We lost our beautiful dog Maggie this past weekend. She was about twelve – not young but not terribly old, either. Her passing was still sudden and unexpected. I remember picking her up at a dreary animal shelter all those years ago. Sarah could not bear to go in and see the caged animals, so I went in alone. Of course I wanted to adopt every last animal they had, but something about Maggie touched me just a little more than the others. She was a giant puppy, filled with energy and confined to a tiny cage. Her eyes were so sad.
The shelter had a visitation room where Sarah and I were ushered once I made the choice. When they brought Maggie in, she just burst with happiness, jumping and licking and playing. Such a stark contrast to her sad existence in the small cage. The attendants at the shelter told us that large black dogs are less likely to be adopted than others, and by then there was no longer a doubt in our minds. It was the start of a journey, and what a journey it was. Maggie was with us through difficult times, major life changes, hikes and camps and other animals coming and going into and from our lives. She survived cancer, was rescued from a barbaric leg trap, and recovered from a deep depression after the death of our old dog Cletis. Together we gasped for air on high summits, sat in sunny patches in remote canyons, played in snow, and just lounged on the couch watching the day fading. She had a huge smile and a big personality, and the house feels empty without her. She grew old but never grew up. A big, lively mischievous puppy till the end.
Some people seek solace in the company of others. I seem to be the opposite. I need time alone in the wild to heal. After losing Maggie I went to be with the rocks and trees and creeks and winter. Temperatures had been below 0˚F for several days. Everything was white and frozen and silent. I stopped to appreciate the aspens and the long views from the Aquarius, reminded again of how fortunate I was to live here and to be a part of these places; not just witnessing their stories, but being a character in them.
Calf Creek seemed like a good choice. There was nobody around. The walk, the solitude and silence, the warm light reflecting from the sandstone as the sun traverses low in the sky, the beauty of the place and its history all whisper calming missives in a language that requires no words. The place is in me as much as I am in it. My own blink of a lifetime juxtaposed against life cycles hundreds of millions of years in the making, making me cherish the gift of time still available to me.
It is easy in the midst of cities and virtual worlds to believe that life is fast-paced, requiring great investment of labor, multi-tasking, never-enough-hours-in-the-day kind of thinking; a mode that is erosive and poisonous to everything that makes life worthwhile. City life to me always felt like listening to the great symphony of existence played at ten times the speed, turning it into a blurry cacophony, leaving no space to fully appreciate its infinite nuanced beauty with the attention it deserves. Life here, in contrast, is like tuning into the frequency of the universe; to flow along and cross paths with a multitude of beats and rhythms, sensuous adagios and triumphant allegros and everything in between. To be here is to be connected to something far greater, more wondrous and brilliant and moving than all that is included in, and excluded from the artifice of human hives. To be here, for me, is to truly live and to appreciate life in a deeper sense than anywhere else I had ever been.
Sadness paints everything with a melancholy brush, beauty tinged with a bitter sweetness, heavy and intoxicating, tempting me to give in to the siren song of sorrow just before realizing there is still much living to do. Alone, I can break down and pull myself back together again. I don’t need to avoid appearances or grasp on to empty platitudes and cynicism to skip over the painful part. The pain is necessary. Without it, we never truly heal.
