A dog digging a hole is happy
Sometimes they are digging to bury a bone
Or investigate a noise
Lost in the digging they avoid all thought other than
I
Am
Digging
But when they surface
happily panting
A little wild eyed
Is when the reality arrives
And they wonder if perhaps that great and wide, exciting excavation
Was just digging, the whole time
Except they don’t, because dogs don’t think about why they are doing something – they just do it
And afterwards, they leave it behind
Totally
A dog admonished for digging a hole which the owner has found half an hour later, will look guilty perhaps, but it’s like wondering why the stars are up there, we just don’t know and neither do they.
Following creative impulses is just the same.
I have been engrossed the last month or so. Building a new website, kitting it out until it feels like an authentic home. Expanding and revising and republishing my book. Travelling, camping, writing, photographing, posting and writing poetry. And now I’m deep in planning for another trip to a writers festival in Winton in a couple of weeks time to set up my first ever face to face market and sell my book.
How exciting!
And in amongst all that creating has been the busyiness of living and administering a business, loving my family and cooking and cleaning and being a human.
This morning I cleaned out the fireplace, lit a great big satisfying fire and it all hit me at once.
Have I just been digging?
Am I utterly delusional?
Do I really believe anyone is going to buy my book?
Join my poetry workshops?
Need my help?
Am I actually just a hack and a delusional one at that?
And I let it all hit me, one nasty thought after another.
Until like a popped balloon I sank further into the leather of the sofa. I let it all out because I’m familiar with this feeling and the only way over is through.
I let it drop me the way it always has, because being creative is exactly like this. The ups always end in downs. Always. And then an up will come along again – but in the meantime..
How do we know anything?
We are dogs digging, chasing an instinct.
Dig!
Just dig!
At least it brings joy and who cares if you are delusional? The fact that you’re having a think about things now and then probably means you aren’t.
But don’t think too hard. Life itself is an illusion – it’s all just a screen – and the biggest joke of all is that we have this window in time, where we decide what matters. We get to choose. And still so often we waste it.
So when I’m done resting, I’m going digging again. How about you?
Love
Header photo: my beautiful dog Bodhi the day before she died. I knew something wasn’t right but not quite what. The next day I took her to the vet and then folded as if struck when I was told she was terminal and in another week it would be painful for her.
Bodhi lived life to the max. Always by my side she taught me joy and love and gave me the deepest wound of all my dogs in leaving.
I couldn’t write about her death, how she lay beside me, put her head on my leg and went to sleep. Utterly trusting to the end that I would do the right thing.
I think some part of me imagined she would be around forever, that I would.
That was two months ago.
I won’t ever have another dog – Bodhi was the last. But she gave me an even greater gift than her love, her passing gave me the realisation that this is it. This is life. All we get.
I quit my other job two weeks later and I’ve been digging ever since.
