Not a Dog's Life

(She looks like this) (Not counting gender)

So today I was headed out around the Little Lakes, looking forward to a long walk and a couple of hours of absolute quiet, when I heard the most terrible yelping up ahead. I hoped that it could be attributed to a dog or two whose owners had stopped to talk and created a minor civil war, but within a few minutes a woman approached me, gestured backward, and asked hopefully whether I had tied my dog to a tree and left it there temporarily. I guess I look like a total idiot, but whatever.

So we went on a few steps to the spot where she had encountered a perfectly beautiful beagle/lab ~ a healthy, well-fed dog tied to a tree, who had started to cry piteously when she walked by. We talked for a few moments about whether someone might have actually left the dog there while she finished a run or, I don't know, jumped into the lake (no, no one does that, but I guess optimism is not a bad thing). I said that I would be back around in an hour or so and, if the dog were still there, I'd pick her up.

We walked on and a second woman approached us and said, "Please tell me there isn't a beagle/lab mix back there tied up and abandoned." We backtracked and she said a sad, "Yep." She had seen a well-dressed (heels, manicure, make-up, definitely not one of the three of us) woman get out of her car with the dog, disappear into the woods, reappear sans dog, get into her car, and drive away.

The second woman was accompanied by her own dog, whom she had acquired in just this way, and she was willing to consider taking our new friend, if her own dog, abused in his past life and still leery after many years with her, responded in a positive manner. We tried walking the two dogs together and things were looking up, but the newly homeless pup struggled mightily when we tried to put her into the woman's hatchback, and leaped out immediately. ("She'd probably been locked in a trunk," said my daughter later, when I called for commiseration from Oregon.

So the dog and I ended up making a little trip to the police station (she was willing to get into the back seat of my car), the repository for dogs abandoned on the week-end. She was strong and apparently recently pregnant ~ no doubt yet another "cute puppy" who grew up and needed to be trained to a leash and spayed and otherwise actually cared for by people who did not know how or want to learn to take responsibility for her as she grew to adulthood.

I am SICK of this. Just sick of it. She is the third dog I have encountered this summer who needed to be "rescued." (And that doesn't count the kitten I found in the cemetery, whose plight engaged five or six people before he was settled.) I could go on and on and on, but I will just say that this beautiful little dog represents the foundation of what is practically a religious doctrine in this house with respect to where one should acquire a pet (a pound or a shelter) and what one should do with said pet the next morning (put a complete end to its reproductive capacity).

Well, that's my soapbox for the week-end. I know that my friends all provide good homes for their pets, and that many of them prefer reputable breeders to the streets as sources for same. (The Lovely Daughter, the expert in the house, states unequivocally that the frequently-made argument that well-bred animals are more predictable in behavior is utterly without foundation.) I just know that I have spent the afternoon delivering a beautiful dog to her doom, and I try to believe that the Lovely Daughter's volunteer work at Friends for Felines compensates in some small way.

Little Week-end Community

Lakeside is one of the religious summer camp communities that popped up in the context of the Chautauqua Movement of the late 19th century, and one that survives today. While not as large, elaborate, or ecumenical as Chautauqua, Lakeside is still charming in its distinctly Methodist way, with 100+-year-old guest houses like the one in which the eight of us stayed, buildings that tend to look like churches even when they aren't and, of course, a lake.

We stayed up until 2:30 the first night, discussing The Election. We walked all over the place (several times) on Saturday. We went out for dinner and watched The Witches of Eastwick, a fairly ridiculous movie that fit our mood well. We drank very moderately and talked excessively.

And horned grebes and bufflehead and hooded mergansers came to visit. There is nothing that cheers me up quite like the appearance of bufflehead in November.

Tomorrow I am off for a week-end with a group of women friends for whom that time away together has been an annual enterprise for probably fifteen years. We've rented a guesthouse in a lakeside resort community and will talk and eat and talk and walk and talk and stay up late and just generally celebrate who we are together.

With one exception. The only one of us who has moved away in all those years, thousands of miles away (divorce followed by new life), the one around whom this particular week-end was timed, announced two days ago that she would not be coming. The reasons are complex, the ostensible one being unexpected demands of family, the murkier ones having to do with those issues of obligation, guilt and freedom with which we all struggle. The result is some major hurt all around, and apparent oblivion to it on her part.

