In my daydream, I sell everything I own and buy a piece of land in Northern Arizona, near the reservations. Then, I buy an Airstream and outfit it with solar panels. I pack a few precious belongings, wave goodbye to Phoenix, and drive there. On my way, I throw my smartphone from the car window, and it bounces dramatically behind me on I-17, where a semi-truck crushes it. (I sit in this fantasy for a while. I smirk at the flying shards of glass and iPhone components. No more chat messages, texts, or notifications from CVS, making me think my prescriptions are ready as a covert way to tell me Cheetos are on sale.)

I pull out a flip phone, looking like it travelled through time from 2006, and set it in the cup console of my Bronco. My family and friends can still call me, but that’s it. I tune for an FM radio station and can’t find one, so I switch to AM and get some weird broadcast out of California. I have no other options, after all. My podcast connection is obliterated behind me.

The Airstream is waiting for me. I had it towed up there. I move into it in two trips from my car.

I spend two weeks disconnecting my nervous system from the grid. I only read paper books, write in a paper journal, and watch DVDs from TV shows and movies made before 2005.

In the evening, when I sit outside in my comfortable lawn chair, I can see for miles, the mesas jutting from the ground with sharp edges. Somewhere, a coyote howls. I hear the rustle of an eagle’s wings. Rabbits dart from sagebrush to sagebrush, and I tell them to hurry before the sun is gone entirely. It’s not safe for them.

At night, I see the edges of the Milky Way in the night sky, littered with stars so bright I don’t need a light to move around.

I can see, feel, and hear God.

By the end of week two, I’ve met three stray dogs from the reservation, and they’re living with me. By the end of month one, I’ve got at least ten stray dogs, and I’m calling my friend Shellee on my flip phone, asking her to do a traveling vet visit. She agrees, of course.

I build a porch for them, with a little fence, not to trap them, but just to deter predators. None of them go far anyway. We all really like each other. I meet a nice couple who run a small gas station about ten miles from me. I drive there with my at least ten dogs in my Bronco to pick up the dog food I ordered from Chewy. I’m sure I’ve ordered a lot of protein bars and protein shakes for myself, as well. While I’m there, I fill water jugs. They’re kind enough to receive all my mail and packages for a small monthly fee.

At night, the dogs and I pile into the Airstream together, and I’m sure it smells bad because my daydream hasn’t figured out running water yet, so none of us have bathed.

This daydream is explicit, and I can go there at a moment’s notice.

This usually happens when work is too busy and life is too demanding. I get oversaturated by the grid, technology, demands, and people. The impulse to return to a completely analog world is followed quickly by an even deeper urge to become a hermit and live only with dogs in Northern Arizona or Southern Utah. It’s always there, too. I never daydream about a cottage in the Northeast woods or Pacific Northwest. Idaho would be a good place for this, but I never go there either.

I want spacious views, red dirt, and a connection to the high desert of my birth.

I might do it one day, too.

I jumped into the digital revolution without hesitation. Social media. Bought the first Kindle. Rendered all my music to the cloud. Stopped renting and buying DVDs as soon as digital options arrived. I started streaming Netflix the week it was available. I donated hundreds of paper books. Sold my CDs.

But now I have digital regret, even as I make my living working in cloud software.

Around the same time I started thinking social media wasn’t healthy, I began longing for more rootedness and physicality. A book to hold while I read. A house phone to ring when someone calls. A newspaper delivery in the morning. A garden to tend. Vinyl records to play on slow mornings while I sip my coffee and watch the birds in the backyard. (Sheryl Crow and Leonard Cohen sound different on vinyl, friends.)

But I’m no Luddite. I’m writing this on a laptop. I have YouTube TV and 5G internet. I like ordering my groceries on an app and picking them up without walking into the store. I used to dream of a life like Sandra Bullock had in The Net. Ordering pizza from her computer and working from home.

I just want to consume things slower, at a more natural pace. To not be available and connected.

I miss solitude.

I remember buying a new season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2003. Life was simpler then. If I stuck to my budget, on the last payday of the month, I could pay rent on my tiny apartment, buy dog food, groceries, half a tank of gas, and afford to spend $30 on books or DVDs. A season like Buffy strained that budget, so I’d trim food spending. I remember that weekend. The walks with Scully (my beloved golden retriever), the cheap meals that sustained me (Hormel chili, eggs, 99-cent pizzas, frozen Albertson brand chicken and hashbrowns), and watching Season 3 of Buffy, one episode after another. It was the first time I binge-watched anything.

This memory took me back to times before, when I’d set the VCR timer to record my favorite episodes of TNG, Babylon 5, Buffy, X-Files, so I could watch them in the evening. I checked out stacks of books and videos from the library. I had enough to eat, read, watch, and I had Scully.

It never occurred to me then that I didn’t have enough. I had no FOMO.

Sometime around 2010, that feeling changed. My tiny world felt so much bigger. I needed more. More money. More education. More options. More media. It wasn’t all bad. I left a job I hated. I started on a decade-long push to prove something to myself and the world.

Then, 2020 struck like a prize fighter, and I went down. Rheumatoid arthritis forced me inward. Those ten years of expansion and growth were followed by a sincere, heartfelt, and necessary desire to retract and root more deeply in place.

I often look around my small house and wonder if I could downsize even more. How much simpler could I make my life? I always run the risk of overcorrecting in the opposite direction, like a pendulum, swinging too hard on its pole.

I’m only remembering the freedom of that time with Scully in my 500 sq. ft. apartment. Not the empty checking account or inviting myself to dinner at my parent’s house as I waited for payday with empty cupboards.

My urge is to find the space between that time of austerity and simplicity and now, where I am abundant and secure. Walk the line between presence and long-term security. When I was poor, surrendering to the present was easier because it’s all I could afford. I only had the moment I was living in.

I’m willing to concede that fleeing to an Airstream in Northern Arizona may be a bit of an overcorrection. But I can dream.

I want the benefits of the digital age without the noise. I’d like us to collectively roll back time and never use X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I want days like the day I described with Scully and Buffy, where I disappeared into a different world, thoroughly disconnected from this one. I don’t want FOMO. I want there to be mysteries again. I want to wonder what happened to the kid who teased me in high school without the option of finding his Facebook profile.

Until the past decade, my long periods of disappearing and not responding to people were just one of my quirks. Now I get feedback about my availability.

A few years ago, I discovered May Sarton’s journals and read Journal of a Solitude and Plant Dreaming Deep. This sent me into a six-month-long deep dive into every book of similar topic, including those that extol the virtues of cutting all digital ties and the reasons none of us can concentrate anymore. All those words just told me what I already knew.

I was consuming information faster than I was meant to do so. The world was too big and noisy, and I needed to retract. I wanted to engage in a world with edges. DVDs run out of episodes. CDs run out of songs. There is no closing the reading app and scrolling a news feed when you hold a physical book. Newspapers contain a finite number of articles until another comes the next day.

Before constant connectivity, people disappeared from your life. Movies left. An episode of ER aired and was gone until summer reruns. Sometimes, I recognized an actor in a show and couldn’t place them, and I wondered what else they’d been in. I lived in that wonder because I couldn’t Google them. When I left work, I was gone from work.

