Moses is a Giant Schnauzer. He is entirely black and stands six-foot-five when he stands. He knows this, and he likes this. With paws as big as your face, he tears plastic lattice off the fence because he has a thing about barriers and obstacles. Turn your back on him more than a second and there’s Moses standing on the kitchen island like he’s waiting for a sign from God. Moses is your quintessential pandemic puppy at three years old. The pandemic was this time when everyone was told to sit and stay, and of course, humans are bad with commands. It was also a time when everyone was given a chance to be good, and again, they are so bad with the commands. To fill an empty space bereft of their restaurants and ice cream shops, they adopted dogs. This wasn’t the old way.
In the old way, the humans adopt us and give us food and cuddles, but we’re allowed our free agency to keep our new group in tune with nature. We’d use our free time to mark the furniture and engage in the vast communal dream of life when napping. Suddenly, because of the pandemic, everyone was home. This placed limits on our adjustments and lessons, these necessary developments that kept everything in motion. Dogs like Moses now just had to roll over onto his side and lift his head a little when his human approached, and he neglected his duties in favor of a belly rub. The dream sessions grew shorter, and we felt torn between our capital D lives and our little d lives. Both were necessary, but one was, well, a belly rub. Maybe even a treat. It was okay, though. The earth understood. The earth had suggested it in the first place.
This was just like what that happened with Noah the Pomeranian. We all love that guy. It was just in reverse. Instead of a boat, in the pandemic everyone had to just stay put while we took care of a few things. Smite holds a different meaning for everyone. For us, smite is the same as pause. The earth just needed a break. It was tired, and all us on it were tired. So the earth decided to close up shop for a couple of years. Show everybody how nice it is not to be rushing around all the time. Show everybody their ability to be nice and supportive. If it had all gone according to plan, that is.
Those homo sapiens, though. We had forgotten.
Before you think “oh this story is so sad,” allow me to assure you, the dogs would never steer you wrong. We might ask that you let us sniff a patch of grass at the base of a tree for thirty minutes. We might insist that we poop in the exact same place as last time. When we are doing our business, it is truly business. We’re organizing. We’re letting the earth know we know what the earth knows. It needs to know we are listening. We check in.
That’s where homo sapiens first went wrong. That’s how we all knew someone had left a mess. Suddenly a sentient being didn’t care about all the other sentient beings. We did not know what to make of it. I wish I could say that after that odd and violent start, they figured a few things out.
There are some dog things you need to know. I will tell you them because I am a dog. We don’t keep secrets. We’re generous. We share. We don’t have intel. We just have love, and that is so much better for everyone. It goes like this. In the beginning, there was the woof. You call it a word, and that works fine as well. I’ll let Moses tell you the rest.
MOSES
It’s no surprise that the key players of the old stories (which yes come from dogs) all start out with their own version of a basket floating down a river. There aren’t any Ritz Carlton birth stories, no birthing suites with the jacuzzi and the yoga ball. If you’re going to tell a story everybody can relate to begin it as close to the earth as you can. Even homo sapiens want the woven reeds, the sounds of water lapping upon the sandy shore. Give them dragonflies poised in sunlight on the bullrush. Give them the the moon and this image of a newborn baby drifting along in its path on the Nile, its first face the face of the sky. No wonder this story begins with the firmament being called the sky. While we can’t remember everything about when we were babies, we can probably infer that even a baby in a basket can make a few connections about the world he’s born into. And we know that babies imprint effectively on the first face that lovingly gazes into theirs. When we create our stories, everything in our entire lives finds its place. How would I not call the face that gazed into mine, all those sparklies against a pane of dark, Father?
Nice touch, don’t you think? If I had known how much pain that little bit of poetic license would cause everybody, I would have backspaced on that puppy. But you can’t know these things. We are each given a story to tell, and our responsibility is to tell it. Maybe you’re not the best storyteller. Maybe you don’t like to talk. Maybe you’re a dog and communicate in much more superior means than verbal expression. Whatever it is, you have to tell it. You have to re-create it the same way that it created you to start with. Don’t be dim. It’s a pattern. It’s a way of keeping the whole story going like leaves to a tree. If you don’t tell your story, your whole life is a leaf that falls off. Done. But if you tell it, your leaf never falls. It attaches back on, and the whole tree lives on. I know it’s not a perfectly biomimetic metaphor, but you can see it for yourselves. All those generations, all that begetting? If we’d known the entire homo sapiens breed would lose all touch with metaphor and the nature of symbols, we would not have even tried. We did try, though. It’s just we were talking two different languages.
Now, back to my story, all five books of it. How do we begin? How does anything begin? What is the origin? And why do we need to know the origin? Why not just wander the earth like dullards bumping into stuff and never taking the time to ask it for a story? Now that I mention it, that’s basically what it’s all come to, hasn’t it?
Almost had you there, didn’t I? Almost had you thinking you’re beyond saving, beyond story. You homo sapiens with your gloom and doom. You with your human condition when you know you’re the only beings who see you as human, conditioned or otherwise. Alas, the illusion persists. All it takes is a belief, an emotionally charged thought. And you have so many. So, if you want to see how far off you were in thinking that we, the dogs, had messed it up, or even if you want to believe that you messed it up thereby proving your point, answer me this:
What songs have you listened to today? What show are you streaming now at this late hour? What 36 hour long story are you caught up in so intensely, you’re staying awake past midnight, though you’re blaming it on blue light. Baby, it isn’t the blue light. It’s you. You love a great story. You love a great song. Most of all, you love your dog(s). My work here is done, you see. For as insanely a whack direction you have taken your sapien self, for all the wars your self-concept as “special” waged on the air you breathe and all the people that are just like you (in our view at least), for all the smarty pants ideas and inventions that you have puffed up with so much that now you’ve run out of space for make teensy tiny itty bitty byte-sized wastes of so much time you could have spent lying down in the direct path of the sunlight, for how hard you have worked to celebrate your secularity, your free will, you can’t make it through the day without stories. Admit it. You need them. You might not call them stories. Trust me. They’re all from the same source, the earth. Just like you. Every time you flip on the radio or however you access source, a little Bichon Frise gets a new pink collar. For it’s true. All the stories in the world couldn’t stop you from seeing how far your prefrontal cortex could take you away from your animal family on this animal earth. They could surround you, though, on your journey, hold you when you wept, sustained you when solitude crushed you, spoke to you from deep within the bitter dark of your otherwise lightless creation. They could give you something to look forward to relaxing with later in the day, after all the world receded, leaving you alone with this meagre offering of your worship, your return to wonder and suspense and the comfort of knowing there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only then, could you rest.
(Stay tuned for when Moses the Giant Schnauzer invites his friends to tell their stories, too.)