The dog has grown impatient with my grief. Familiar now with my waves of sorrow, she quietly retreats. This is interesting to me, since I am also (nearly) silent, I wonder what makes her realize that I’m hurting. Her insistance on hiding or softly slipping into another room is also curious. We form a tangled partnership of discordance — between what is tangible and what is elusive, what is acceptable or not, what is expected, what is extracted, added, remembered, forgotten, lost and acquired.
one minute,
you were flying free in a dreamy rose ribboned sky with the wind kissing your wings
and the next minute,
you were crashing into a false future,
impersonating a cloudy horizon,
delivering a heart-stopping
ending
to a very small but precious story
I had an overwhelming desire to fold his shadow into my pocket and take it home
your green eyes and
the way the sun shone through the pink petals—
Rita’s painted egg and two sand dollars on the toy chest,
Queen Anne’s Lace in the wild lane
where I walked alone on a late summer’s day
time falls and drifts
like rain that mists
on a hot summer day,
evaporating before our very eyes–
slanting sideways into the future
she was a feral creature—
wild and fierce and city-smart–
a force to be reckoned with,
a weary spirit of hardship,
a survivor of many lives
In the end, the only virtue that wolves need from us is honesty—regarding them, regarding us, and regarding our shared past. Only by seeing them as they are, as neither demon nor deity but as creatures worthy of our admiration, will we find tolerance with our own human character.
Excerpt from the book: The Wisdom of Wolves, Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack by Jim & Jamie Dutcher, 2018
you were watching me
and i was watching you
spanishwoods 