When I start to have this daydream now, I’ve developed a “Temporary 1995 Protocol.” The phone goes in the other room. I read a physical book with KBach on an FM radio. I turn off work chat notifications. I write in a paper journal. I pretend streaming services don’t exist.

Occasionally, though, I open Google and browse land for sale in Coconino County. May Sarton did buy a cabin in the country, after all.

He had been in the hospital for eight days. It took the first four to figure out what was wrong and where he was bleeding from. A calcified cyst on his pancreas had grown fistulas that connected to the bottom of his lungs, his diaphragm, and his stomach. One of the arteries in the fistula leading into his stomach began to bleed. Despite every attempt, the doctors couldn’t locate and reach the artery.

He bled to death.

When the ICU doctor finally told him there was nothing more they could do, my dad looked at me, held my gaze, and asked, “What do you think?”

I said, “Dad, if there were anything they could do for you, I would have made them do it over the last eight days.”

It had been hell.

One afternoon after work, I came to the hospital to sit with him for the evening. As I stepped onto the elevator, I heard an overhead page for a rapid response team being called to his room. When I got there, he was gray and shaking. They had him on oxygen, steroids, and a nebulizer.

I thought he was going to die then, but that happened twice.

By the time the doctor finally told him there was nothing left to try, my dad was exhausted. He simply nodded. A single tear ran down his cheek.

Then he looked at the doctor and said, “Just get me some glue, and I’ll fix it myself.”

Earlier this year, when my dad confessed macular degeneration had made it impossible to read, I introduced him to audiobooks. I got him an iPad, AirPods, and we logged into my brother’s extensive Audible library. He spent the next few months leading up to his death happily devouring the entire Mountain Man series by William Johnstone.

I thought this was adorable. My mother, not so much. Somewhere along the way he realized he could leave the iPad next to his chair and wander outside, to the bathroom, to the kitchen table, and never hit pause. I’d call to see how my parents were each afternoon and my mom would say, “Your dad is READING, Jenifer. READING. Thank you so much.” She’d emphasize reading with the vitriol of a woman whose typically quiet husband had decided not to talk at all.

I’d say, “Mom, he’s happy. Leave him alone.” She accused me of spoiling him, always taking his side, and that was probably true.

Dad was my silent constant. I won’t pretend he was perfect, because none of us are, but he was a good, decent, hard-working man. He was quietly funny and wise. In the most challenging passages of my adult life, I liked to just sit next to him outside while he smoked, saying nothing. His presence was enough. I always felt safer with my mountain of a dad.

As a kid, I remember sitting in his lap, holding his hand, thinking it was as big as my brother’s baseball glove. When people new to my life met him, they’d say, “Your dad is a giant.” It always surprised me, but I suppose growing up surrounded by big people left me immune to the shock of a man my father’s height and musculature. In his prime, he could lift anything and tighten tire bolts with his bare hands.

He was a real-life cowboy. He rode bulls and broncos, and herded sheep. He liked sleeping under the stars and didn’t care much about owning anything. He grew up dirt poor on a farm in Elmo, Utah. On the farm, what is real is immediate—animals, crops, weather, and water—and whether or not you had enough of those to survive. This pragmatism informed his consciousness throughout life, and it was rare to see my dad too worried about anything. “It’ll sort itself out,” he’d say, “and it’s all a long way from your heart.”

Once, about five years ago, my mom called worried because she’d not been able to get him on his cell phone. I drove to their house to wait with her, figure out what was going on. I arrived right as he returned home. I parked behind him and he got out of his Ford, closed the door with his hip. He had a gallon of Jack in one hand, a carton of cigarettes in the other, and a Kirkland-size package of ground beef under his arm.

“Dad,” I said, “Mom was worried. Why didn’t you answer her call?”

He shrugged. “I forgot my phone.” Then he waved me into the house behind him. “I just ran to Costco to get my stuff.”

His stuff.

He started refusing additional medical care about two and a half years ago. “I’m just tired of damned doctors.” But we talked him into lubricating injections into his knees to help with mobility.

“Dad, it’ll make getting outside to your bench easier. Can’t hurt. Just try it.” I took him for the first injection.

The nurse said, “Okay, Tom, did you drink plenty of water like we said on the phone?” He nodded and she left the room.

“Dad, you didn’t have any water. Why didn’t you tell me you needed to hydrate? I would have gotten you a bottle for the ride over,” I said.

He shrugged and waved his hand at me. “I don’t drink anything but coffee, milk, and beer.”

“What about the whiskey?”

“That’s medicine,” he said.

I think the shots helped his knees.

My nephew Mick and I kept watch at his bedside through his final night. We pulled two recliners near each other, close together, anchoring one another for the vigil.

Dad ripped the hospital gown off around eleven. Mick insists he was saying, “I am not dying with some sissy gown on.” Probably.

He faded into sleep around midnight and did not wake again to earthly life. The hospice nurse came into the room, every hour on the hour, to give him additional pain medication. Each time, she touched me on the shoulder as she passed, and I’d stand and walk with her.

His breathing was shallow but steady, all through the night.

At five, she wanted to change his sheets and bedding before shift change, and so we stepped out. Mick left to get coffee from the cafeteria. I wandered back into the room. The nurse was waiting for me.

In the time we’d left, his breath had slowed.

“It won’t be long now,” she said, her hand on his shoulder. I walked to her side.

“If you have faith, which it seems you do, he is right here now.” She waved her hands above him.

His breath rattled in his chest, almost ten seconds in between inhalation and exhalation.

“He was waiting to get out until you left. It happens all the time. It’s okay.”

Mick came back then, and I told him. He sat across from me, on the other side of my dad. Tears rolled down his face. My dad’s breathing slowed to once every thirty seconds.

Hebrew scripture describes breath as ruach — the same word used to describe spirit and wind. This is the breath of God, granted to all living things for a time, subject to return to source. Each inhale and exhale expanded and contracted with God’s withdrawal. The force animating my father called him back, breath by breath, until finally, after an agonizing two minutes, we realized there was no breath left to recall.

I sat with my father for a while, opened the blind as the sun rose in the distance. I kissed his head and drew the sheet over his face.

He was no longer there.

Nothing prepares you to be a person in the world where your father no longer lives, and I am on the cusp of fifty and feel too young.

For most of my life, my father’s presence required nothing from me. I could sit beside him outside while he smoked, neither of us saying a word, and know he was there and it was enough.

My mountain of a dad. I’d never considered what it meant to live in a world without him because mountains are not something I’d expect to disappear.

But perhaps grief asks us to learn the difference between absence and annihilation.

His breath returned to God. I watched it happen as the intervals grew longer until the breath that animated his body for eighty-three years was no longer his to hold.

What a privilege to be there when he gave the breath back.

“And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the ruach returns to God who gave it.”

— Ecclesiastes 12:7, adapted from the Hebrew

It’s hard for me to even type that, but she did, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night in March, two months ago. She experienced a syncope, then a series of cascading events, each one worse than the last, and I rushed her to the emergency vet where there were few options.

The kindest thing I could do for her was let her go. Mercy is often demanding.

Sophie is not the first dog I’ve lost, and now I have no dogs, which is existentially weird. A lot of people in my life are perplexed by this, bothered by it almost, as though I’ve somehow altered their perception of reality too.

