Heart of a Dog Page #4

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Things you loved as living things

move with a different speed.

They disappear.

Echo. Repeat.

Anger turned to liberation,

earth into water,

water into fire,

fire into air,

air into consciousness.

The many days of silence and loneliness.

You are not alone in leaving this world.

At first, you don't realize you're dead

but continue doing things you used to do,

looking for things you've lost,

your mind overwhelmed

by memories and plans.

What am I? What am I?

Looking for your food bowl

and wondering what...

Recognize this.

The monkey mind, my teacher calls it,

dissolving, like moonlight,

in a cloudless sky.

Recognize this.

You can move through walls.

Recognize this as the play

of your own mind.

Leave attachment to the things you left.

Could I have done this?

Could I have said this?

...get some good food and bring her home.

The long ago fears

of childhood.

This is a nightmare.

No solid self.

The longing after your own happiness.

The longing after your own happiness.

Trapped in your thought flow.

Wake up.

Wake up.

Clocks have stopped.

Once you wore that.

Once you did that.

Everything you knew about time

slipping, repeating.

Do not be afraid.

Like all mornings.

Recognize this.

Leave behind aggression.

Leave behind

passion.

Recognize this.

# Some call me beauty #

# Some call me pain ##

I spent the next 49 days

keeping a kind of double diary,

keeping track of what

was going on in the real world

and what was going on in the bardo.

Lots of things were going on in

the real world during that time.

On May 2, Osama bin Laden

was killed in Pakistan

in a raid called Operation Neptune Spear

led by the CIA.

On April 22, the memory unit

of the flight data recorder

from Air France 447

was recovered from the bottom

of the Atlantic Ocean.

Then on May 21, there was a prediction

by a US religious group

that the world was going to end.

...judgment has come.

Your world is now under judgment,

where it was not prior to May 21.

On May 23, there was a retraction.

There's a big difference in the world

that we can't detect at all with our eyes,

but we can know from the Bible.

Strange, but after all this time...

30,000 years of human civilization...

we still have no idea why we dream.

Of course, there are lots of theories.

And one theory of SIDS,

or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,

has to do with dreaming.

SIDS, or crib death,

is the mysterious phenomenon

of the death of a baby

who just suddenly stops breathing.

And according to the theory,

the baby dies during REM sleep,

a period when dreams of the past

are the most intense.

And these dreams are from

before the baby was born,

before the baby began to breathe.

And the dreams are so real,

the baby gets lost in them

and just

stops breathing.

And when you see an X-ray

of a child's head,

you see this second pair of teeth,

right above the baby teeth.

And this second pair of teeth

is ready to drop down into place

when the first set falls out.

Now wouldn't it be great

to have a second brain

or a reserve heart

that would just drop into place

when the first one breaks?

I want to tell you a story

about a story.

And it's about the time

I discovered that most adults

have no idea what they're talking about.

It was the middle of the summer

when I was 12.

And I was the kind of kid

who was always showing off.

I have seven brothers and sisters,

and I was always getting lost

in the crowd.

And so I would do practically

anything for attention.

So one day, I was at the swimming pool,

and I decided to do a flip

from the high board,

the kind of dive

when you're temporarily

magically suspended mid-air,

and everyone around the pool goes,

'Wow! That's incredible!

That's amazing!"

Now I'd never done a flip before.

But I thought, how hard could it be?

You just somersault

and straighten out

right before you hit the water.

So I did.

But I missed the pool.

And I landed

on the concrete edge

and broke my back.

I spent the next few weeks in traction

in the children's ward at the hospital.

And for quite a while,

I couldn't move or talk.

I was just sort of floating.

I was in the same trauma unit

with the kids who'd been burned,

and they were hanging

in these rotating slings,

sort of like rotisseries or spits...

machines that would

turn you around and around

so the burns could be bathed

in these cool liquids.

Then one day, one of the doctors

came to see me,

and he told me that I wouldn't

be able to walk again.

And I remember thinking,

"This guy is crazy!

I mean, is he even a doctor? Who knows?"

Of course I was going to walk.

I just had to concentrate,

keep trying to make contact with my feet,

convince them, will them to move.

The worst thing about this

was the volunteers

who came every afternoon to read to me.

And they'd lean over the bed

and they'd say,

"Hello, Laurie,"

really enunciating each word

as if I'd also gone deaf.

And they'd open the book.

"So, where were we? Oh, yes.

'The gray rabbit

was hopping down the road,

and guess where he went?"'

Well, nobody knows.

The farmer doesn't know.

The farmer's wife doesn't know.

Nobody knew where the rabbit had gone,

but just about everybody seemed to care.

Now before this happened,

I'd been reading books

like Tale of Two Cities

and Crime and Punishment,

so the gray rabbit stories

were kind of a slow torture.

Anyway, eventually, I did get on my feet,

and for two years

I wore a huge metal brace.

And I got very obsessed

with John F. Kennedy

because he had back problems too.

And he was the president.

Much later in my life,

when someone would ask

what my childhood was like,

sometimes I would tell them

this story about the hospital,

and it was a short way of telling them

certain things about myself...

how I had learned

not to trust certain people

and how horrible it was

to listen to long, pointless stories

like the one about the gray rabbit.

But there was always something weird

about telling this story

that made me very uneasy,

like something was missing.

Then one day,

when I was in the middle of telling it,

I was describing the little rotisseries

that the kids were hanging in.

And suddenly,

it was like I was back in the hospital,

just exactly the way it had been.

And I remembered the missing part.

It was the way the ward sounded

at night.

It was the sounds of all the children

crying and screaming.

It was the sounds that children make

when they're dying.

And then I remembered the rest of it.

The heavy smell of medicine,

the smell of burned skin,

how afraid I was.

And the way some of the beds

would be empty in the morning,

and the nurses would never talk about

what had happened to these kids.

They'd just go on making up the beds

and cleaning up around the ward.

And so the thing about this story

was that actually I had only

told the part about myself.

And I'd forgotten the rest of it.

I'd cleaned it up,

just the way the nurses had.

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