The Before Time
Photograph of Wall-E by Matthias H. Schmalisch.
I was going to call this post, “House Arrest,” and talk about these last months of staying close to home without referencing the enormous elephant in the room. But I can already feel the next post that will be written, an inevitable companion post. When I look back from there to here in my mind’s eye, I realize that I am being silly. This is a difficult topic; I will not deny that. But who am I trying to protect and from what? So here we go.
Our beloved Golden Retriever, Wall-E, was diagnosed with lymphoma in January. Even with the most sophisticated treatment available, lymphoma is fatal in dogs. Most dogs with this diagnosis live less than 6 months. We began palliative care just after Wall-E was diagnosed and he had very severe side-effects that made us fear that he was coming to the end of his life. He is now on a lower dose of the medication and he has been doing really well, acting a lot like his old self. It feels like a miracle of the biblical kind. We are trying to stay in the present and enjoy every moment that we have together, because neither Matthias nor I believe we have all that much longer with Wall-E.
The reason I was going to call this post, “House Arrest,” is because that is how the last few months have felt. No court ordered this; instead Wall-E’s terrible separation anxiety has been the cause. He has been an anxious dog since puppyhood, but whereas for the last several years I could leave him for a few hours two or three days a week, since the end of November, he has started to panic if I leave home for almost any length of time. He even gets a bit agitated if I take too long down in the basement with the laundry. He needs to be able to see me or to know that I am in another room in our apartment to feel safe and calm. He has hip and back problems that make it unwise to bring him downstairs every time I go myself. We take our morning walk together for an hour, and sometimes two, and we go out into the garden in the afternoon for a half hour or even an hour. Aside from that, except when Matthias can work from home—which he has begun to do two mornings a week—I am home with Wall-E.
I think that Wall-E knows that something is wrong with his body. I think he has felt this for a while. Whatever he feels that is different is leading him to have trouble being alone. As for me, although I do not find it easy to be practically house-bound, I also do not find it all that hard. Over the last five years, I have adapted a number of times to having to be at home much of the time. It began with the first lock-down in California in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Back then, I was seeing clients in my psychotherapy practice at two different offices. From one day to the next, I started to work exclusively from home. For some months, Matthias was between jobs, and so he was home too. Wall-E loved having the two of us with him all the time! Then Matthias found a job and was considered an essential worker. He went to an office every work-day, and has continued to do so ever since. A year after the pandemic started, I thought that I could go back to seeing clients in person at my offices too. That is not what happened. Wall-E developed a limp and was in a lot of pain for months. I could not leave his side. I gave up my offices and accepted that I would work from home. That was really hard. This is smooth sailing by comparison.
Matthias has a colleague who had a baby recently. She shared with him that in the last trimester of her pregnancy, she developed a serious condition and her obstetrician put her on bedrest for the remainder of the pregnancy. All mothers experience a change in their bodies and their thoughts as they prepare to birth their babies into the world, and sometimes they are called on to prepare for this last phase of their pregnancy by being bed-bound. I see a parallel here with Wall-E and me, tethered together as we are, and effectively both house-bound. We are preparing for a change, but the change is not going to be from inside the womb to outside into the world. I believe what A Course in Miracles and many other spiritualities teach, that, “birth was not the beginning, and death is not the end.” (M-24.5:7) Wall-E is going on to another kind of life, maybe with his biological parents and siblings. One of his littermates, a wonderful boy called, “Tino,” ‘crossed the Rainbow Bridge’ last summer. My first Golden Retriever, Max, is ‘over there,’ too. Matthias and I feel like he is Wall-E’s big brother, in a way. Lots of other beloved animals are there and many beloved people, like my grandparents, my father, and my dear, dear friends, Linda and Louise.
Through reading the Course and learning from my teachers, I believe more than ever that we are not separated by time and space from those who have died (in fact, in my last post, Practicing Everyday Transcendence, I invite us all to consider that we not separated by time and space from those who are alive!) In his seminars, Gary Renard, who has been teaching about A Course in Miracles for many years, often quotes the Gospel of Thomas in explaining that the spiritual realm is right here:
The disciples said to [Jesus], “When will the Kingdom come?” He said, “It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Behold here,’ or ‘Behold there.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” (https://www.garyrenard.com/PGoTh6.pdf)
We cannot experience the spiritual realm with our physical senses. This is why many of us, for example, dream very vividly of loved ones who have died recently. We are not looking at them with our eyes and hearing what they have to say with our ears. Instead, we are communicating with our minds.
I recently listened to a fabulous podcast called, “The Telepathy Tapes,” created and produced by Ky Dickens. Even though I am already quite “woo,” each episode still knocked my socks off. The podcast opens a window into the minds of children and adults who are non-verbal and considered autistic. In our world, they often have great trouble caring for themselves, in part due to limitations in their ability to control their movements. For a very long time, these people have been written off as intellectually disabled. This is because intelligence testing depends on fine motor skills, which include those needed to speak and to make small finger movements. It turns out, though, that if they are taught to use a large alphabet stencil to spell out their thoughts with a pencil or stylus held in their hand (which requires specialized training, but only depends on gross motor skills), a lot of these children and adults are often plenty intelligent, even brilliant.