“Jen, when are you getting another dog?”

Friends send me links to dogs who need homes. I get texts with photos of three-legged min pins and messages that say, “This one. You should just go get this one.”

People ask the question gently, but with real confusion underneath it, as though my life no longer makes sense in its current form.

“Why do you not have dogs?”

I wish I could answer that question without writing an essay.

I don’t just adopt dogs. I make covenants with them. We meet, our nervous systems fuse together immediately — it’s happened again and again. There’s eye contact and then we’re bonded, and it’s painful to be apart and even more painful to keep living after they go.

In the past fifteen years, I have loved and let go of over thirty dogs.

Sophie was the last of a long procession of aging, senior, or special-needs, and often poorly behaved dogs.

When I adopted Sophie in 2022, I was married and already had three other dogs. She wasn’t supposed to become mine, but within the first twenty-four hours something clicked in her brain and she decided, “That’s my human.”

She immediately wanted to assume what she felt was her rightful place at the top of the hierarchy in the house, but Blue — my Tiny, Mighty Princess, my Biscuit — was already there in full terrible rat terrier mode and quickly informed Sophie that the throne was occupied.

Leonard and Gus, the two boys, were far more willing to go along with Sophie’s self-appointed authority. When Blue passed away in October of 2023, Sophie finally assumed her rightful place as monarch.

Then she told me what to do every day for the rest of her life, and I happily complied.

She was, by all accounts, a legitimate psychopath.

No, I’m serious.

She had no teeth, bad knees, and a grade 3 heart murmur, and she would attack anyone that pissed her off. In the spirit of Villanelle, I was her Eve. I was the one precious thing in her world. She may only have weighed six and a half pounds, but she was vicious.

A few weeks after I adopted her, I opened the back door and startled a stray cat lounging on my patio. Before I could grab Sophie, she exploded across the yard. The cat cleared the fence, and Sophie looked prepared to follow. Then she strutted back to me, deeply pleased with herself, as if she had personally defended the kingdom.

After Gus passed away, during the last four months when it was just the two of us, I took her everywhere with me. If someone bumped into me in a store, she’d growl from inside her little bag.

People would say, “Oh, can I pet your dog?”

And I’d say, “Please don’t. She has no teeth, but she will bite you.”

Sometimes I’d take her to my parents’ house where she’d interact with my siblings’ dogs, and if any of them came too close to me, she would launch herself at them, full of sound and fury.

I’d hold her up in the air and say, “Sophie, stop getting so mad. It’s not good for your heart.” She’d kick her little legs while spit flew out of her mouth, and then eventually she’d settle against my side and I’d feel her tiny body relax.

She couldn’t help it. It’s who she was. My Spicy Sofritas. The Spice Girl. I loved her for it.

Every night, I had to carry Sophie outside to use the bathroom because she was deeply offended to pee outside during the day, but to ask her to do it at night was beyond the pale.

She had one pre-approved patch of short grass she liked near the house, and every night I had to make sure I got her out there before the sprinklers came on because if her feet got wet, she acted like I had personally betrayed her.

So I’d carry her outside against her will while she huffed dramatically in my arms, set her down on her approved little square of land, and wait. When she was done, she’d walk back to the patio, stop on the tile in front of the door, and just flop over onto her back with all four paws sticking up in the air, waiting for me to pick her up and carry her to bed.

She never asked. She expected it and of course I did it, every single night.

In the final weeks of her life, I started picking her up and kissing her little face and saying, “Please don’t leave me, Sophie. I feel like you’re getting ready to leave me. Please don’t leave me.”

At the time, I didn’t understand why I kept saying it.

Nothing dramatic had happened yet. There wasn’t a clear event or obvious medical revelation. I think some part of me was already picking up on subtle shifts in her energy, behavior, and presence. I sensed changes happening below language and conscious thought.

Some preverbal part of me already knew.

About three days after she passed away, I had a dream that I was staying at a cabin with a bunch of people. There were double doors that opened out onto this green, forested landscape. We were all sitting around eating and talking when suddenly this giant white wolf trotted through the doors, and everyone panicked. But I didn’t. I looked at her and thought, well, hello. I wasn’t afraid of her at all. I just said, “You come with me.”

So we walked together down a hallway into my room, where another set of double doors opened onto a huge skyline. The sun was setting. Beyond the hill outside, the land dropped off into the distance.

There was a daybed in the room, and the wolf jumped up beside me. I wrapped my arms around the neck of this massive animal and we fell asleep together.

I slept for what felt like a very long time. Then eventually she nudged me awake. She jumped down from the bed, and I sat up and scratched her face and kissed her forehead and said, “I’ll see you later, my friend.”

Then, this giant white wolf walked through the doors, paused once at the horizon to look back over her shoulder at me before disappearing over the hill.

I woke up with tears because that’s who Sophie really was underneath the tiny body, bad knees, missing teeth, heart murmur, and psychotic rat terrier rage.

Maybe that’s why we understood each other so well. She came into my life right when my own body stopped cooperating with who I felt myself to be.

I have loved so many dogs.

And when I die, my singular hope is that I’ll hear God say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” just before I’m swarmed by all of them, knocked to the ground, covered in kisses, surrounded completely.

May I never leave.

Because honestly, I think that’s the first moment I’ll finally feel home.

You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

-Psalms 16:11

Of all the modern theologies that piss me off, The Secret sits at the top. Not because it’s ridiculous and simplistic, though it is. Not because it focuses spiritual pursuit on material life, though it wrongly does. But because it pretends to be liberating while victim blaming. It’s true what you pay attention to matters. It’s not true that attention controls reality.

Once you make that move, health, love, stability, loss is reinterpreted as evidence of your internal state. It’s secular prosperity gospel bullshit.

Of the many things I’ve heard since being diagnosed with RA, after a horrific battle with COVID that resulted in double pneumonia and a body that’s never been the same, is that maybe if I get a treatment that works, feel less pain, I’ll give off better energy and things will get better.

Yes, please, allow me to vibe my way out of this.

I understand the impulse to do this. It’s not so much about me as it is a desire to order reality into a worldview that feels controllable. Confrontation with the truth is much harder. You can’t always control what’s going on in your body. You can eat well (I did), take appropriate precautions (I did), and still get really sick, live with it, or if you’re really unlucky, die.

That is where shit gets real, and no amount of good energy matters.

Attention isn’t leverage. It doesn’t bend reality to your will. It’s looking at what is and not turning away. It’s love, as a verb.

One of my dear friends just lost her husband. He was my age, not even 50. The day he died, he was having a medical procedure to repair a stent for lung cancer treatment and coded under anesthesia. She called me sobbing from the hospital. All I could say was, “What? It was just a procedure.” I couldn’t reconcile it. My brain skidded to a halt. The world slowed down. The chirping of a bird outside the kitchen window reduced to a 0.25x speed.

“He died?”

Then I saw him, twenty years before, outside behind a friend’s house at a party. I gave him one of my cigarettes. He said, “Don’t tell my wife.” I never did.

