The realm of the soul is the realm of dreams, of creativity, of emotion, and the true spark of life in every life. |
| www.flickr.com |
| www.flickr.com |
The hatred that acts out in the world is so overwhelmingly large and out of control, it feels like there's nothing I can possibly do about it, in my narrow little venue, limited energy and puny resources.
But ... I must remind myself ...
Each of us impacts the world around us every single day. We have a choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place - or not to bother.
Jane Goodall
And ... What the Wombat has to say
I finally pulled my "Jake" story out of archives. I was derailed for a few days there, by *!(%#*!!! hardware problems, but I have the weekend to just do my own thing now, so I decided to make a start on the writing.
Whew. I haven't looked at this story since 2001. I put it away, thinking it was finished. But it's calling to me to be reworked, retooled and rewritten. It needs much trimming.
My relationship with Jake, the inspiration and main character in this story, was extraordinary enough in the plain telling.
He had been badly abused for the fist year of his life. My first meeting with him was heart-wrenching. He didn't seem to know how to behave like a dog. He cowered and cringed at every noise or sudden move. He couldn't relax and just let himself be petted. If you touched him, or even just turned your attention to him, his whole body tensed up. Preparing himself for a blow, no doubt. And even though I never raised a hand to him in the 6 years he lived with me, he never quite lost that cringe reflex.
Early imprints are hard to break.
I would like the man who bruised Jake's soul to be hurt that bad himself. It makes my heart twist up when I think of what he must have inflicted on Jake's puppy-body.
Part of me wants to believe the man was raised with violence himself, and had painful imprints of his own. Not that that would excuse his abuse of Jake, but it would help me understand that kind of heartlessness. But another, more cynical part of me says that some people are just heartless toward other living things. They don't see animals as beings with feelings or needs or rights.
Jake was rescued from the man by his neighbor, J, who was a huge dog lover, and who had secretly witnessed much of the abuse. J also happened to be my band partner. One day I showed up for rehearsal and found a fourth dog in the house, shivering under a table. I couldn't coax him out to say hello. But throughout the rehearsal, I occasionally talked to him and eventually he came and laid down underneath my keyboard. After a while, he rolled over onto his back and let me brush my toes across his belly. J asked me if I would be willing to give Jake a home, but we already had a dog, and I just didn't see how we could manage two.
J's house was almost 3 miles from mine, and I frequently walked to and from rehearsals, if the weather was clear enough. I always followed the same route, so maybe my scent was stamped on the sidewalks and lawns and hedges along the way. That's the only explanation I have for what happened next.
The next rehearsal was pretty much a repeat of the previous one. Jake was timid, but after I settled on a stool, he came and laid down under my feet. J asked me again, pleading with me this time, to please take Jake. I wanted to, I really did. He had grown on my heart already, and not just because he was so obviously damaged. He had a sweetness about him that you could feel right away. But I just couldn't see how we could manage another dog. Sadly I said no, and left to walk home.
I didn't say anything to my husband at the time. I knew he'd object strongly to another dog in the house, and he didn't much like my being in a band, so any mention of J caused tension. So I kept quiet, and said nothing about Jake. But I felt sad and heavy, like I had made the wrong decision.
I went to bed and dreamed.
I dreamed a large black dog came knocking at the door. It had the look of a doberman, but not quite. It knocked on the door, and when I answered, it asked "Can Rika come out to play?" (Rika was our dog at the time.) I laughed and said come on in, and he trotted through to the back yard, where he and Rika started doing doggy dances.
The dream was interrupted by my husband shaking me. "There's a dog at the door," he said, "Wake up!"
I thought it was part of my dream and I rolled over, but he shook me again. I sat up and looked at the clock. It was just after midnight.
He said he had heard a scratching noise at the front door. He went to open it, and this strange dog just came walking in, as if it owned the place. My husband wasn't a coward, but a strange doberman-like dog at the door would probably scare anybody. He said he coaxed the dog into the garage and shut it up there. "Come and see," he kept saying, "It's the weirdest thing!"
I went. He urged me to be careful, not to open the garage door too wide or the beast would escape. I was still in that strange place of sleep-reality where anything is possible, with a strange tilting feeling of dreams coming true, and I knew what had happened. I knew that somehow Jake had found me. He had left J's house, gotten out somehow - which explanation I would be calling to get first thing in the morning - and traveled the 3 miles to find me.
There was no question about where he would live after that, no question at all. My husband objected, of course, but it didn't matter.
And when my marriage ended a few months later, I took Jake with me. He turned out to be a great traveling dog. Which was good, because for a while there I became quite a gypsy. He was willing to go wherever I went. After we fully bonded, *I* was home to him. I was everything to him.
I had never been anyone's everything before, and it changed me. It helped heal some wounds of my own, and it opened my heart in new ways. I didn't even know how much my heart was closed and frozen, afraid to really care, afraid to be responsible for another life, afraid to feel the pain of seeing the ones I love get hurt, or killed, and not being able to protect them. Jake helped me know, and I found the lost parts of my heart.
But there were times when his imprinting would kick in and I would get frustrated. I wanted so badly to help him overcome his fears. He never did really learn how to play. He ran away when somebody threw a ball. Too much attention was hard for him. Love had to be given carefully, sideways, not head-on, lest his fears be roused. I wanted to crawl inside his head, inside his soul, to know what he was thinking and feeling. I wanted to draw the poison out of the wound and help him heal.
But some wounds can't be fully healed, I guess. I know he felt as safe with me as he could possibly feel. But life to him was not safe. It was scary and unpredictable and he always had to be on his guard.
It was trying to get inside his head that led me into this story. The first part of it just ... unfolded. It opened itself up in front of me one day while Jake and I were out walking. I wondered at the time if I hadn't somehow slipped into his head for while there. It was so vivid, so real. When we got home from our walk, I wrote it all down, as near as I could remember it.
But it seemed incomplete. So I added some stuff to the middle and created a fictional ending, trying to give it some oomph. Trying to give it a point, a moral. I'm not sure why I felt the need to do that. But it feels now, like a story like Jake's might be interesting without too much embellishment. To dog-lovers, at least. Heh.
So, I'm going to strip it down to the bare bones, if I can. I'm going to pare back all the stuff I added, and start again with the story as it unfolded that first day.
I admire the way others share their "works in progress", their ideas, their thoughts about their creativity, whether it's painting or writing or whathave you. Especially the whathaveyou. :) I want to be like them when I grow up. I want to be brave and unafraid to make mistakes... and to be seen making them.
After all, we're all works in progress, in one way or another.
So I decided to start sharing some of my writing stuff here.
I write a lot. But the way of the words is not something I can consciously plot or plan. I don't take the word road. It takes me. Sometimes it feels like a meandering thread that I accidentally step onto and travel down for a while. A thread that just keeps going on all the time, that I'm not consciously aware of. I'll be working in the yard, walking the dog, sketching or painting, and suddenly I realize I'm an hour deep into some wild storyline.
I used to call these meanderings fantasies. My dream life. I do think they spring from my subconscious, from that place where my soul resides, where conscious thought has no real control. That's where the magic happens.
Nevertheless, here I sit, on stacks and piles of pages and pages and PAGES of stuff. None of it finished. That's the hard part. How do you finish a story when the threadline in your head just keeps going on?
Today I'm going to dig out one of the short stories I wrote and finished but wasn't happy with. I'm going to start reworking it, and share some about it here and open myself up to feedback on it - a particularly hard thing for me to do. I have to be careful not to just be looking for validation. It's a scary thing.