I've had some relationship highs and lows over the past few weeks, and this is certainly one of the lows. I'm beginning to wonder if we ever have much sense of how we affect one another. I've experienced a tremendous swell of support, encouragment, and generosity in the past several weeks as people have learned that I am applying to seminary, but I've also experienced a number of frustrations and disappointments in other areas of my life.

And ironies. Another friend and I were discussing some of our struggles on Iona this past summer, where we were immersed in a sort of "instant community," to which many of our church friends took like ducks to water and to which a couple of us responded with somewhat more reticence. "Ruined by boarding school, " I said. It has not escaped my understanding, in my adult life, that my expectations of community are somewhat unusual. Unrealistic, perhaps. I expect it to take much longer to unfold and create itself than others seem to, and I expect the results to be on a level of far more depth and intimacy than others seem even to know exists. It's hard for me to be satisfied with what's possible in only a week's time, or to identify the participants at the end as "good friends." I would be more likely to say "promising acquaintances." And I'm pretty sure that my response is a consequence of those six years in boarding school, when I moved through ages twelve through seventeen. Adolescent community is an intense enterprise under any conditions, and when it exists in close quarters 24/7, it's especially formidable. I find that as an adult, I often have to check my expectations of friendship and understanding at the door.

The most immediate irony is that only a couple of days after the aforesaid conversation, I found myself carelessly agreeing to make an hour-long presentation on the concept of community as a spiritual practice. I don't know whether to groan or to laugh. We are studying the spritual practices of the life of faith as our adult education program at church this year; we had just decided to talk about community in terms of the importance of opening ourselves to the "other" and to invite Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu speakers; and we had decided that we needed an introductory session on the mutual concepts of hospitality and openness and, especially, community. "Sure, I'll do that," I said.

I can't believe I said that, I grumbled an hour later. I am an idiot.

Well, this week-end will be grist for the mill.

Iona World IV

I anticipated some personal challenges on Iona. After an intensely interior year focused on an Ignatian approach to spirituality, how was I going to manage a week of equally intense community life? And Ignatius was, paradoxically, a man of the cities. How was I going to bridge the distance between Paris, a Jesuit hometown, and Iona, the pastoral island "thin place" to Celtic saints?

OK ~ figured it out. I took a volume of Gerard Manley Hopkin's poetry and writings with me -- Hopkins having been that Jesuit, largely unknown in his lifetime, who penned those expansive nature poems. And so when I got up before 5:00 am on Iona to watch the sunrise and walk to the beach, the language echoing in my head served to connect all my experiences:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil... .

As it happened, among the first things I saw on the beach were oystercatchers -- including a frantic pair of adults, indicating to me that they must have a young one nearby. I've only seen oystercatchers during their winter layover in northern Florida, but I was soon to discover that they summer in northern Scotland. They were all over the place -- at least, all over the beaches where I walked every day. I did find the one little one, but limited myself to only a few photos and didn't make any effort to disturb what must have been others nearby on other mornings.

It wasn't until I came home that I read up on Brigid, a woman swirling in mystery and somewhat lost to mythology. A goddess of the Druids? A Catholic saint? She looms large in the Celtic world and, it seems, the oystercatcher is her sacred bird. According to legend, she sent oystercatchers out to guide sailors safely home.

Everything, in the end, has a way of merging. Celtic Brigid and Jesuit Hopkins. Oystercatchers and kingfishers catching fire. There are gannets, too, over the Irish Sea. I didn't find Iona to be an easy place, but with Hopkins in my pocket and oystercatchers among the rocks, I was all right.

Adult Oystercatcher

Little Oystercatcher ...or...maybe it's an adult Ringed Plover? Thanks, Virginia, for the correction! Anyone know for sure?

Brigid Window in the Iona Abbey Church

Chicago - In Front of the Field's Windows - Thanksgiving 2005

The thing about community is -- it creates itself. When there's a reason for folks to go somewhere and a space for them to to be who they are -- they do.