This was Monday. The next couple of days were a blur, but then at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night she called me, sobbing. The funeral home had urged her to donate his body to science. She thought it was the ethical thing to do. But lying in bed, she googled what happened to those bodies. Heads and limbs are severed, sent different places, and organs are separated, parsed, and distributed. She couldn’t stand the thought of only getting partial cremated remains. She tried to call the funeral home, but it was late, and the woman she texted said it might be too late to stop the transfer of his body.

She needed me to pick her up at six a.m., take her there, try to stop it. So, I did.

We drove in silence. What do you say when you’re on the way to stop a body transfer out of a funeral home as the sun peeks up over the horizon?

The funeral home is situated on the corner of 51st Ave and McDowell, across from a Food City and in the same parking lot as Domino’s.

The front doors were locked, lights off, but I drove behind. The back door was open.

“I’m going in,” I said.

My friend made to get out of the car.

“Stay there, just stay in the car. Don’t get out. Just stay.”

I walked into a morgue at dawn. I yelled for help. Two men came out, looked at me with disbelief and shock, and ushered me back outside. I explained, pointing at the car. She got out, came to me.

“That’s his widow,” I said. “Wait, are you a widow or a widower? I don’t know. He’s her husband. You can’t take his body.”

They promised nothing would happen. We waited for the funeral home to open, windows down in the car, the noise of urban Phoenix traffic idling at stoplights, the hum of I-10 behind us. I watched four little birds hop through a water puddle. I don’t know where the water came from. I worried they’d get sick from it, but they flew off after a while.

We made arrangements for a viewing the following week, and I took her home. I watched her walk inside, steps slow, head bent. I pulled away, uncertain.

Was there something else I should be doing?

I sat too long at the stop sign to pull onto Union Hills and someone honked at me. The morning was fully awake now. There were places to go, life to live, no time to idle in thought at stop signs.

There is no system for this. There is no abundance mindset that reaches into a morgue at dawn and makes any of it different.

You just show up when needed, try not to look away, and love with all you’ve got.

Everything else is privileged theory that cannot withstand death.

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked shall I return there;

the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.

— Job 1:21–22 (NRSVUE)

For years, I mocked it. Sent the zombie memes, made the jokes, exiled on the outside, looking in. But then, in 2022, something shifted. I felt this burning desire to read the Bible.

Isn’t that strange? I have two advanced degrees in religion and philosophy. I’ve read every major religious text from every religion in the world. Upanishads? I can quote it. Bhagavad Gita? What do you want to know? Tibetan Book of the Dead? Let me tell you about the passage that made me quit my job and move back home to Phoenix. Tao te Ching? I can spend hours talking about the Way. But do you know that I’ve not read the Bible, in its entirety, since I graduated from Mormon Seminary in 1995?

I mean, I’ve read excerpts. It should be no surprise that I love Job and Ecclesiastes. From time to time, I’d crack open Psalms to chase down a fragment of one I remembered. I avoided the New Testament with everything in me. For some reason, I could talk about the God of the Old Testament, but the God of the New Testament seemed inaccessible to me.

“I don’t give a good g-damn about the Bible,” I’d say, wave my hand, posturing, confident in my certainty.

Listen, if someone says they don’t care about something enough times, it probably means they do. Intervene if you can.

I did the only thing I knew to do. I went to the Mormon church’s website, and I ordered a Quad. (If you don’t know what that is, you can check it out here.) It’s what I had as a kid, gifted to me on my eighth birthday and baptism day. When I was excommunicated, I threw it in a fire pit, rage, humiliation, and rejection raw. If God rejected me, fine, didn’t need him, I would burn his words.

When my new Quad arrived, I sat it in my lap, hand on it, and cried. I had this sense that whatever was happening was not something I could stop. I had not known how much the loss had devastated me.

Unfortunately, the font was too small for me to read and the book was too heavy for me to hold. I had not factored in middle age and RA.

I downloaded The Bible Project app and made the font gigantic and read it on my iPad mini. (GenX survival font. Give me God, but with wifi and a tablet.)

I started in Genesis, as one should, and read every word through 2022–2023. Then, I started over in 2024 and finished again in October 2025.

When I first read through it, I thought, is this the Bible or Game of Thrones? Listen, it’s pretty brutal there. There were passages that punctured my chest. (Have you read Judges 19? It’s ancient Epstein files evil.) I’d have to set it down, walk away, outside, see the sun, remember the light. It wasn’t until my second trip through that I understood the deeper layer and how it translated to my modern life.

I can summarize it for you, because it’s been my primary complaint about God for years.

The fundamental problem with Earth is that things have to die for others to live. It is not enough that good sometimes balances evil, because evil should not exist at all. Some lives matter more than others, and they should not. Being caught between the living and the dead, as conscious creatures, aware of our mortality, is cruel, unforgiving, and made worse by our worst traits, like greed, envy, and lust. Some days, I think there may actually be a war between darkness and light, and the entire story of human civilization is proof of it.

From the macro to the micro, Earth is fallen. It’s a consistent theme in world origin myths. In Hopi tradition, the Coyote, the trickster, bursts into the Spider Woman’s hogan where they are weaving the rug of creation. He grabs the corners and shakes it, sending everything into chaos and confusion. In Greek myth, Pandora’s box is opened and toil, disease, suffering, and death are unleashed. In Norse myth, creation is built on a corpse because creation itself is violent consumption. In Rig Veda, the cosmic being Purusha is sacrificed, and the world is formed by breaking something whole. In Buddhism, the problem is just built in. To exist is to suffer.

Genesis’ curse, the bitten apple. Paul called it creation groaning. I didn’t know I agreed with them.

Within the sprawling, magnificent, hyperlinked Bible are warnings and solace spoken by saints and prophets who saw the madness and cried out, trying to get anyone to listen.

“It should not be like this. This is wrong. But it is what it is, so let me console you, or warn you, or try to hold you accountable.”

If Ezekiel had an X account, he’d post 150 times a day and no one would engage him. Isaiah would get shadow banned, people would mock his poetry, and then he’d be arrested for public nudity. Ruth would get on TikTok live to tell her amazing love story and be dragged for using her mother-in-law and taking advantage of Boaz. Paul would have a podcast that offended the right and the left.

As the teacher says in Ecclesiastes 1:9:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (NIV)

And Genesis, where it all began, tells us the score plainly, but like most things, we miss it.

When humans were exiled from the Garden of Eden, God didn’t say, “Get out because you’re evil.” God said, “You have to leave now because you possess the divine attribute of moral consciousness without immortality. It’s going to suck. I tried to tell you. You crossed a boundary and now there are consequences. Here, let me give you some clothes before I bolt the door behind you. Don’t mind the angels with the flaming swords.”

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:19 NIV)

Brings us right back to the beginning of Lent, doesn’t it?

And with it, the quiet recognition that something is wrong. Every road with me leads back to Simone Weil (Gravity & Grace):

Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it, every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation, all our feelings are mixed up with the opposites. It is because we are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God. Human life is impossible. But it is only affliction which makes us feel this.

But this is what I was missing, all those years. In Christianity, God descends into this darkness and lets it kill him, which is either the most absurd theological claim ever made or the only one that doesn’t feel like gaslighting. It’s so bizarre, honestly, it breaks the frame we thought we were living in.

