Tail Wags

You can tell from the title of this blog post that I am a dog lover. The first dog in my life was a Kerry Blue terrier, who came to my family with the name Cheer. I was seven years old, and she was the only dog we ever had. Actually, the breeders where we got her had named her Chere, with a French accent mark over the first “e”. This means “dear” in French and should be pronounced something like “Share”, but clearly the breeders didn’t know anything about French pronunciation. So my dog was “Cheer” throughout her lifetime, which was fine with all of us. Her tail was cheerfully up and wagging frequently. For much of my adult life, I’ve had two dogs at a time, and currently have an aging, glorious mixed breed named Rumi, after the 13th century poet.

What’s the point of all this dog focus and history? I really believe that we have important things to learn from other mammals. Dogs unabashedly live in their bodies, and as a result have prompt awareness of their own reactions, and keen awareness of their environment. We human beings are heady creatures. We are thinking most of the time, analyze, strategize, and have a heavy reliance on words. I l do love words and I love good verbal communication. But there are also primal gut reactions to things that deserve respectful attention.

Have you had the experience of meeting a new person, and feeling an immediate connection? I’m not talking about a sexual attraction, but a body and soul response that says: this is good! This feels familiar! This feels safe! I call this response a tail wag. When dogs meet each other, they sniff, circle, and then decide what the nature of the relationship is. They wag, they tolerate, they may even snarl. It’s visceral. We humans have this too, and we can feel it if we pay attention. The song I wrote recently, called “Tail Wags”, is in celebration of this inner knowing. Thoughtful assessment is important, but the body response weighs in, whether we know it or not.

Last Friday night I was in a concert and sang Tail Wags live, and unedited. My husband Stan took a video of this on his phone, so it’s not fancied up. There are some mistakes in it, and that’s fine with me because it was the best I could do that evening. At this stage of life I have gotten better at accepting my imperfections without letting go of the notion of improvement. In the video I left in some of my spoken introduction and also the assistance from my friend and mentor Rebecca Folsom. She set up a music stand for me so that I could have a cheat sheet on the words. The song is pretty new, but my brain isn’t pretty new so a little help is welcome. And here’s the song!