I read a chapter called Charles Bronson that made me cry so hard, I wondered for a moment if I might not be really more overtired than I'd thought.
It's really a powerful chapter for me, with its message of gratitude, and with a little sickly dog at the centre of the story, a dog who embodies my concept of "One Crow - Joy". . I want to write about the book, when I feel I can pull it together coherently. Today I just wanted to share something, about Danny, because all of this brought many things into my mind, about his life, which is not *over* but getting there, about our time together in Rupert, for which I grieve endlessly, and about an incident when he was first with me, maybe 14 weeks old, that I felt a need to share.
I brought Danny home on October 20, 2006, and this was in November, before the first snow, so he was really a little beezer, in his little puppy harness, which I still have and just fills me with heart-quaking, inexpressible love whenever I see it. It was mid afternoon, that day in November, and I was home with Dan, Lila and the guy who was staying with us, after getting kicked out of his last place, staying with us for a bit. I worked all the time and the guy who stayed with us didn't, so it got to me at times. On that day, I decided to get out for a while, just me and Dan - Lila had severe arthritis and was getting on, and I decided to just get in the car with Dan and drive to Gatineau park. I also left Lila because I needed to take Danny on the trail I used to walk with Luke, and just initiate him to the place. Luke's death was very fresh and I felt it had to be Dan and me. Plus, the guy who was staying with us was driving me crazy, so off we went.
To back up - this was 2006 and I had been walking that particular trail since 1993. With Luke and Lila, with Jasmine, with other dogs. but it was really sacred to me as a place I could get away from everything, where I learned to ID so many plants and trees, where my dogs could run around off leash (not legally, but far enough in I admit to letting them go free) and a place of spiritual grace in my life. The last time I had seen my brother alive, was on that trail and he had said something incredibly powerful to me and we embraced, with so much pain passing both between us and then away, an important thing that needed to be let go. So I took this baby creature who had appeared in my life, just when I was most in need, and off we went. I knew it was going to be difficult.
What happened, was this. We were only about 15 minutes in, I could still hear, dimly, the traffic on the highway; because Dan was so small, we weren't doing huge walks, but I decided to go a little further that day. Danny was on a long leash, busily doing his puppy thing, when I saw a very large dog, what looked like a German Shepherd, up ahead, just around the bend, half hidden by pines and the thick, dead stands of goldenrod and asters that lined the trail. I tightened my grip on Dan's leash, pulled him in, a little apprehensive because this dog was offleash and BIG...as we moved closer, the 'dog" stopped dead in his tracks and stared right at us...right at me....and, it was a wolf. This was on the exact spot on the trail my brother had stopped walking, looked right at me and said the sacred thing to me, four years years earlier, two years before his death. I have never seen a wolf on that trail before, or since, in literally thousands of walks. He just stood there, looking, and me looking back. Danny sat down and did nothing, which was, to say the least, very uncharacteristic of him. It was as if that moment passed through him, too. The wolf put his huge, sad head down and walked away. I watched him go, down into a valley, over a small creek, around a stand of red pines, and out of eyeshot.
It was one of the most powerful moments of my life, filled with such heightened emotion, one of those moments frozen in memory with great power but ever mysterious..a Gift. And now, almost fourteen years later as I read The Wolf at Twilight, I am reminded that in the heart of this sadness, all our human sadness both personal and global, there is still so much love, so much magic... so much to be grateful for in life - for me, in all the years Dan and I have walked together as one. And I am reminded too, that I need to do as the other Dan - the 90 year old Indian man in the book reminds Kent, "You should always give thanks. White people don't give thanks enough...too busy or something".
Thank you to all my loves and all my teachers - the ones gone to the Spirit World, the ones still with me, and the ones still to come.
