holy within one another.

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen – Waiting for the Door to Open

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In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, 
God takes the worse we can do to Him
and turns it into the very best He can do for us.
~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness

Samwise, one of our two Cardigan Corgis, does barn chores with me, always has.  He runs up and down the aisles as I fill buckets, throw hay, and he’ll explore the manure pile out back and the compost pile and check out the dove house and have stand offs with the barn cats (which he always loses).  We have our routine.  When I get done with chores, I whistle for him and we head to the house. 

We always return home together.

Except this particular morning.  I whistled when I was done and his furry little fox face didn’t appear as usual.  I walked back through both barns calling his name, whistling, no signs of Sam.  I walked to the fields, I walked back to the dog yard, I walked the road (where he never ever goes), I scanned the pond where he once fell in as a pup (yikes), I went back to the barn and glanced inside every stall, I went in the hay barn where he likes to jump up and down on stacked bales, looking for a bale avalanche he might be trapped under, or a hole he couldn’t climb out of.  Nothing.

I’m really anxious about him at this point, fearing the worst. He was nowhere to be found, utterly lost.

Passing through the barn again, I heard a little faint scratching inside one Haflinger’s stall, which I had just glanced in 10 minutes before.  The mare was peacefully eating hay.  Sure enough, there was Sam standing with his feet up against the door as if asking what took me so long.  He must have scooted in when I filled up her water bucket, and I closed the door not knowing he was inside, and it was dark enough that I didn’t see him when I checked.  He and his good horse friend kept it their secret.

Making not a whimper or a bark when I called out his name, passing that stall at least 10 times looking for him, he just patiently waited for me to open the door and set him free.

It’s a Good Friday.

The lost is found even when he never felt lost to begin with.  

Yet he was lost to me.  And that is all that matters. We have no idea how lost we are until someone comes looking for us, doing whatever it takes to bring us home.

Sam was just waiting for a closed door to be opened.  And today, of all days, that door is thrown wide open.

photo by Nate Gibson

This year’s Lenten theme:
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 18

Though you are homeless
Though you’re alone
I will be your home
Whatever’s the matter
Whatever’s been done
I will be your home
I will be your home
I will be your home
In this fearful fallen place
I will be your home
When time reaches fullness
When I move my hand
I will bring you home
Home to your own place
In a beautiful land
I will bring you home
I will bring you home
I will bring you home
From this fearful fallen place
I will bring you home
I will bring you home
~Michael Card

Touching Base

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It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while . . . and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine.
We serve a patient God. . . .
~Leif Enger from Peace Like a River

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
~Wendell Berry from Jayber Crow

Sometimes prayers are uttered wordlessly while clinging to the life preserver of a furry neck. Another living breathing creature serves as witness to our need to say what often our lips cannot. They listen, they care, they know a whimper is a cry of feeling lost and alone, all pain and sadness and abandonment.

A whimper gives voice to the fear that what is, might forever be, and might never change. Our God knows better.

God’s creatures understand our groanings. And so does our patient and loving Creator understand. When we touch base to say whatever needs to be said, whatever is spilling from our broken hearts, He hears us even when words fail us.