This drops us into Holy Week, coming up soon. Where Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the brilliant iconoclast Isaiah, enters Jerusalem through the east gate, with the other sacrificial lambs, tips over tables, rebukes authoritarian religious leaders, hosts the Last Supper, gives the final commandment, “You should love one another as I have loved you,” allows himself to be crucified, and then returns.

Easter morning sunrise has its own feel. The sun rising after the dark, new life in spring, promise of summer.

I can’t always get there theologically, but I’m trusting the journey. My faith tends to be rooted in Holy Saturday, where Jesus has died, darkness has fallen, and he has not returned yet.

Mary Magdalene, the ultimate disciple, sits, eyes on the tomb, waiting. I can only imagine how she felt. Her teacher and friend has been brutally murdered by the state. The other disciples have fled. She doesn’t know how the story ends. It’s just that staying is more honest than leaving, and so fearlessly, she waits in the void, between affliction and hope.

In 2009, I was doing hospice volunteer work, and met Peg, a patient with terminal brain cancer.

Her mind fluttered a jam factory in Ireland at sixteen, to the night she met her husband in 1946, to the death of her son. She told me these three stories, again and again.

She laughed telling me about her boss at the jam factory, who loved women and was loved by women — but not by her. Her job was to taste the jam as it cooked, and if it didn’t taste right, tell them to throw it out. She loved this power over her boss — she had the ability to throw out huge barrels of jam if it didn’t taste right.

She told the story about her husband, the night she met him while on a date with another man, and how, at the age of nineteen, she left her family, her country, and moved to America, the wife of an American soldier. They would have two children — a boy and a girl.

The final story was of her son’s death. He had “gotten AIDS in the 1980’s, before anyone really knew what it was.” Her husband, she said, didn’t want him near either of them. But he was so sick, and she had insisted and defied her husband, moving him into their house. She hadn’t cared that he was gay, only that he was her son. She told me this with defiance. She cared for him and nursed him, and one day she came home to find him dead in his bed.

It was here that she paused, the same way, each time, and said:

God always knows what God is doing, but this is the only thing I had a hard time with. I’ve always had a hard time with this. Nothing else in my life made me wonder what God was doing, but when I saw my son lying in bed… I just couldn’t understand what God was doing.

She’d stare forward, her eyes unblinking, and rub her hands together. She’d look back at me and say:

“This is the only thing I have a hard time with, in my whole life. But God has to know what God is doing. God has to know.”

Peg, in the last days of her life, was haunted by her son’s death. When she spoke of him, her posture changed. Her eyes cast downward. Her shoulders tensed. This was not a loss she could reconcile— it pulverized her soul. It was not just grief reflected in her face. Her eyes revealed a soul who struggled not to lose her faith. She could not understand God — and refused to let go anyway.

She died in early August 2009.

She still didn’t know what God was doing — and neither do I.

I’ll stay anyway, with her, in Holy Saturday.

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53:3–4 NIV)

First, I watched every episode of Star Trek Voyager. This started in August, when the flooring in my front room was removed with a jackhammer because someone glued it down. I had to work out of a hotel room. The Voyager rewatch continued through my birthday week in October.

I had someone come in to steam clean the tile and then started Star Trek the Next Generation. About this same time, I moved on from my Reba music hyper-fixation to Sheryl Crow. That took me through to Christmas, when I jumped to the X-Files and the Sheryl Crow hyper fixation continued, until this past week when it was all ... just over.

I found myself wondering, “Who do I listen to next?” Then, almost as abruptly, I thought, “What the heck just happened?”

Consider the Voyager arc. A spaceship, thrown to the other side of the galaxy, fights every known obstacle to get home, losing time, life, and hope, only to be saved by a future version of their Captain who knew the cost of her iconoclastic idealism and rectified it in real time. I started it the day a jackhammer was used inside my house to remove flooring that should have never been glued down, one week after my ex-wife moved out and I filed divorce paperwork, started a new role at work, and felt thoroughly adrift and alienated from myself.

The foundation of the house had just been re-poured. One day, in early June, I noticed the flooring in the bedroom was warped. A pool leak met a poorly poured foundation from 1979 and the backyard and the back half of the house were dug up. Then thirteen men traipsed through my house with buckets of cement, while one uncoiled a cement hose into the master bedroom.

Who doesn’t need a mythical space captain during this kind of chaos?

During that same time period, I’d lie in bed at night, listening to a Reba McEntire playlist I made. When I get sick, or I have an infusion, or I’m scared, I listen to Reba. Nothing soothes a broken heart like For My Broken Heart and nothing gives hope in darkness like Somehow You Do. Reba vibrates with this energy that says, “Yeah, this is all awful, it’s gonna hurt. Put your boots back on. Let me give you a hug. Now get back on the horse.”

Eight-year-old me first saw Reba on CMT in the living room of our double-wide trailer in Helper, Utah. I remember it because it was a few weeks after my baptism and I had my Kermit and Miss Piggy dolls with me, and Buttercup kept trying to chew them. It was a late fall, early winter weekend morning. There were no leaves on the trees outside the window. I could feel hot air coming out of the floor vent. My mom had made me put on socks with my nightshirt. I’d been sick, maybe even in the hospital. I was laying on the floor, right in front of the television. The carpet was brown and black swirls. The TV was color console, dark grain wood. We didn’t have a remote control yet so I had to punch the numbers into the cable box. Reba was singing Whoever’s in New England, and I thought she looked so sad and pretty holding her coffee cup while looking out the window of her house.

Then, I abruptly shifted from Reba to Sheryl Crow, where I cycled through all of her 90’s albums on repeat. When I was not listening to this, I was watching Star Trek Next Generation. The house was almost finished. I was feeling a bit better. Legalities were wrapping up. I started to think a bit more concretely about the structure I wanted in my life and more than anything, I wanted calm.

Is there anything more calming than listening to Jean-Luc Picard parse through ethical and emotional complexity a few hours nightly? Picard is calm, structured, logical coherence to Janeway’s intuitive and emotional fire. Picard is operating within an existing framework of structure in the Alpha Quadrant while Janeway is literally managing jackhammers in her living room.

And Sheryl Crow? If Reba is the aunt who will bail you out of prison and not tell your mom and dad, Sheryl Crow is the older sister who says, “Yeah, you got yourself into some trouble. Life is often painful, doesn’t work out how you think, relationships end, but jump in the car and let’s take a ride.” Her voice is not perfect. It’s incarnated. It pulls you down to earth, explains absurdity, sadness, and loss with a wink and wise lyrics and then says, “You still need to have some fun.”

I was sixteen when I first heard and saw Sheryl on VH1. I’d just come home from the Ogden Athletic club. I’d been playing a game of pickup basketball with the guys there. I was home alone, making a sandwich in the kitchen, when I heard her first sing Strong Enough to be My Man. I remember leaning on the doorway between the kitchen and living room, chewing a bite, transfixed. My mom had bought a new TV, a floor model for cheap from Sears, where she worked. It was a giant flat screen, console floor unit with a wooden frame. Anyway, the video ended and I thought, “I’m gay.”

Honestly, I am a mystery to myself. I just pulled pieces of myself through time, tucked them back inside, right into their place, and carried on. What else is there to do?

