The Constellation Learning Newsletter
March 2010

I began this newsletter a few weeks ago, but I didn’t remember writing it. When I opened my files this morning, prepared to write, I found it. The topic was ‘change.’ The last two paragraphs read: 

“In fact, expansion is often about sorting, shedding, relinquishing. As nature abhors a vacuum, so the spaces we create within by cleaning out the closets of wishful thinking act as a suction, drawing towards us the new expressions of a fuller self. And the expansion continues.

But not all change is growth. Not all cleaning out creates constructively. Without clarity and conviction change becomes aimless and diffused. Conscious, active choice becomes a central ingredient in any recipe for growth….”

I had no idea how bang on I was. Perhaps I’ll complete it and send next month. But what follows is a story, an open letter (with her permission) to one of my sisters, and three times the length of my normal newsletters. Read it at your leisure, perhaps not at your desk (unless you’re looking for a new procrastination technique).

I share it in honor of Pulga.

Cynthia Barlow

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~ Monthly Message ~

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
~ Albert Einstein ~

Dear Sister,

It was lovely to hear your voice yesterday. Sorry I had to cut the conversation short to respond to Pulga’s distress. You ask in your e-mail, how is the little dog? The answer demands a bit of a back story.

Pulga: Spanish for “flea” and the aptly named addition to my landlord’s family. Just a year old and the size of a cat with unknown origins, she is a haphazard mix of something fluffy, black, and small.

I met Pulga briefly last year here in Boca when she was the size of a child’s shoe and being passed around like a play toy by her new ‘owner,’ ten-year-old Toto, Silvia and Luis’s youngest child, and his many young cousins. Being raised in a household where we bred golden retrievers, learning how to hold a puppy properly was a requirement for doing so. Not here. Here they just grab a leg and pull.

By the time I arrived this year Pulga was not quite a year old. She had grown as large as she would and was covered with tangled, dusty fur and coated with burrs and bites. Fleas and ticks wandered their territory of her body. (There is nothing lower, in my opinion, than a flea on the butt of a Mexican dog.) 

She was skittish, wary, her eyes always seemingly at half-mast, hooded by daily distrust. Every time I climbed the steps to my place she would run away barking furiously at me. It bothered me. I consider myself a “dog person” (though I have owned two cats as well, so this isn’t about better or best) and can usually win the trust of new ones I might meet fairly quickly. I decided I would make Pulga my project this year. Last year I won Mattie over (the household ‘alpha’ dog); this year I would win Pulga’s affection, or at least her trust.

So began a systematic daily discipline. I would move slowly whenever in her presence, no sudden movements that could startle. I would speak to her in a gentle, soothing voice – soft and light, cheerful and warm. I would tell her every day that she was a “bueno perro” that “it’s alright.” I told her she was beautiful. I used terms of endearment like sweetie, cutie and darling; the words themselves carry power, I thought.

She never responded but eventually she stopped barking at me, apparently following Mattie’s lead of bored indifference when I came and went; I belonged here, she seemed to communicate. But no matter how many times I slid down a few steps, ever so slowly talking sweetly to Pulga, no matter how many times I held out food to her and Mattie showed her that food from my hand was a fine idea, no matter how many times she might follow Mattie up the steps to my balcony, she would not allow me to get nearer to her than six feet.

Around the New Year Pulga came into heat. It was during this holiday time that Luis and Silvia (my landlords) and their entire family went to visit his mother for a week. I was left alone to witness the attempts of various dogs, frustrated and following poor Pulga’s confused attempts to hide from them. One day I made the mistake of leaving my door open as I ran next door to Christina’s for something and found six dogs milling about in mi casa when I returned; Pulga had retreated upstairs and her pursuers had followed. I had to shoo them all out, which they did, leaving in a frenetic, urgent conga line.

Pulga had left two or three little droplets of blood on my newly tiled balcony, evidence of her current state of fertility. Leaning on the railing of the balcony above, I would watch the unfolding of the rural mating dance and wonder what kind of puppies might be produced should any of these horny fellows finally catch her.

One (at least) did. Weeks later it became apparent Pulga was pregnant. During this time I continued my daily attempts to win her trust. What I noticed most was that her eyes began to get larger, rounder, more open. She would come upstairs with Mattie in the morning and sleep under my table while I worked. As she grew larger, I began to save table scraps for her. She still wouldn’t let me touch her, but she no longer startled when I would get up from my chair and move from the table.

I had spent two months, every day, intentionally attempting to win her trust. I started to think there was no way back from the loneliness with which she lived in the darkness of distrust. But then two weeks ago she suddenly began wagging her tail in response to the sound of my voice. When I would awaken and open my door, there she was, this small poor excuse for a dog. I’d give her something to eat each morning, if only a bowl of milk, trying, in some small way, to help with her nutrition. Still, even holding salmon in my hand she would not come to me. I would have to place the piece of food on the ground a foot in front of me and she would quickly snatch it, all the while watching me warily.

Every day her belly became more engorged. She grew listless, sleeping for longer stretches of time on my balcony while I moved around her, just going about my day. I put out a water bowl for her. She would eat what I put out, drink from the bowl, but I could not yet approach her.

