“It’s just that it seems ironic, don’t you think, the way Morgan won’t walk away from our house and yard, while I would give anything to get away anywhere for even a few hours!”
Above the cloth mask he wore to meet me in the embodied condition I think I’m in, my imaginary inner professor’s brows shot up the way they do. But his eyes, as always, remained steady and kind.
Somehow, I had finally found my way back to his office in the deserted university far, far above and beyond the burning horrors of this world. This ongoing nightmare of a global pandemic, “our” country continuing to fracture from within along predictable and unpredictable fault lines as another presidential election honed in on the United States like a colossal meteor. The wildfires raging around Colorado and the west in the continuing record-breaking heat the latest special-effects addition to the apocalyptic movie of 2020.
The recent inferno had only upped the ante on my sense of solitary confinement. Accentuated each weekend as my husband continued to hang out with our puppy Morgan in the front yard, boisterously socializing with likewise unmasked dog lovers and extraverted passersby likewise (and on my good days understandably) starved for interaction, at a distance I considered unsafe. While I remained inside, self-exiled by my story of their threatening presence, the heat, and smoke, unable to flee to those great outdoor spaces that had kept me relatively sane since COVID-19 abruptly changed the nature of life as we’d come to know it in our collective hallucination of separation.
Weekends were the worst. The latest had begun with a little near-death experience for Morgan. I’d been sitting at my desk as Friday afternoon blurred into early evening, attempting to answer emails I hadn’t had time to respond to, when his piercing screams shot through me. I glanced down to find him standing outside the open door of his crate, his mouth locked into the metal grate. In his current teething frenzy, he’d apparently been chewing on it, too, and now found himself ensnared by his own incisors. The more he tried to liberate himself by opening his mouth and yanking back, the more stuck and terrified he grew, not unlike the way I often berated myself to be kinder, only serving to deepen my grievances.
I talked to him as gently as possible given my own adrenaline-fueled state, somehow coaxed him to relax his jaw enough to let me help him withdraw it, terrified he was seriously injuring himself. Images of how to get help from neighbors, if necessary (during a pandemic for Christ’s sake!) or having to drive him to the nearby pet hospital where we took puppy training classes, still attached to the crate, flashing through my empty, little head. Propelled by the urgency of his screams into the full-on fight-or-flight response that seemed to punctuate this entire, long, surreal year.
As I managed to somehow release him, his wails ceased. He looked up at me with those eerily human-seeming, burnished green eyes as I examined his mouth, nose, and jaw. He leaned his head against my chest and sighed while I drew deep breaths, struggled to slow my pounding heart.
Earlier that day and several times daily throughout the week I’d devoted multiple half-hour segments to another challenging facet of his education; teaching him to walk away from our house on his leash, something he so far refused to do. Our small front lawn and the neighbor’s, to the right, with whom we shared the interior wall dividing our duplex, so far comprised his entire world. He had no intention of leaving home for potentially dangerous, uncharted frontiers like the park four blocks away.
For weeks I’d been carrying him there, walking him to the end of the sports field, putting him down, and trying to keep up with him as he hopped around, realigning himself like the needle of a furry compass, before fleeing due west, retracing the route we had taken from our beloved yard. (Not unlike the way I found myself racing back from my occasional ventures into the ever-peaceful, forgiving and forgiven terrain of my still vastly unexplored right mind.)
For the past week and a half, at the dog trainer’s suggestion, I’d been experimenting with a new technique, smearing his beloved wet dog food on a wooden spoon to entice him to walk away from our house on the sidewalk. Almost luring him one day after 20 minutes to the end of the block before he flipped around in his harness and beelined for our home.
Now I sighed, sinking back into the cushioned chair across from my inner professor’s solid, oak desk. Pure air scented vaguely with fresh-cut grass and evergreens wafted through the beveled windows, upon the sills of which morning glories curled. Healthy maple leaves un-gnawed by the Japanese beetles that had devastated so many trees in our neighborhood waved in the breeze.
