This Earth Day meditation is a day late. But since the topic doesn't cease to be topical, I want to post today, in celebration of Earth Day yesterday, the following entry from my journal of 5.1.1994. I'm dedicating this entry to a new-found friend, Daisy, at the Fur-licity blog site:Last night as I lay on the futon, Arabella* crept up next me, as she's wont to do, as if she's an unnoticeable wraith approaching and not a lumbering mass of overgrown puppy flesh. She lies beside me with her long nose ensconced in the crook of my arm and demands--absolutely demands--that I pet her with my other hand. The minute I cease, her snout begins a ceaseless interrogation, pushing my arm and hands to make me start again. As I pet, she lies like a sybarite, eyes half closed in an eschaton of pleasure.
What I thought of was this: if dogs are made in God's image, as humans are, then God is furry and canine, as well as anthropic. It's a hard idea to express; I glimpse it more than see it. It's that, in order for God to make, God must be like what She makes. God doesn't make by imperious edict and fiat, but by birthing out of her own womb what is simultaneously of herself, stamped in her image, and not herself. God lends flesh and substance to everything she births. So dogs are made in God's image, and we see the face of God in their faces.
I ought perhaps to add that one idea that brought me to this thought was a notion that struck me earlier in the day. As I watched the three dogs, I became aware that they know in ways that more or less elude us. It's not that their "reason" is subrational, subhuman: it's in some ways deeper and more profound, less complexified and so more intent, less troubled, than that of humans. Dogs know, I'm convinced, with a profound intuitive awareness.
How else can one explain their nobility at times of crisis, the way they serve and protect humans, giving their own lives at times to save that of their human companion? Dogs can be kenotic as Jesus was.
*An 85-pound golden retriever, all blond hair and smiles, as confident as any beauty-pageantist of her ability to beguile with good looks and charm, who was then 3 years old.