My mom, Becky, the ultimate philosopher, survivor of chronic myeloid leukemia, heart attack, and stroke is fond of saying, “You can’t let the bastards win.” I’ll sometimes say, “Mom, who are the bastards?” She’ll say, “Anyone or anything that thinks it’s going to beat you.” Divorce? Rheumatoid arthritis? House chaos? Death of a beloved dog? “Don’t let ‘em win.”

She’s also fond of saying, “Wish in one hand and shit in another, see which one gets filled first.” Maybe harsh, but also, valid life advice. I find this very helpful when reality does not conform to my expectations.

Sometimes a lot of shit happens, all at once. Stacked losses, cascading into a pool of, “There is no f-in way I can manage all this.” But there’s always this moment, where I find my way to the surface, and I say, “In the game of Becky vs. the World, I’m still standing.”

If reality won’t provide narrative coherence, I’ll borrow some.

“There’s coffee in that nebula.” - Captain Janeway

It can be wrapped in chains and a cinder block, honestly, and sunk in Lake Pleasant. Like a time capsule where I dumped all my baggage, got Job’d (in the best ways possible—it could have been worse; I hope God is not reading this), and somehow left it upright. I’ll tape a Post-it on the inside, against the window that lets the future look into it, saying, “Note to the future: I survived this and was only moderately unbearable. Please clap for my sisters.”

I’m being dramatic, and really, life doesn’t unfold in tidy calendar years, but arcs that begin inside dorm rooms in 1997 and end in stucco houses in 2025. Time is a pattern strewn through a lifetime. Choices made, life lived, sometimes tidy, sometimes messy, sometimes thin, sometimes chubby. All of it honestly and with great effort. (Sometimes too much effort.)

Have you ever had a somatic time slip? I did a few weeks back. I popped the back off a picture frame and I slipped through time to September 2011, in a different house, light through different windows, but the feeling met me like it was fourteen years earlier and I’d not moved. It was just a moment but felt like a lifetime. I sat down on the kitchen chair and looked around me. Was I still where I started? Something inside me clicked off, complete.

The last few months of this year have been like this for me. Unravelling, unspooling moments of clarity, release, and somatic understanding. It seems as though my body knows a lot before my brain will accept it, and I’d probably be better off if I listened more.

On Christmas Eve, I went to my church, sang Christmas songs, lit a candle, and celebrated the Light of Christ entering the world. Then, I came home with the single mission of staying awake long enough to accompany Bertha to Midnight Mass. I put on a pot of coffee and decided to watch Christmas episodes from my favorite television shows. I started with Bones, the one in the first season where they’re exposed to Valley Fever and she solves a cold case and finds a $100,000 penny. Then, I thought about The X-Files and Lilly Tomlin and went to The Ghosts Stole Christmas, and that was all it took. It was a gateway episode, and I was on an X-Files bender for the next week.

So, that’s me. Been watching The X-Files on DVD like the world never invented notifications. I’ve not been interested in wearing pants or making plans. This is a modern cloister walk—but with pantless solitude, X-Files, an old ornery rat terrier, and somatic time slips.

Bertha and I did make it to Midnight Mass. I drove her there in misty rain, car lights orange against wet asphalt, Christmas music low on the radio. St. Helen’s is a mid-century church. It is lovely but doesn’t have that haunting sensation of older Catholic church. (You know, when you walk in and think, “Am I in church or a dungeon?” I like those churches.) We found good seats in the middle, just close enough to smell the incense and for me to be worried about so many people drinking out of the same cup.

I have no idea how to follow along to a Mass, but I tried. The music was modern, full band. (Also disorienting. I felt like I’d overtuned to a Christian contemporary station rather than NPR.) But once we got started, it was rejuvenating. Following along with something so old and grounded. Billions of people have said those same words every year at Christmas in the two millennia since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Tell you what I’ve learned the last couple of years: Deconstruction as a tool is awesome to dismantle unethical and corrupt power structures. But you can’t live in it. To try is like saying your leadership philosophy is a Six Sigma fishbone diagram. Instead, try rolling into a Presbyterian Church service when your life has been cleared out to the studs to find that structure is already there, just waiting. Like a Midnight Mass with one of your oldest and dearest friends when you’re both a little worse for the wear at the end of the year.

The rain continued to soften the edges of the night, and carried me into Christmas, where I enjoyed a lovely day with my parents and siblings. NBA Christmas Day took me into the wee hours, and we can circle back to the X-Files bender.

I’ve paused said bender to watch the Suns.

So that’s where I am, at the edge of a year, not making resolutions, not optimizing, not even pretending I know what comes next or WTF is going on. Just watching basketball and X-Files like it’s liturgy, letting my body finish its sentences, trusting that whatever is real doesn’t need me to rush it.

If this is a threshold, it’s a quiet one. No trumpet. No fresh notebook. Just rain, old stories, ancient words, and a sense that for the first time in a long while, nothing is chasing me.
Which feels… holy enough.

Also, Go Suns!
Refs, YOU SUCK!

*I originally wrote this as a guest author post for a “Share your most embarrassing moment” series. I won.

Date: 2/2014

Location: New Jersey

You asked for my most embarrassing story, and you’re getting it. This is a cautionary tale about good intentions gone wrong with kale, a blender, and a trip to Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I was living in New Jersey with my twenty-one-year-old nephew. He decided to get fit and took my credit card to buy a Ninja blender for the apartment. He started making smoothies every morning before he bounded off to the gym.

He then drank this smoothie every day for a week or two. I encouraged it. I was busy with work, not really paying attention to what he was doing. We’d also just begun to recover from an apartment flood. A fire sprinkler pipe had burst during an arctic blast and all our furniture floated away. I needed to wait for the insurance check so I could replace our furniture and toss out our air mattresses. It came on a Wednesday night, and I told Mick we’d need to make a trip to Ikea Friday night.

Hearing that he’d soon have a bed again made him generous. “Let me start making you a smoothie. You know, to help you. It’s been stressful.” So, I agreed. I mean, what could it hurt? I asked what was in the smoothie. He told me apple, banana, carrots, kale, spinach, ice, and water.

Looking back, I should have asked portions of each.

I was all in. I heard him blending my smoothie that morning before he left for class. He proudly told me it was waiting for me in the fridge.

It was amazing, and after, I was so full. But by late morning, air started leaking out of my butt against my will. I walked around all day, a tiny cloud of putrid air-puss floating behind me. People looked at me from the corners of their eyes. I could see their disdain and judgement. I heard someone whisper, “Is that her?”

It hurt so much to hold it in, but I was afraid of what would happen if I let it go. At lunch, I got in my car and felt the sweet relief of release. I had to roll down all the windows.

I texted Mick.

Jen: What did you put in my smoothie? Tell me exactly. I can’t stop farting!

Mick: Two Apples, banana, cup of carrots, three cups of Kale, two cups of spinach, some weird algae superfood I saw on a Netflix documentary, ½ cup of blueberries and strawberries, maybe a peach, protein powder, coconut milk, and ice.

Jen: You are trying to kill me! Do you know how tender my intestines are? I have Celiacs! That’s three days of servings in one smoothie!

Mick: Dude, it’s the kale. It’s good for you.

