Elephant Walks
Her name is Ellie, short for Elephant, but she comes to a slew of other names too. An abbreviation of Elephant as a name for a little black dog may seem a bit ironic, and yet, you’ll come to understand her name is quite fitting to her. She is not your average ordinary dog, and she most certainly is not your standard, run of the mill Chihuahua. For one, she does not shake and tremble incessantly, nor does she live in a state of terror, in constant need of coddling. She’s small, yes, and therefore the world around her is very big, especially in proportion to her pint size frame. She’s a 9 pound creature and rises up a towering 8 or so inches from the ground; but her smallness doesn’t ask, beg, nor want anyone’s protection. Smallness is not a designation of fragility in wild animals, just as sweetness or kindness in people is not a designation of subservience and deference - women in particular. For the record, she is wild and I am not meek. A scorpion, black widow, crow, hornet, all small in their own right, harbor a big dose of mightiness, a respective largeness that is somehow cocooned within their small stature; just as a woman’s kindness can be a cocoon for her righteous spirit.
The bigness of the world doesn’t force Ellie to live small, in fact, it’s the opposite; the bigness of the world calls forth the bigness that is within her. The vastness of the outside kicks up the largeness of her spirit on the inside like a building storm kicks up whipping wind. The bigness of the world seems to call to her, it says: live in your bigness rather than by the limits of your smallness. The imposed limit of her small frame is merely a cocoon for the largeness of her soul, a petite shelter for her grand and elephant sized spirit.
Whenever I feel too small and the world too big, her large littleness speaks clear and loud, reminding me:
The largeness of the world is calling to the largeness within you. Let the largeness of your truth be drawn out of you breath by breath, step by step. Be brave, now. Be mighty. Allow your own elephant sized spirit rise to up and reach out.
Regardless of her stature, Ellie is much too big and far too wild to be bothered with “small dog” coddling, she is much too fierce for that. She’s an elephant for crying out loud. She runs for miles along the beach, her paws thundering along the sand to the beat if her own drum; she goes out mountain biking, cruises paddles boards, camps, swims, hikes, and stands vigil at the bottom of the gnarly crags we climb. Most importantly to her, she strikes the balance between her inner largeness and outer smallness on her daily walks. She lives for her walks, they are a talisman for her large spirit, a ritual that keeps her wild awake and honest. I’ll let you in on a little secret; an important part of me lives for her walks as well, they somehow make me more human, and more wild; connected and in the flow of nature's rhythm, even when I feel stuck in the societal realm. Our walks are my solace when days feel heavy and shin deep in low-tide sludge; they keep the lightness in my step, the sun in my mind, the wild in my blood, and kick up the bigness of my own spirit.
Slowly over the years our neighborhood has transformed from a place we and others live and into a life size jigsaw puzzle of dog walks, our own private map of Ellie’s Loops spread out like invisible misshapen puzzle pieces that we religiously walk the perimeter of. Our neighborhood ceases to be a neighborhood anymore, it has been refashioned and transformed into an amalgamation of dog loops.
Recently Ellie and I were on one of these loops, a long one, her favorite. We passed the patch of green freshly mowed grass that she loves to run through at the nearby school, walked through the artfully landscaped flower garden that bursts with color and fresh floral smells, then past a tall bank of redwood trees that stand proud and wise in their own largeness. The trees open up into a small overgrown field, we slip through it, and arrive at a narrow inconspicuous trail- the hallmark feature of this puzzle piece loop.
The trail is marooned between private property and a tidal canal. Overgrown Jasmine decorate the wire fences that draw the harsh lines of personal property to the right; ducks decorate the tidal waters that flow freely out into the bay on the left. The smell of fennel and jasmine suffuse through the air, and the sun smiles down hot and bright during the months of summer. Ellie’s long tongue dangles out the side of her mouth as she pants. I unhook her leash here to let her run free; her freedom has come to be a kind of cathartic release leading to my own freedom. I unhook myself from the leash like thoughts and judgments I carry, I watch them turn to the dust, kicked up by her free flowing paws. Watching, walking, smelling, feeling; life is complete, if only for this moment. It’s a revelation of some special universal kind of magic, perhaps of the bigness that swirls inside each of us.
As we get half way down the trail, each of us lost in own summer reverie, a loud bark howls out from behind the fence on our right, and a black and brown speckled hound dog is pressing its front paws up onto the fence, pushing at it to get our attention. It works. Ellie pulls her tongue back into her mouth, shoots up her ears like little unfurled bat wings, then springs, lunges, flies, towards the fence echoing her most raspy and menacing ‘I don’t take no shit from nobody’ bark. The dog protecting its backyard is at least 65 pounds, roughly seven times the size of Ellie, at yet, its bigness doesn’t scare her one single bit. The other dog begins to kick up dirt and push violently on the wire fence, no doubt trying to intimidate Ellie with chaos. She stands unafraid, planted, grounded, powerful. All the hairs on her neck stand straight up, an kind of antenna to her elephant spirit, her mightiness unfurling its trunk, energy exuding from every fiber of her being. The louder and larger the other dog makes himself, the more her inner largeness rushes outward. For every hounding woof the big dog calls out, Ellie responds with a raspy, direct, confident, and clipped yap. The other dog’s barks and behaviors seem almost incoherent, loud, belligerent, and sloppy juxtaposed against Ellie’s confidence and directness. Like he’s sloppy after one too many whiskies; one of those who tries to educated the masses in slurred hollers, “Iemme tell ya thing or two about a thing or two”. Ellie’s the one, a sober pillar of confidence, who says, “Looks like you’ve had a enough, buddy. Time to go home now.”
For a moment or two they go toe to toe, paw to paw, nose to nose; the big dopey one stuck behind the fence, while the small one with big courage is out roaming free. Eventually I pull Ellie away, and we get back to our loop. However, that spot on the trail became an invisible threshold that imprinted itself on her senses forever. From that day forth, every single time we hit that exact spot of the trail: her tail waves in the air, the hairs on her neck stand with static electricity, her ears sharpen pointedly, she prances on the tippy toes of her paws towards that gate, springing up in one final hop into position, squarely facing the exact place she expects the big challenger to be. She’ll stand there for a shake or two, panting, eyes searching, waiting, willing, as if her eagerness could summon the other dog to the fence. Most of the time, she is met by nothing, just an open yard of dog-less emptiness. But her enthusiasm and willingness to live large, to meet the big dog, to match the bigness of the world, never wavers. Not ever.
I admire this about her because its challenging to live big and boldly, and to square off to life’s surprises when so many aspects of society conceive you that you are small. It is terribly tempting to stay small, to coddle the deeper avenues of the soul, and play it safe with this one wild beautiful life we get -as Mary Oliver says.
But where’s the fun in that? Where’s the living in that?
As odd as this may sound, I’ve learned from my little dog that there is an elephant sized spiritedness within us all, somewhere; a bigness that we have the capacity and the responsibility to bring forth from within. The world may not always ask you to bare that part of yourself, but the magic of life and the creativity of the universe is always calling to it. It calls and calls and call and calls. And if this little pint size Chihuahua can let her inner bigness live freely, then I sure as hell am going to do the same with mine.