Last week she let me touch her. It was as though I could read both doubt and desire in her eyes that first time – would I strike her? All that week I would touch her head with only two or three fingers, ever so light a touch, ever so small a stroke. In a matter of days she rolled over and offered up her burgeoning belly to my entire hand. I watched the fleas march their trails – I petted her anyway, brushing aside my petty distaste for life forms that crawl.

All that week and this she spent a portion of each day in silent companionship with me, her belly bloated, her movements slow. I began painting a new picture, the most recent in a series of abstract interpretations of various words: joy, compassion, serenity, determination. This one began as ‘acceptance’ but became ‘possibilities.” I couldn’t make sense of the shift since all my previous expression of various words had been quite clear and consistent. Pulga watched me while I went about expressing myself. I called her precious and smiled at her whenever she opened her eyes.

Three days ago she came to me, very slowly, and finally took food from my hand. It seemed a very large moment; a grand victory, a glorious accomplishment. By yesterday I could leave my hand on top of her head, cup it – it was so small! – and she wouldn’t pull away. Perhaps it was only the lethargy of impending birth, but I’d like to believe I had finally won her heart. That she believed I was a safe person who had proved through consistent kindness that I could be trusted, that I cared.

Yesterday, Pulga was not at my door when I opened it but came by shortly afterwards and I could see that she was in the initial stages of labor. Her water had broken; she left moist little patches on the terracotta tiles of my roof-top balcony when she rose to move. She panted, moving from place to place. She wandered around all day, slowly, trailed by green flies collecting at her hind-quarters drawn by the smell of her, I suppose. She attempted to snap at them, but to no avail.

I cut up a cardboard box and lined it with old clothes and placed it downstairs near where she usually slept. Silvia agreed she was in labor and placed the box behind an old wood door leaning against the side of the house. She called Pulga who came to her and climbed in: a small, dark space. There was a deep sense of satisfaction as I watched her circle round and round falling finally into a comfortable heap with her head resting over the edge of the box.

By evening, she had once again returned to mi casa looking for a small closed space. She wedged herself up next to the gas tank behind my bathroom. I brought her a bowl of water and laid down another old rag for her to lie on and then went out to dinner. When I returned home I looked for Pulga but she had left, off, I supposed, to give birth in the bush.

This morning I awakened fully expecting to hear the sounds of wee ones born in the night; she wasn’t outside my door and so surely she was somewhere pushing, licking, or nursing. Making coffee, I realized I had run out of sugar and so went to borrow some from Christina. Passing my landlord on the way back, I asked about Pulga. Luis hadn’t seen her, but was sure she had had her pups last light. I decided to have my coffee, get dressed and go look for her.

Not ten minutes later, Luis called up to me. His wife, Silvia, had found Pulga last night at ten o’clock in the little box-bed I had made her.

She was dead.

And the last person to pat her small flea-ridden head before she left her dangerous, hard, lonely life had been me.

I am weeping right now for a brief lonely life, a life that seems wasted. But was it? I sit here and cry; do not tears mean value by extension?

But here is the thing: I knew, when I was about to leave for Christina’s last night and Pulga was wedged next to the gas canister, I knew, as I cupped her teeny head like a bishop blessing the newly confirmed, I knew in some corner of my soul that I was somehow saying goodbye, that this might be the last time I touched her. And so I infused all the love I could muster and sent it oozing down my arm and into her. I had a sense she might not make it through this ordeal, so young, so small, so alone and unprepared. I blessed her little life and I told her she was loved. And then I left.  And now, in my sadness, I have the horrible knowledge that I was right.

It is that knowledge that propels my tears.

I recall your comment yesterday about meeting your maker and being reminded of the times you weren’t kind, that you wanted to “get it right” this trip, now. The small little glory of Pulga’s small little life is the knowledge that she knew kindness before she died, that I gave her what I had, and it was enough. What’s that Biblical quote? “Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

I treated Pulga, consciously, as if she were Jesus in disguise. I gave to that little dog a piece of me not easily given, kindness not being what I consider one of my strong points. Compassion yes, but kindness demands conscious action to actually demonstrate compassion and I have often fallen short in that regard. I got to practice. I got to be a part of something so small it contained the entire journey of humanity inside it; so large that it obliterated effort, ugliness and differences.

I hope that Pulga’s last day on earth might be one moment I get to review upon my own death, and be able to smile, for truly, I believe it will be the smallest of moments that define our lives – not the large easily recalled moments of making a difference when it seemed to really matter, the large gesture, the saving net, the warm honey-coated examples of our ‘goodness.’ No, I suspect that our assessment will be based rather on the unnoticed gestures at times that seemed not to make any difference at all, that incrementally, day after short day, choice after small choice, develop into characters of kindness – or not; of love – or not; of connection and compassion – or not.

I am reminded once again that in our acceptance of each moment we draw forth new possibilities of what might be, of what will be, with our active involvement in and appreciation for the moments that don’t seem to matter. They do.

And if the death of one lonely, little dog last night—one sickly ill-groomed dog that wasn’t even mine—can bring such depth of feeling to my experience of life today, I say it was not a wasted life at all: It was a rich one that mattered. And one I shall remember for the remainder of my own.

Today I shall complete painting “Possibilities from Acceptance.” It makes sense to me now.

So far, it’s my favorite.

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