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Truth be told, it’s hard not to feel like posting a blog about a dog and butterflies while the world’s exploding seems tone-deaf. Maybe it’s helpful to be reminded of little things that I / we can try to pay attention to when they show up as gifts in our lives (especially when they land on top of our phones)…? If it’s just more noise, I get it. Don’t read it. If it’s helpful to center on a small thing, perhaps this can be something like that.
Whatever it is, it’s here. You can read this post for free or listen to me read it by becoming a paid subscriber (a cheap way to support me as a writer). I appreciate you.
Boops & Butterflies
People who spend enough time around Frank (the dog) know that eventually, he stops tolerating their doom-scrolling and uses his nose to boop your addiction out of your hands. I’ll be texting someone and he’ll come head-down beneath my phone just to lift and snout-whack it away like, “Bro, whatever you’re doing is not as important as scratching my ears.”
I think he’s right, actually. I have a sense that St. Francis the Labradoodle is a constant invitation to Presence and Play, and sometimes — after spending thirty minutes next-to-but-nowhere-close-to-with him — I’ll experience legitimate sadness about the way that I imagine he can feel my absence.
Energy is wild. There’s a legitimate energy to Presence and you and everyone else knows when you’re not there. Hell, you can be inside of another person and light years away at the same time.
My roommate, Garrett, was playing with Frank outside our apartment the other day, and he said, “It’s really something when you start to see everything else as a ‘Thou’ instead of an ‘it.’” That little doodle and I are cut from the same cloth. And he’s always side-eyeing me like, “Bro, pay attention!”
I was talking to Brian when he visited me a couple of weeks ago, and he said that his dog died recently. Whenever someone tells me that, I want to cry. I remember when we had to put Cali down. She was my first dog — a boxer. A rescue. I named her Cali because I thought it was funny to name a dog “hot” and also because I wanted to move back to California.
I couldn’t believe I got to have my own dog. She’d lay at the foot of my bed at night and listen to M88 Radio while we waited for the DJ to play the requests I’d call in — always P.O.D.’s Southtown, Thousand Foot Krutch’s Puppet or Project 86’s Truthless Heroes. She used to pull me on my skateboard around Cedar Crest, New Mexico, down by Isaac’s place. She had a brown coat and a white belly. She got cancer. I remember when she could barely get up anymore. We had to lift her onto a blanket in the back of my dad’s Nissan Pathfinder and take her down to the vet on South 14. We set her on the ground and the doctor said it was time for her to go and I laid my head down on the tile floor next to hers while he gave her the shot and I literally had to excuse myself to the bathroom to weep in this coffee shop before finishing this sentence almost twenty years later.
A contemplative hero of mine — Richard Rohr — dedicates at least two of his books that I’ve read to his dogs. In Eager To Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, he writes:
[To] the three canines in my life — Peanut Butter, the miniature poodle; Gubbio, the Alaskan husky; Venus, my present and beloved black Labrador — who every day in every way have always been "eager to love." (The only people who can say that dogs do not have souls are those who do not know what a soul is or who have never been loved by a dog!)
And in The Universal Christ:
I dedicate this book to my beloved fifteen-year-old black Lab, Venus, whom I had to release to God while beginning to write this book.
Without any apology, lightweight theology, or fear of heresy, I can appropriately say that Venus was also Christ for me.
I love it so much. 😭
Anyway, I’m writing this today because this morning I was standing outside, mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, and a butterfly came and landed on my phone — right there in my hands. She stood there for a moment — Beautiful, and suddenly I was smiling involuntarily (a big smile, dorky as hell) all wide eyed and awe-inspired — and then flew off to play in all of my enraptured presence, like:
“Bro, pay attention!”
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