I held it together as much as I could at work, but driving home, my car filled with gases so noxious they wouldn’t be welcome on Venus.

I texted Mick: Oh my f-ing Gawd!! My guts are on fire! What did you do to me?

I got home and sounded like a marching band as I walked the dogs. Each step expelled more of the gas festering inside of me. The smell was pure evil mixed with a dark descent into the abyss. My guts felt like I was listening to alt-right talk radio.

When Mick got back home, around eleven, he said, “Oh my god, dude. I had to hold this fart for the whole class. I thought I was going to die! I’m not kidding. It’s still coming.” It was too. As he stood talking to me, air leaked out of his butt. It sounded like air seeping from a balloon when you pull it tight after blowing it up. (Do you know what I’m talking about? I used to do it all the time as a kid. I’d inflate the balloon, and then grab both sides of the air entry way, and let it hiss. Sometimes, I’d let it go so it flew around the room.)

I laughed hysterically, my eyes watering from the laughter and the smell. “I got to my truck and let it out and it was so sick. It wouldn’t stop. It went on and on.” He made the sound for me.

I heard it coming out of his mouth and his butt the same time.

“Oh my god, go away,” I said, throwing a pillow at him. “Slow down on the smoothies. It’s too much.”

He disagreed. “Dude, it’s the kale.” He said this as the noxious gas leaked slowly from his butt, steady in its release. I don’t think he even realized it was still happening. It was totally involuntary.

The next day at work, I had a bit more control, but not much. I hadn’t eaten at all because I was so afraid of adding to the chaos inside my body. I told Mick to meet me at the office with his truck so we could go to Ikea. It had snowed heavily the night before and everything was buried under at least ten inches of snow. I was cold, tired, miserable, homesick, and the smoothie was rotting inside me.

He showed up, oddly on time, still farting. I could hear it as I stood by the truck window while we discussed our plans. He followed me to Ikea. I hate shopping. I really hate shopping at Ikea. But I dig the furniture, so did what I must.

We walked through the sliding glass doors, and I began farting again. It was a combination of stress, anxiety, and the prospect of navigating miles of Ikea. Their floorplan traps you. You can only move forward. Turning around is impossible. The yellow arrows on the floor demand you only walk deeper into the cavern of prefabricated modernity. It comes with the promise of well styled, cheap home decor, but that comes with a price. Maybe you leave a piece of your soul at the mid-point to help fund such a monstrosity.

By the time we finished, I felt like I’d just completed Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey. I was changed and had met many helpers along the way. A married couple with three kids were our companions on our long trek. I really wonder what happened to them. I’d overcome anxiety, over-stimulation, and overwhelming options and selected furniture.

We checked out, pushing two large and loaded carts.

I told Mick to run and get my car and then his truck. I’d wait with the stuff. I really wanted to just stand outside and enjoy the fresh air. In a few dark moments, deep in the heart of Ikea, I was worried I’d never see the light of day again.

Mick brought my car around first and I loaded it while he went to grab his truck. I saw him zoom around the corner and throw it into reverse, backing right up the loading dock where I waited. He is such a show-off. He jumped out, opened the tailgate, and the back of his truck was full of snow.

When I saw it, I farted so loud someone three cars away said, “Oh my god, what was that?”

Mick said, “Anything in your pants?”

“It’s all your fault. And I told you to scoop the snow out of the back of your truck this morning!”

“You did not,” he said.

“Well, I thought it. Anyway, you knew we were coming here? It didn’t occur to you to push it out?” I farted again. It felt like a baby dinosaur was hatching inside me. Or an alien. Something was breaking free, stretching out its arms and legs after long confinement. I feared what was happening inside me at this point.

“Dude, it’s the kale,” Mick said, pointing at me.

“It’s all the fiber you put in that smoothie. Who the hell does that?”

He shrugged. “You drank it dude.”

“Just clean out the snow,” I said. I had to walk away from the smell where I was standing. I was dying inside.

I leaned against the glass window by the door and watched him push the snow out with the brush I’d bought him to use to clean off the truck windows. He piled it right behind the truck, in two piles on either side of the tailgate and a small one in the middle. I pointed.

“So now we have to lift everything up and over the snow,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He lifted a long piece of furniture up and couldn't get it to clear the pile of snow. He tried a different angle and still couldn’t get it in the truck.

“Want help?” I walked forward.

“Will you fart while doing it?”

I ignored him and lifted the other side. We slid it into the back of the truck but as I stepped forward to help him push it all the way in, my foot slipped off the loading dock and I slid from where I stood down the incline of snow in the middle of the tailgate. I looked like a tobogganer. Had I been in the Olympics, I would have won at least a Bronze medal. I careened under the tailgate and slid until I was under the truck.

I farted the whole time. I think it might have propelled me forward some.

When I finally came to a stop, I heard Mick laughing. I closed my eyes and just held still for a few minutes. When I opened them, Mick was hanging over the side of the truck. His face was upside down and he laughed so hard there were tears.

“You okay?” He didn’t really care if I was okay. “Did you poop your pants because it sounded like it.”

I twisted and stuck my legs out from under the truck, near him. “Please pull me out.” I heard him jump over the side of the truck. He grabbed me by an ankle and drug me out like that. A crowd of bystanders had gathered on both sides of the truck. Someone went to get the Ikea store manager, who rushed toward me, holding a walkie-talkie. I heard him say, “I’m on scene.”

I waved everyone away. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone that close if I had to fart again. I reassured the manager I was fine. They helped Mick load the rest of the furniture. I got in my car and drove away.

I never went back.

It took a week to recover from the smoothie.

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Junie B. Jensen

July 21, 2007 (Gotcha day 3/4 years old)- June 29, 2017

AKA: My littlest. Bo-bittlest. The littlest, bo-bittlest of the bo-bittlest clan.  Widdle Waddle. Bug. Buggest. Beagle butt

I got you almost 10 years ago from people who couldn’t see past your anxiety to understand your value. But I did. I saw the soul in your eyes. I knew you belonged with me. You ran out of their house and saw me and peed on their porch mat. I laughed and you jumped into my arms. You never looked back. I took you home and woke up the next day to find you’d destroyed every pair of shoes in my closet and a couch cushion.

It’s no surprise that as I mellowed these past five or six years so did you. Before that we both left a trail of destruction in our wake. We taught each other commitment, patience, and unconditional acceptance. Together we learned to be still. To be. We made our way through the darkness together and then we rested and just enjoyed each other’s company.

How I enjoyed it! When you were younger we’d walk for hours and I’d laugh at your insolent refusal to be decent on a leash. You hated being constrained, stuck, or held back. (We are twin souls.) I laughed chasing you when you'd talk me into taking off your leash. You always had to test the limits. You were just so naughty and defiant. You knew what you wanted to do and didn't care what I thought you should do. (We are soulmates.)

You accepted every dog you met. You never resented all the dogs in and out of our house. You welcomed them, excited, and then taught them all how to Dog.

A wise woman told me earlier this week you were holding emotional space for me. You felt like you could move on now – I’m okay. You’re not going to be part of my next chapter here. You’ve got some other work to do somewhere else.

Your little body struggled so much these past few years. Finally, the pain was too much and at 14 years old, you told me today it was time for your story here to end. What a story it was!

