New Meditation of the Month is HERE
Latest Puppy Photos & Videos HERE
The most common thing all my friends who hadn’t yet met Vlad but came to his birthday party last Sunday said was some version of:
“It’s usually disappointing when you meet a celebrity in real life but…
Meeting Vlad––and especially Vlad with Malibu––more than exceeded my expectations.”
I, however, kept thinking about another saying, that “It’s not a party unless the cops are called,” given what happened.
Tyler brought a stuffed toy dinosaur for Vlad.
Within 3 minutes it was torn to shreds in a tug of war with Henry (another friend from the dog park).
Unfortunately, as the last bits of stuffing flew out of the T-Rex, in an operatic final moment, Henry also took a nasty little nip at Vlad’s ear.
I hate being gender-normative but there was definitely a “boys will be boys” feeling in the air.
After all, what’s a little blood-letting amongst puppy friends?
Indeed, the incident between Henry and Vlad evaporated almost instantly.
The vet later confirmed that antiseptic wipes were a sufficient remedy.
Nonetheless, telemedicine aside, it did get me thinking more about the nature of Healing, which is the subject of this Month’s Meditation HERE.
As always, I find the Angel Card’s definitions helpful.
They always offer another perspective, new insights on how I view a particular virtue.
Here’s what the Healing card advises:
“Let go of the woundedness
that separates you from your wholeness,
and restore the balance of your true nature.”
What I find interesting is the idea of letting go of woundedness.
I’m reminded that I have two friends who are very different kinds of healers.
One is a non-binary Zen Buddhist whose posts have had over a billion social media views; the other is an 80-something energy shaman who works 1:1 and in small zoom groups.
Even so, despite their differences, they both define the core of their work in exactly the same way.
Their identical (and adamant) message is:
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with you
that needs to be fixed!”
Ironically, letting go of that concept––that something’s definitely wrong with us––seems infinitely more challenging than striving to fix the thing that might actually never have been broken.
Vlad’s nipped ear proved incidental to his puppy career.
Yet that was not the only medical drama of the week.
Three days after his birthday party, after a robust morning hour playing with his friends in the dog field and a hearty breakfast, Vlad woke up from his 90-minute nap unable to stand.
He was confused and disoriented, having brief moments of twitching which looked like possible seizures.
Something similar to this has had happened in October, a month after I got him.
This time seemed a little more severe and after a telemedicine consult, it was clear he should visit the emergency vet hospital to be thoroughly checked out.
As before, the diagnosis was the same: most likely he got into a discarded joint someone must have left on the playground or the alcove to our building where smokers gather.
They gave him a dose of anti-nausea medicine and some subcutaneous fluids.
They were confident his 55-pound body could process the toxins.
And fortunately they were right.
Vlad was very sleepy but fine within 12 hours.
Indeed, the recovery process was remarkable.
Vlad went from a diagnosis of Acute Ataxia––I had to look it up but it means “a severe lack of muscle control or coordination of voluntary movements”––back to being a fully robust, athletic puppy the next morning.
His capacity to heal his one-year-old self was truly amazing.
I’m attending an online seminar today on the topic of healing by the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte.
I find his perspective interesting:
“Our wounds and traumas are not just a difficult personal inheritance, nor are they meant to be completely ‘healed’ or forgotten.
Our physical sense of having been hurt is not only our only true foundation of compassion for others and the pain they carry, but the doorway through which we may fully appear in the world again.”
In some ways, perhaps he’s agreeing with Rumi that
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
In that case, should we even try to heal it?
I’ll share what’s revealed.
Tom Wait’s unforgettable Tom Traubert’s Blues always makes me cry.
The first versus begin with “Wasted and wounded” and the last with:
“And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal.”
The ultimate image of this wound that cannot be healed is, of course, Greek Mythology’s Chiron, the centaur who was the philosopher, teacher, and great healer.
Accidentally struck by Hercules’ poisoned arrow, ironically the only wound Chiron could not heal was his own.
Condemned to an eternity of suffering, Chiron finally struck a deal with Zeus to trade his immortality for Prometheus’ freedom.
Chiron’s soul was thus placed among the stars, becoming the constellation Sagittarius.
I find it a fitting footnote that just as the nature of healing and woundedness can blur, modern astronomers are still debating about the real-life celestial body Chiron.
Chiron was discovered in 1977.
It has a diameter of 168 miles.
It’s currently orbiting between Saturn and Uranus.
And interestingly, Chiron has been classified and reclassified as either an asteroid or a minor planet or a comet or some unique combination of them.
Apparently, like healing itself, it’s very hard to define.
(recent discoveries show that Chiron, like its neighbor Saturn, has rings)
With all the chaos on the world stage right now, healing of a global kind is definitely in order.
It’s so very hard to know how to approach that but somehow it seems right that we can at least start with ourselves.
Thus, I want to end with the last stanzas of a favorite poem by David Whyte, whose seminar I’m attending today.
Recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not.
Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain
who helped to make it.
Perhaps in the same way that we are the privileged and the pilgrim, like Vlad, ultimately we are also both the healer and the one who needs to be healed.
Namaste for Now,