Tears stood in my eyes. I had begun to think I would never see this place again, never feel the support of this chair, never encounter the gentle gaze of those healing, unconditionally loving and accepting eyes.
“I think I see what you’re saying,” I said.
“You usually do—”
“Eventually,” I added, finishing his sentence for him.
We both laughed, like two close friends reunited after many years, picking up our conversation right where we left off without missing a beat.
“It’s like you say in the second part of the workbook, ‘What is the Body?,’ paragraph five: ‘You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you.’”
He nodded.
“Morgan thinks our little patch of grass that doesn’t even have a fence (another bone of contention for Susan, by the way—add that to the list of things we need to talk about) will keep him safe, right? Along with the crate I trained him to regard as his home which turns out, bites back, too, like everything else here in this world. Just as I think faithfully taking the precautions recommended by the CCD to protect us from COVID-19 and somehow magically thinking I can get my husband to comply will guarantee my own bodily safety.”
“Imagine that,” he said.
“But Jesus!” I whined. “You also say that as long as we believe we are bodies, experience ourselves as bodies, we need to take care of our bodies, right? Treat them kindly, and try to treat other bodies that way, too?”
He nodded.
The word “kindly,” spoken in my own voice, mocked me. I thought about the way I kept robotically choosing to believe and defend my position that other bodies—particularly the one I lived with—were constantly threatening my physical or emotional body in one way or another. Plundering my sense of safety and harmony and plunging me into conflict. The way I used him/them to justify the anger simmering inside me. Even though A Course in Miracles tells us over and over that the only real source of our anger springs from repressed guilt over a forgotten decision in the mind to make the illusory belief that we separated from God and deserve punishment real.
When I’ve chosen the ego as my inner teacher, I am always defending and reinforcing that mistaken belief, using my body as a righteous shield, driven to protect myself by perceiving others as guiltier than I am, unconsciously hoping to catch the attention of an all-inclusively loving God with whom we are all still united in truth. An all-loving God who doesn’t even recognize fictitious separation, guilt, or shame. Who continues to love his one Child equally, maximally, no matter what kind of crazy things dream figures do.
“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “It’s OK to take care of my body, to take all the measures I consider reasonable to protect myself from the coronavirus. It’s OK to wish that my husband and others would take those precautions, too. But I am only estranging myself from the peace and comfort of your presence by making their choices a condition of my peace. I am not responsible for their choices but I’m completely responsible for my reactions to them.
The truth is, it is only, always, my own mind in need of healing when I find myself feeling unfairly treated. Nothing outside my mind really has the power to take my peace away, to make me feel unloved, unloving, and furious, unless I choose to let it. And I can only experience my true enduring innocence by remembering that we all share the same need to heal our mind of the belief in separation, guilt, and punishment, the same need to find our way Home to the safety of your Love that excludes no one.”
My Teacher was looking at me the way I look at Morgan on the rare occasions in which he remembers to sit and wait patiently rather than jump, lunge, and bark as I hold his bowl of food above his head.
Speaking of Morgan … I glanced at my watch. It was time to try walking the plank of the sidewalk in front of our house with the value-added wooden spoon again before the heat and smoke made venturing outdoors prohibitive. “Want to walk the dog with me?” I said.
Jesus smiled. “I thought you’d never ask,” he replied.
“The body is a dream. Like other dreams it sometimes seems to picture happiness, but can quite suddenly revert to fear, where every dream is born. For only love creates in truth, and truth can never fear. Made to be fearful, must the body serve the purpose given it. But we can change the purpose that the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for.
The body is the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity. Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill.
You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you. Your safety lies in truth, and not in lies. Love is your safety. Fear does not exist. Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self.” (A Course in Miracles workbook part II, 5. “What Is the Body?” paragraphs 3-5)
(My heart goes out to everyone affected by the wildfires!)
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