I still remember the day I came home from work to find you sitting in the middle of the kitchen counter. You’d pulled the kitchen chair to the counter and climbed up. You opened every door in the kitchen. Had you not still been up there I might have thought a poltergeist had visited. You scattered plastic containers. Cereal boxes and spices lay on the ground. You looked so perplexed sitting there. I was so angry but then I saw the look in your eyes. Your anxiety was so uncontrollable you couldn’t understand what you’d done. I realized you were not so different from me and I picked you up and held you on my lap. You shook and whimpered. I cried too. We were both so self-destructive. Somehow, our own way, we managed to pull it together.

You were all DOG. I remember the time I tried to stop you from eating that gecko you caught and swallowed alive when I tried to take it from your mouth. Then you climbed on my lap with your sad, Bette Davis eyes as it wiggled in your tummy. I told you I wouldn’t feel sorry for you but you still insisted on stretching out across my lap, on your back, and I rubbed your tummy for you.

Thank you for all the mice, snakes, birds, and geckos you brought me as gifts. I love you too, even though you were not a vegan.

I’m sorry for the times I yelled at you for eating my books. I’d let you eat all my books if I you didn’t need to go now. It’s so silly the things we get worked up about. Anger is so silly.

Junie, I don’t know what this planet is because it can be awful. Being born and growing old and hurting along the way is stupid. There must be a better way to exist and I know that is where you’ve gone. I'm upset you must go without me because I know that scares you. I know you feel better when we are together. I do too.

I guess it’s time for us let go of our separation anxiety and surrender to this transition. I’ll always carry you in my heart. I know I’ll be in yours.

I will miss sharing my watermelon with you. Your snores. Your beagle bay – which shakes the windows and rattles the pictures. I will miss the tiny cries you offer when you see me after you’ve not seen me in a while. I’ll miss my driving co-pilot, best friend, and teacher.

I will miss your beautiful presence. Your energy filled up my life for 10 years and I am so lucky I got you.

Today you were in so much pain. You knew what was happening in the end and you peacefully settled. You kissed me and then rest your head in my hand. Then, just as we thought you were going, you lunged to me and kissed me and I felt your last breath on my face. Everyone gasped because they knew what you’d done. You told me it was okay, thanked me, and made sure the very last thing you did while you could was love me. It was like you said, “Oh, wait… not yet! Hold on! One more time…” Your heart wouldn’t stop beating until I whispered it was okay to let go.

I'm sure you've already found Scully & Penelope. Keep them safe until we are all together again. Play. Run. Kiss. Snuggle.

Until I’m ready to join you, Junie B. Jensen, I will never go a day without thinking of you.

Jen

Your Human

"And she'll tease you, she'll unease you

All the better just to please you

She's precocious, and she knows just

What it takes to make a pro blush

She got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, she's got Bette Davis eyes" ~ Bette Davis Eyes

I hope someone else finds comfort knowing peace is possible, even in the darkest moments.

Sometimes, there may be no answers, but we can let go of the questions.

******

I just read a Zen proverb tonight ‘Die before you die.’

I love this. I think each time we let go of something, we’re preparing for the ultimate letting go when we die. How we die is how we lived. Death & living, like grief & love, are the same thing, just inverse.

Each time we let go something -a relationship, loved one, expectation, addiction - who we were dies. Our world is re-ordered. The perceptual markers which orient us in reality shift and the world is no longer the same. Which is a powerful thought because our perception drives so much of what our world is. We tend to inhabit what we perceive. At least this is true for me. Hell is a state of consciousness. It’s resistance to what it is and my arrogance which insists I know what’s happening.

I never really know what is going to be best for me and I’m always surprised by what lurks right below the surface of what I think I want. I’m often a mystery to myself.

Now, I’m in a passage marked by both loss and expansion. I must let go of what was to make room for what is coming. If we allow it, loss opens room for different energy and growth.

But I can’t talk about loss with new age platitudes. It really sucks. I have no desire to overlay the challenging experiences in life with unicorns. (Like getting a hole drilled in your humerus or losing your best girl, Junie B. Jensen.)

When you think you’re ready to evolve, do something more, change, forge ahead, the Universe somehow expands like a rubber band with you and then, just as you test the farthest limits of your current reach, it snaps back, sends you back a pace or two, puts you in your place, demands your patience, acceptance, surrender and generally, let’s you know that you’re most definitely not really in charge. Then, with time, as you start the trek again, the band stretches with you, instead of against, and you gain more ground.

You can get in alignment but you just don’t know enough to really chart the course for yourself.

How humbling life is. As I get older I find great comfort in humility. I’m fond of saying, “I have no idea what I am doing. None. Right now I’m not a mess but I could be at any moment in the future. I’m just happy I’m packing all my marbles in my pockets today.”

In the past few years, I’ve learned about the uncomfortable process of surrender and acceptance and now I find great solace in the moment I get to turn inward because I’ve realized acceptance is demanded. It is as though I can somehow just wrap my arms around it, pull whatever it is tight, and whole it with presence.

Don’t ever be afraid to just sit with your shit. Once embraced, it’s not really all that scary. Just let go and die a little every day.

It's Carl Jung himself, (though I modified the pronouns):

"It is often tragic to see how blatantly a human bungles their own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in themselves, and how they continually feed it and keep it going. Not consciously, of course – for consciously they are engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil their world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop them."

Almost ten years ago, I wrote:

1. Most of what goes wrong in your life is going to be your own fault. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You do the best you can with what you have at the time.
2. It’s like your life is a video game – it’s only after you clear a level that you realize there was a shortcut there the whole damn time. Don’t fret. Just remember it next time.
3. From time to time something really awful will happen that won’t be your fault, but through the intricate absurdity of the universe, know that this will be the thing for which you blame yourself. Try not to.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm any Carl Jung, but I think the commonality of the expression makes me settle into his theory of archetypes and collective consciousness. I arrived at those same conclusions after making such a horrid mess of my life there are no words for it. In the aftermath of the disaster that was me, I had this profound epiphany while sitting outside drinking my coffee one morning. A voice inside my head, mine, but different, stronger, wiser, said, "If you made this mess, that means you can fix it." Somehow my higher cognitive processes got the upper hand on my subconscious shadow impulses and sent a message through. I imagine a great struggle happened to do so, with ships and cannons firing, while one brave neuron and synapse broke through the barrier, crossed the moat, and lobbed the bottle with the message into my conscious mind, over the castle wall. (The battle continued on for a few more years with great intensity, and every now and again, I still hear the occasional burst of gun powder, but most days, I think everyone gave up and went home.)

The greatest work we will ever do in life is with our own shadow. Those impulses we project onto others, and the faults we see in their decisions, beliefs, and actions are our greatest teachers. The messes we make, chaos we spin, and arguments we pick can point the way to our own awakening. And if your life feels messy right now, it’s all good. We do the best we can with what we have and know at the time. We’re mysteries to ourselves. Jung also said that our shadow can’t be truly anticipated, only met, in the world, through our action and continuous commitment to understanding ourselves, each other, and our existence.

Which means we’re all in process, and that really takes the edge off.

Citation: Carl Gustav Jung, The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 147.