Letting Bones Go
Chandla and Leonita playing with toys in the yard
My yard is a dog’s playpen: old shoes, bones, rope.
When Chandla knows we are going walking she gets excited and likes to grab a bone and bring it along. LIke a toddler, within yards of the gate, the bone is dropped as our movement brings other scents and sights that must be followed.
My normal reaction is to discourage her to bring the toy with, because it will just be dropped, forgotten, and ultimately picked up by some other dog and then, my story goes, she’ll be bored tomorrow because she doesn’t have the object to chew on.
I’m encouraging “holding onto” and “possessiveness” with the belief that “tomorrow there will be none.”
Realizing the beliefs I was projecting onto and really trying to teach my dog, I decided to play with an experiment. I saw that Chandla is not concerned about the future. She is not thinking nor worried about not having a bone tomorrow. She is fine in this moment. So I decided to take her lead and try out this spiritual experiment: Suppose, just suppose I am not worried about her losing her bone and not having one tomorrow and her being bored. Suppose I just let her drop her bone on the road and see what happens tomorrow. This is the great question of how to shift from my mind being in charge to following some other flow, which I am told is Goodness. I want to trust this other thing. I want to see what it means to let go of thinking and attempting to control life and trying to figure out the best way to make the things happen that I want to happen. So I let Chandla drop the bone. By the way, this was not just a regular bone that I brought from the butcher. This is a deep orange, hollow, excellent chewing bone that somehow appeared in my yard. I really don’t want to lose this bone.
I breathe through the fear that there won’t be “more” tomorrow. Of not knowing what will happen, what horrible thing might happen by me not preserving her bone. The next day in my yard I see….the fresh skeleton of a horse leg, complete with hoof! I don’t know how it got there, if Chandla found it or some other creature brought it. But the experiment proved powerful: An even bigger, better bone replaced the other stupendous bone. Prosperity, goodness and cause for Trusting abound.
The teaching doesn’t end here. Throughout the day, Chandla and Leonita took peaceful turns with the bone, working at it contentedly for hours. Late in the afternoon some dogs ran by, returning with their masters from another day in the fields. Suddenly there was a cacophony of barking as one of the dogs darted into our yard, grabbed the leg and ran out. Leonita, being still a puppy barked but didn’t do anything. Where was Chandla? The bone should be protected! They were going to lose their bone! I returned minutes later and somehow the bone had returned! Satisfied I went back inside. I returned awhile later and the bone was gone again! By now I was getting comfortable with the ebb and flow of the bone’s coming and going and so wasn’t worried. The bone had movement. It would move. No condition of it’s presence or absence was permanent. The bone remained in our yard that night and the next day the upper bone had been separated from the lower one. Today a partial hoof remains, the rest of the leg well digested. I feel content now. It’s okay to let the bones go. There are more bones, and there will come more bones.
Sage Chandla