The first season of the podcast proceeds step-wise from the hidden intellectual abilities of these non-verbal people, to their telepathic skills with parents and teachers, to their ability to communicate with one another in a non-physical realm that this community calls, “the Hill.” Some of the children and adults are able to communicate with those who have died and many of them can access knowledge through ‘attending classes’ on the Hill or visiting the so-called, “Akashic Record,” which is a non-physical storehouse of all knowledge. At least two of the speaking adults interviewed on the podcast have been able to experience meeting with others on the Hill. The children and adults on the Telepathy Tapes podcast want us listeners to know that telepathic and psychic abilities are nascent in all of us and that we can develop them if we want to.
Ideas are very powerful, and learning about this community of people and their ability to access the non-physical realm has had an impact on my own mind. For example, not long after hearing the podcast episodes, I had a vivid dream in which I traveled to our old apartment with Wall-E just by thinking about being there. It had a hilarious ending because I could not think my way back home to where we live now, but instead had to start walking there with Wall-E! One of the mothers on the podcast talks about sharing a field of awareness with her non-verbal child. After that episode, I realized that I have this experience myself with Wall-E. While it is obvious that he relies on my physical closeness to feel safe and calm, I also often sense his needs and even his thoughts. Not long ago, when Matthias first worked from home, I took the opportunity to go and run some errands. I was gone for about two hours, and Wall-E was not used to this. When I got home, something in his posture spoke volumes to me. He communicated very clearly, “You left me! You were gone, and for so long!” After that, though, when Matthias next worked from home, Wall-E understood that, although I was leaving, I would come back after a couple of hours. I have not had this unhappy message from him since that first time. I also regularly just talk to him in my mind and he seems to get what I am trying to communicate. He won’t always do what I ask, but everyone has free will, after all! A friend who also studies A Course in Miracles encouraged me to consider that after Wall-E dies, I will still share a field of awareness with him. I find this to be an incredibly comforting thought.
For years, I have thought of Wall-E as my great teacher. I have had to adapt many times because of how he is in the world and what he needs from me. This has been truer in recent months than ever. Many of the usual escapes and distractions from a trying situation have not been possible, because Wall-E is not well enough to travel, nor to be left in the care of others. Instead, Wall-E is deepening my capacity to turn within and find what I need there. Whenever I feel overcome with sadness, fear, or despair at the thought of his passing or of no longer waking up every morning to greet him, I close my eyes and imagine myself as much bigger than my physical body. Sometimes I imagine that I am the size of a city, other times that the space inside me is huge, as big as an enormous arena, miles across. Then I place the feeling in relation to this hugeness. Very soon, the feeling loses some of its force, and eventually dissipates. Sometimes, I use an idea from insight meditation to distance myself from the feeling. Instead of identifying that I feel sad, afraid, or despairing, I simply try to notice that sadness, fear, or despair is present. This non-attached attitude, like the imagery of enormousness, allows the feeling to dissipate.
A Course in Miracles says, “Peace is an attribute in you. ⁹You cannot find it outside.” (T-2.I.5:8-9) Sometimes, though, a little outside help is very welcome. I recently had an experience in which I felt beside myself. Matthias and I have been having major renovation work done on our house. It is no surprise to anyone—not even us, really—that the work is grinding on and on, taking much, much longer than we had hoped. After a break from the grating noise of power tools and the resulting, pervasive grit and dust, a new crop of tradespeople arrived for the next stage of the work. As the noise level picked up, I began to feel a wave of frustration rising. It reached a pitch in which I felt completely panicked and trapped by the whole situation.
Thankfully, I soon had the thought that I needed some help with how I was feeling. I remembered a quote from A Course in Miracles about the quiet center (the quote that actually inspired the name of this website). Since last summer, I have been subscribing to the ACIM App, developed by The Foundation for Inner Peace, the publisher of the Course. The App lets me cue any section of the Course and hear it read by a calming voice (the Text, Workbook and Manual for Teachers are read by the same voice actor, Jim Stewart, who sounds to me a lot like Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on the original version of Star Trek. This is a positive association for me!) I found the section that I was thinking of, called, “I Need Do Nothing,” hit play, and listened to Jim Stewart read the beautiful words:
Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. ²And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. ³This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent. ⁴For from this center will you be directed how to use the body sinlessly [i.e., without error or judgment]. ⁵It is this center, from which the body is absent, that will keep it so in your awareness of it. (T-18.VII.8:1-5)
Almost immediately, I felt myself move closer to this quiet center and I felt the “busy doings” of the workers recede into the background. From there, I was able to get on with my own “busy doings” for the day, within the four walls of our apartment above the work, of course.
A Course in Miracles is published by The Foundation for Inner Peace. All the books comprising the Course, along with the supplemental pamphlets, are now found online:
https://acim.org/acim/en
All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog post are drawn from this version of the Course.
To learn more about “The Telepathy Tapes” and be directed to listening platforms, go to www.TheTelepathyTapes.com.