Acknowledgements
Those familiar with the work of Sanaya Roman (Living with Joy) and of Esther and Jerry Hicks (The Law of Attraction, Ask and It Is Given) will recognize some of the 'Orin' and 'Abraham' teachings in this book. These and many other authors have inspired me and guided my thinking over the years. In no particular order, they also include Candace Pert, PhD (Molecules of Emotion, Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d), Bruce Lipton, PhD (The Biology of Belief), Gregg Braden (Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer), Pema Chodron (When Things Fall Apart), Alan Watts (This is It, The Joyous Cosmology), Neil Douglas-Klotz (Prayers of the Cosmos, The Hidden Gospel), the many poems of Rumi, and Ursula Le Guin's beautiful translation of The Tao te Ching.
You see, the concepts I discuss in this book are as old as the hills. They just haven't been the predominant 'rules of the game' we humans have been playing. But as Victor Hugo observed:
“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”
My heartfelt thanks to each and every one of these authors, and to all of the other teachers who have guided me over the years, only some of whom are human.
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Prologue
I wasn't looking for a dog. I wasn't in the right place in my life. I wasn't settled enough, and a dog would have further disrupted my rather unmoored life. What I most wanted was to settle somewhere and put down roots. But where? And doing what?
Wandering had never suited me. I hated change, yet I could never settle to anything for very long. I would inevitably outgrow what I thought I'd most wanted and where I'd most wanted to be. Even so, 'wanderlust' was a foreign concept to me — a character flaw, in fact. Yet wandering was what I found myself doing for what ended up stretching into decades. So, at the time, I didn't want to commit to as much as a house plant!
I first met Tiger Lilly in the summer of 2002, when I was visiting my friend Linda. She and her husband had a lovely little farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, surrounded by woods and fields. I was there late one afternoon to do some bodywork on her horse. It was early evening when I was finishing up and getting ready to leave. As Linda and I stood chatting in the doorway of the barn, her neighbor Brenda came over with a skinny, flea-infested, brindle (tiger-striped) dog on the end of a piece of old rope.
The dog was a young bitch who'd evidently had a litter of puppies recently, because a pendulous udder hung down beneath her toast-rack of a body. Brenda asked if Linda knew the dog, who'd shown up at her place a little while earlier. No, Linda had never seen the dog before and had no idea where she might have come from. Kind soul that she is, Linda offered to post some flyers around the neighborhood if Brenda would take care of the dog until someone showed up to claim her or they found her a good home.
The dog was quite an odd-looking creature. Imagine what would happen if you crossed a Greyhound with a Staffie (Staffordshire bull terrier) … that was Tiger Lilly, who later came to be known simply as Miss Lilly. (Her full name was The Splendid Miss Tiger Lilly. Good name for a drag queen, right? ☺︎) Being brindle, there was only a handful of things she could have been; but other than her striped coat, she didn't look like any of them.
Rural North Carolina is notorious for getting … shall we say, “creative” with dog breeding, so I never did get any closer to unlocking the mysteries of her heritage — and as dog-fighting was as popular there as hunting, I didn't even want to know! Instead, I variously called her a Carolina Truck Hound (sounds official, but I made that one up), my Stripey Dog, or a Bitza (Aussie slang for a mixed-breed dog, one that's made up of “bitza this and bitza that”; also known as the Heinz 57).
The poor thing was covered in fleas and ticks, and she looked like she hadn't had a good meal in months. Her teeth showed her to be a young dog, and her subsequent development put her at about 12–18 months of age at the time. What stood out to me most, though, was her sweet temperament. She was just lovely! As I later got to know her, I came to realize how stressed she'd been when I first met her. Still, she was obliging as I looked her over and examined her teeth, and as we humans stood around talking about what to do with her.
As I said, I didn't want a dog at the time. I was an Australian veterinarian, living in the United States for the time being. I'd moved to the US in 1993 to do a large-animal internal medicine residency at North Carolina State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. It was a 2-year program and the plan was to complete the residency, sit the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine board exams, and then return home to Australia as a specialist in equine internal medicine. But life had other plans, and 9 years later I was still there.
Whenever anyone asked what had brought me to the US and what was keeping me there, I would always answer the latter by shrugging and adding,
“I don't know. I just know that this is the place for me to be right now; and when that changes, I'll move.”
It was as clear as day to me that I was in the right place; but for what reason, I didn't know. It never seemed all that important for me to know why. It was enough to know that there was where I was supposed to be for now.
As the two neighbors had a plan, I drove home, confident that the dog was in good hands. But as the days went by, I couldn't stop thinking about her. Unbidden, that stripey dog would pop into my mind at odd times through the day, and I'd wonder where she was now and who was looking after her. When I went back to Linda's place the following week, I asked her what had happened with the dog.
“Oh, I'm so upset about that!” she said. “Brenda had Animal Control come and take the dog away.”
