Snowglobe city and survival dog walks

One of the baseline 12 step recovery concepts is the utterly insane (on paper, anyway) move of turning your thoughts and actions over to the waves of an ultimately unknown future, doing the best you can with the footwork you take between the immediate impulses and the actions. Living your way into the answers, like Rilke said. (I hope it’s not gross and pretentious to quote him, and also I don’t care. This quote has helped me so much for so long. We gotta take it where we can get it.)

This turning over situation is the ultimate fuck around and find out process. At the best of times it’s illuminating and cool. At the worst it can inspire simultaneous fight, flight and freeze, with a side of fawn, which is obviously not ideal for the trauma babies among us, especially. Always, like it or not, it’s a learning process, and it’s so important.

One of the baseline metaphorical concepts that my own brain has generated over the years in times of change and turmoil is my life as a snow globe. Occasionally the universe picks it all up, shakes it violently and puts it back down. And when it’s done, hi, there I am, lying in the biggest bank, one eye open, going “I mean, wtf.”

It’s been a snow globe month, but let’s make it leaves instead of snow, because it’s fall, and also I don’t do very well in severe winter weather. Leaves feel less threatening, plus the colors are way better for my aesthetic. They’ve been so amazing this year where I live, too — a real gift in the middle of some significant personal challenges.

I could detail everything that happened but I don’t need to or want to. It’s not a good idea to minimize any kind of pain, because otherwise it just comes back and bites us later, but there is so much human pain, next to me on the highway in another car and god knows around the world, that we could any of us swap ours in and it would resonate, I think. I find real comfort in that shared experience, I think because I’ve spent so much time relating to other people living through and thriving after active addiction. Once you walk this path intensely it’s impossible — and ill-advised — to go back to separation from others, mostly because that’s a fast track back to using (which thankfully I do not want to do at all at this point, or hopefully ever, but I can only speak for right now today and it’s a no) and first, a whole lot of misery. I do not want misery, not today, not ever, and I love my sobriety. I am daily reminded just how much.

What I do want to talk about is what saves me in the snow globe times. And one of those things is, as you know if you’re here, my dog.

Bless him. One day last week I cried so hard I swear it came from my root chakra, or my core, if you’re not a chakra person. I think whatever that cry was had been buried in my body for at least seven years (the time of my last real heartbreak) and it came out of my eyes and my nose and my freaking soul, to the point where I said “God help me” out loud like I was in some kind of afterschool breakup special. I do have a solid daily relationship with a power of some kind that is beyond me, but I don’t usually ask it for help in my outside voice.

(AT LEAST I DIDN’T UNTIL LAST WEEK. WATCH OUT HP, I’M CALLING YOU ON THE PHONE NOW.)

Hoover is not the most affectionate with me in recent years.

He’s getting older, he trusts me implicitly to serve him, to the point that he’s developed a sort of supply and demand relationship with me over the years, where mom is the provider and everyone else is an unproven potential food source, so he saves his biggest moves for them. He’ll sit on my lap right now, but he gets down when he feels like it, which is pretty soon after he gets up there. He will show me love for Cheez-its, but when those go back in the cabinet, game over.

The other day when I had my crying thing, he was down on his living room perch. He got up voluntarily, poked his way up to where I was, and sat exactly one foot away from me. He did not touch me, and nor did he Disney-fy and start talking to me encouragingly or burst into a motivational Academy Award-nominated song. He just sat there, with a combination of mildly bored and maybe a little more concerned. He didn’t move until I was done, and then he went back to his perch.

I have received some top notch human support recently, as evidence of the quality of people I have been fortunate to attract into my life. But this is just an example of why my dog is, I’ll say again, better than people. (Except for a few people recently, who are really up there. Thank god for some people, you know?)

And this is why he gets good walks

We are back in our old neighborhood, which is really our most consistent neighborhood for his whole nine years with me. He actually seems pretty happy about it, or maybe it’s just the reinvigorated supply of Cheez-its? His life was really good in the other place we were, but he really does like it here, and I can’t fault him for that.

The leaves in my fall snowglobe are all over the place here. It’s been an autumn extravaganza of familiar trees showing way off, and, just in the past week, beginning to drop their leaves in a way that always makes me melancholy, but since I’m that way already, it’s really just been another thing to observe. It’s been interesting, to have significant stressors during a time that I usually reserve for complaining about the very real deal of Seasonal Affective Disorder — not exactly double SAD, because the SAD part hasn’t really mattered much. I’ve actually been appreciating the view, enjoying the shifts in the sky that normally freak me out and make me feel all topsy turvy inside. Now they’re just there, and I am trying to stay in the moment. Life is really pared down to the basics again. I feel so clear about where my priorities got messed up about the stuff that really matters.

And what matters is letting him go on walks wherever he wants to go.

I have shut down so many tabs, cancelled so many things that I thought were important a month ago but now just make me want to throw up, gotten back down to the human condition, basically. I don’t care about much that isn’t breathing.

So that means that we take our time. He follows his nose, and I follow him. I had gotten to a place where I wasn’t allowing him that time. I was operating under a false sense of urgency that choked me and made me rush him around the block to…do what? I have no idea. It wasn’t cool and it wasn’t even real. It was some kind of bizarre control simulation and looking back even a little bit now I don’t even recognize it.

But I am not doing that right now.

Unless, you know, I have to go to the bathroom or I’m going to be late for something important. And as I look at the shortening days in the year in the span of shortening time we might have together, there is really nothing much more important than taking longer to go down a road that smells particularly inviting to him, for reasons I don’t understand that might horrify me if I did. Dead bodies, cicada skeletons, the endless supply of buried chicken bones on a particular stretch of road? I don’t know. But I don’t need to, because he does.

I’m taking videos of him while we walk. I started for me, but another friend who’s had a crazy snowglobe year sent me a message and said they were her favorite new way to start her day. So we’re doing this. It’s always interesting, what helps me hold on through hard times. Usually it boils down to refocusing, sharpening the aperture on what’s important, cropping out the garbage. Why I can’t do this in normal not-upside-down days as easily I don’t know, but always there’s the hope that in these times I’ll learn more about the necessity of doing that when things aren’t on fire, bringing the ease into the daily heart of things and not just in the crisis. I have the hope and the glimmers that that’s so. But for now we’ll just keep walking.