The Dog On The Road

Though we never formally met, the dog on the road taught me a lot.

I was on a bus headed down a foggy road in India one morning last January. I was In Hyderabad for a two-week residency involving 10,000 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation who converged in the city to foster World Peace.

World Peace, it turned out, takes more than sitting in silence and was not achieved in any absolute sense. The Middle East is still a gaping wound of racial hatred. Americans divide themselves along seemingly unmendable political lines. People are starving globally, and one needs to look no further than India’s backyard to see how horrifying the level of poverty is. It continues today, all of it, and the wound is septic.

Yet, we meditated, and the dog on the road would come.

TM is the great love of my life, along with movies, and it has changed me in simple and profound ways. The practice, which, as of today, I’ve done for two years, has given me a sense of clarity and comfort in my body, a feeling of belonging in the family of things, as Mary Oliver put it in “Wild Geese.”

Was TM some magic or superpower that would change the world because enough people did it? It seemed far-fetched, but I wanted to try. I come from activist stock, and my parents are deeply religious and would surely be proud. If I went to India and also saw a wild tiger, my life might be complete. (Author’s note: I didn’t, despite my best efforts, see any tigers, yet life still feels complete. It would be better, though, with a tiger sighting, as my life has constantly been enriched by encounters with creatures that could eat my feet.)

The two-week course involved meditation and yoga asanas repeated several times a day. I had resisted yoga as a Los Angeleno because Angelenos often do stuff like that to be seen doing it, but it challenged my body enough that I can now see the value.

During these times in class, I felt the earth move under me — not in an earthquake way, but moving as though it were hopping up and down like an excited child on her birthday. It happened twelve times, and they seemed unfazed each time I reported it to someone. Meditators, at least the old-timers, must have seen it all. Good for them.

I told no one at first about the dog on the road, as that experience shifted my perspective in ways I couldn’t fully articulate, but I felt like I had escaped the Matrix. I thought no one would believe me, but I write this now because I believe it myself. That belief carried me through the darkness following the India experience, but more on that later.

India swarmed with slumdogs, these no-name mangy mutts scavenging the cities and towns for table scraps. On the campus where we meditated, packs gathered around the main cafe, their heads slung low, their jaws white and watery with hunger. One morning, about five of these dogs surrounded me, barking their demand to be fed, and that scared me despite the fact most of them wagged their tails incongruously to their growling.

On that fateful morning, The dog on the road made no such intimidating overture.

I didn’t even register it at first. The bus I was on coming from my hotel to campus rolled along this misty byway. Farmland and shacks littered the terrain. It was quiet, as everyone still needed to wake up.

Then, a woman shrieked from the back of the bus, and the brakes screeched to match her.

I snapped to attention in time to see a skeletal dog right in the path of the bus. To my horror, the bus couldn’t stop in time — and this dog on the road laid down on the pavement, I presumed, to die.

The vehicle rolled over the animal, and everyone gasped.

Whatever peaceful state I had achieved by that time had shattered. It wasn’t simply that moment either — I felt that my meditative life was over because of what I’d seen. I knew I could never close my eyes again without seeing the dog pancaked on the road, and the punishment fit because I was complicit -

-And then the dog on the road scurried out from under the bus to my right and scampered away. It barked and wagged its tail.

It wagged its tail.

I sat back in my seat in disbelief. How did it survive that? And why on earth was it so happy? Were I the dog on the road, the fear I would have felt would only have been outmatched by the rage that followed it.

That day, and many days and weeks after, until I wrote this, the dog on the road never left me. It ran through my mind, happy as can be and free.

I took the dog on the road everywhere I went after that, hiding it in my skull. It was a special secret I only told one or two people about, who thoughtfully listened and told me it was a great experience. I pride myself on my storytelling, yet no one shook as I did in the telling.

The dog on the road, though, kept me going, and I only discovered why later.

I returned home to several nightmares. I became violently ill, so much so that it felt like my body physically rejected the entire India experience. I slept in my bathroom and barely ate or drank anything for over a week. If I could have given up breathing to cool my engines, I would have, but alas. Everything hurt, and dying felt like a vacation.

I avoided the hospital, recovering through sheer force of will and gallons of vitamin C, but I came to resent my trip, meditation, and humanity on the whole. This became a pattern post-India. Instead of enlightenment and peace, I felt frustration and alienation. When we returned, we were told to be gentle to others because they wouldn’t understand our experience, but I thought I was the one who needed a gentle hand.

I felt breakable.

“Because you are,” the dog on the road told me, taking on the voice of Leonard Cohen for some reason. “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in….”

I pushed this aside to concentrate on stewing. That was more my current speed.

Then, my uncle died.

He was a good man, good to his family and me, especially when I was young. I hadn’t seen him in a few years, but one of the last things I remember was him slipping fifty dollars under the table at a restaurant because he wanted me to take a cab home instead of riding with someone who had been drinking. This gesture was the cop in him, a sign of his dedication to his community and its well-being.

His death hit me harder than I thought it would, and I was alone in it. I was alone in my apartment for far too long, and no one in Los Angeles, through no fault of their own, would understand why I was upset.

“There’s a crack in everything…”

Then, one night, after a group meditation, the dog on the road finally pointed a paw toward a certain truth.

I realized it hadn’t given up by lying before the bus but accepted its fate. Que sera, sera. We think of dogs as intelligent companions but stop short of them relating to our experience. After all, we cannot shake ourselves off when we get out of the shower, which is a significant shortcoming.

Either they are way advanced, though, or we are not.

The dog on the road taught me death was death, and that was it. It’s another thing that happens. We are here, and then we are gone, though if I’ve learned anything from meditation, there is a unified field where we all belong and continue onto the next stop. There is no stopping in death. Whether the dog on the road knew that, I cannot say, but it seemed at peace with its decision.

Yet, how visibly happy the dog expressed itself upon surviving shook me. It pranced with joy at its aliveness. Could the proximity to death be understood? Or could it be that it rejoiced in another moment, another tomorrow?

The dog on the road knew what the score was, knew that it would be ok, whatever happened, and accepted it.

That kind of peace can come from living a life bereft of it.
In other words, the dog on the road taught me pain was inevitable, but there was a choice in how to handle it.

I don’t know how my uncle felt in his final days or moments, but I do know that the life he led as a servant and brother was a fulfilling one based on how his loved ones reacted. He left the world better than how he found it.

A parable about this involves a bird enraged at the sea who tries to empty it after its offspring drowns. The bird’s mission moves the world to join in, the lesson being that one person’s actions can affect everyone.

One being can move many. That was the case with my uncle and the dog on the road.

The remnants of the illness still cling to my lungs and guts, but I carry that. My loss has made me raw. I carry that, too.

This doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I am, but I’ll go anyway.

Yet, there is a comfort to be found in simply living, even when it is difficult because that comfort is often the windfall of going through difficulty.

I spoke to a friend sometime after India and remarked how weird we were on the phone. She asked why.

I responded, “I don’t know. Isn’t it weird how improbable Something picked us to tell the story? What is the probability of us living as we do at this moment? I don’t get it.”

It’s a glorious, confounding mystery.

If anything, the dog on the road showed me the point is not solving the mystery but that there’s a mystery at all, and it lay behind all things, quietly, constantly humming, waiting patiently for the veil to lift.