Day: January 12, 2012

Izzy is a spirit dog, one of those wonderful creatures who comes out of nowhere and enters the lives of humans when they need it. He has had a challenging life. He lived outside on a farm for some years and came to me late in life. He spent his days running alongside a farm fence, so much so that there was a foot-deep trench where he circled and circled. He was a nightmare for months before settling down, for reasons I’m not sure I will ever understand. I remember him running off up the hill when he first saw donkeys and my pursuit of him in the truck with Rose. Five miles away Izzy was still running, and he didn’t stop until I let Rose out of the truck and she ran him down. Today he is Mr. Cool, but it took him a long time to get used to a house and a live among people and sounds.

I do not know how old he is. Almost unaccountably, he entered hospice work as Washington County’s first canine hospice volunteer when I joined. At a crossroads in my life, we came together and drove hundreds of miles all over the county and into the Adirondacks to do hospice work. Izzy seemed to be born to it and I will never forget the people he helped leave the world in dignity and affection.

The wonderful thing about hospice work is that you help people at the edge of life. The difficult thing about hospice work is that all of the people you come to know and love die. The experience led to a book – “Izzy and Lenore,” and to my photography. Hospice opened me up, and Izzy and I started taking photos on our hospice runs, inside the homes we were visiting and out.  I paused in my hospice volunteer work because it is difficult to write about other things when you are doing hospice work, and also because Izzy and I were both feeling the loss. He was popular and we were seeing a lot of people. He became increasingly deflated, even disoriented after the people we were seeing died.

I don’t know exactly how old Izzy is, but he is leading a lovely and peaceful life.  And a good one. We do some hospice work unofficially – people call us from time to time to see friends or relatives at the edge of life – and we go. He spends many afternoons with Maria in the Studio Barn and he loves to curl up in corners and keep her company while Frieda is guarding me. Izzy is a wonderful dog, a remarkably loving and easy creature. He is not doing hospice work now, but he is doing what he loves – walking in the woods, riding around with me while I take photos, helping Maria do her work. He loves people, women especially and loves to end up in their laps.  I stopped taking Izzy to readings because people admiring him disrupted the readings and he got nippy around some children who got excited around him.

The hospice work with Izzy was transformative, some of the most important and memorable time in my life. I believe it began the process of opening me up as a human being, and was the beginning of a meaningful spiritual life. Izzy is welcome to rest her for as long as he wishes, which I expect will be a long time. He is in great health, loves to chase frisbees,ride in the car, run alongside the ATV.

Someone asked what the most important thing was that I learned during my long interest in a spiritual life. I said I thought a spiritual life came first and foremost from a life lived out of fear. I see that most people, including me, have lived  their lives in fear.  They live in a system that convinces them that this is what they need. They need regular paychecks, frequent visits to the doctor, medications, retirement funds, “news” to keep informed, weather and financial updates, a political system that degrades them, jobs that leave them unfulfilled, religions that frighten them.  The system of fear around us teaches us that we desperately need these things to live, and so we structure our lives in that way.

Some learn to live out of fear – Thoreau being a patron saint, rejecting conventions on behalf of a life lived in fulfillment and self-determination. But this requires breaking away from most of the conventional wisdoms about life. You will not see stories on the news about lives lived out of fear. I have lived in both camps, having spent most of my life living in fear, and I am just beginning to live a life out of fear. I am just beginning to comprehend what that means: changing much of what you do, how you live, how you think. It is difficult to live out of fear and quite understandably, most people choose to accept the messages they receive about how they need to live their lives in order to be safe. I don’t blame them. It’s a tough idea to walk away from.

A life out of fear is different. It is about understanding that security is internal, not external. It is not something “they” can award us with health care, retirement funds, mortgages and so-called secure jobs. If we are calm within, we can be calm without. If we are quiet within, we can be quiet without. If we are safe within, then our lives our safe and secure. This is what I am coming to see, working to do.