Brenda had been keeping the dog outside, but the dog wanted to be in the house; and in an effort to get Brenda to let her in, she'd accidentally torn a small hole in the screen door with her nails. Later, I came to know this scratching at the door as a sign that Miss Lilly was very anxious and needed to be inside, where she felt safe. Perhaps there'd been a storm coming; she was always very anxious during thunderstorms. Without mentioning it to Linda, Brenda had simply had the dog picked up by Animal Control and taken to an animal shelter.
I fretted about that for days. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the dog off my mind. She was such a strange-looking thing! I wish I had a dollar for every time we were out on a walk and a stranger said to me,
“Is that a hyena?”
”Yes,” I wanted to reply matter-of-factly, “I have a hyena.”
I'm pretty sure they were mixing up their African animals, because she looked more like the Cape hunting dog, also known as the African wild dog. As she was no longer a puppy, I was sure she'd be euthanized because no-one would want her, and the county animal shelters are always full to overflowing and running on shoe-string budgets.
But still I resisted adopting her. I had a 'green card' (permanent residency status), but I had no firm plans to stay in the US indefinitely. I loved living there, yet I expected that I would return to Australia at some point. Adopting a dog would anchor me in the US for the duration of her life, as I would not put a dog through the 6-months-long rabies quarantine that Australia required for dogs and cats arriving from the US at the time, not to mention the long flight in the cargo hold.
I also had the recurring thought that if I adopted her, I'd simply be signing up to have my heart broken at some point. Perhaps it's an occupational hazard, but it's long been clear to me that, in sharing our lives with animals as companions, we're signing up for a master class on love and loss. Unless we die unexpectedly or we adopt a puppy when we're in our 90s, we are almost certainly going to outlive our animal companions. (Of course, there are other exceptions, including long-lived species such as cockatoos and tortoises.)
In other words, we are almost certainly going to have our hearts broken at some point. And I did — but broken wide open, and in the most unexpected ways.
Over the years, I've often thought of that line from Tennyson's poem, In Memoriam, which he wrote as a requiem for a beloved friend:
“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
I'd always hated that line! To me, the prospect of love had never seemed worth the inevitable pain of loss. Put another way, the prospect of loss seemed far worse to me than missing out on anything that love might offer. I'd rather avoid loss than risk love. But Miss Lilly wormed her way into my heart and changed my mind about all that. Now I just shake my head in wonder at all I very nearly missed out on, simply because I feared the loss that would undoubtedly ensue at some point.
I remember very clearly the moment I realized she was mine: I was driving along the interstate, thinking about nothing in particular, when the thought, “Tiger Lilly; her name is Tiger Lilly,” popped into my mind. Oh, no! I'd named her. There was no hope for me now!
As soon as I got home, I called Linda, tracked down my Tiger Lilly to the animal shelter where she'd been taken — the last of three possible county shelters where she might have been held — and went to get her. I stood at the front counter, pleading with the careworn receptionist not to make me go back and look through the kennels for the dog I could so accurately describe to her.
”Please don't make me go look at the dogs,” I begged, “I'll go home with twenty!”
Her eyebrows lifted and a hopeful smile flashed briefly across her face before she relented and kindly began leafing through the enormous folder of current inmates. There was only one dog who matched the description I gave her, and after what felt like an interminable wait in the tiny visiting room, Tiger Lilly finally arrived.
She was as sweet as I remembered, but she showed no particular interest in me, being so anxious to be out of that place. I later became very familiar with that anxious expression, the tension in her body, and the shutting down as she blocked out everything but her avenue of escape from the situation she found so distressing. Still, I knew she was mine, so after signing the adoption papers and fitting her new harness, we headed for home.
Thus began the most profound and wonderful relationship of my life so far. Miss Lilly did indeed anchor me in the US, for the next 15 years. In fact, she served as an anchor through the most turbulent and transformative period of my life, which included a long struggle with recurring bouts of severe depression and repeated thoughts of suicide.
Miss Lilly saved my life many times over. I can say with certainty, because I well remember the decision-making process, that I would have been long dead right now if not for her. When I adopted her, I made a commitment to take good care of her for the rest of her life and to make her life as good as it could be. I would not go back on my word to her, no matter how hard it was at times to go on.
The idea for this book arose from some meditations and musings on the role Miss Lilly had played in my life. Yes, she kept me alive through some very dark times. But she also made my life better in the process. Although she's been gone for over 6 years now, she's still teaching me as I've pondered the ways these special animals come into our lives and, together, we make each other's life better.
Initially, I titled the book Soul Friends, because I now think of Miss Lilly as my soul friend. But after some reflection, I changed it to Better Together. Not only has the term 'soul friend' become rather cliché, I wanted to write a book that could be embraced even by those with no spiritual inclination or who, like me, have unpleasant memories of a repressive religiosity.
I hope you'll see something of yourself and your beloved animals on every page, and that all of our lives are made better in return.
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