That sucks.  I am looking at the clotted vomit on the corner of Elliot’s ballistic nylon bed, and imagining being shut in with it for however much time has elapsed between barfing, and the joyful morning ritual of Letting the Monster out of the Box. He comes bounding out, ecstatic tail and poky snout, and resumes barfing, this time in selected locations around the living room floor. 
 
It turns out that, even if you are Elliot, walking around with a deceased squirrel in your mouth is not necessarily good for your health, even if you do it with utmost ceremony. Even if the squirrel’s tail, in rigor mortis, arches just so, over your own furry snout.
 
Here is what happens: we are walking in the woods at the top of our home hill, Chloe barreling ahead in her slightly off-center, flop-ear lope, when suddenly I notice Elliot beside me, mouthing a large squirrel-corpse. He's doing what hunting dogs do: not clamping down, just holding. A wave of alarm rolls through me, but I know it’s not really worth listening to. I see the dog, the dead creature, and some unspecified relationship between them. I say, Elliot, I don’t know what happens now, and I'll bet you don’t, either. He looks up at me. The lower half of the squirrel dangles to one side, perfect little hands; the tail curves up jauntily, like the flourish on an especially audacious hunting hat. We walk on, suddenly a procession. Elliot paces exactly at my side, occasionally brushing my leg with either squirrel-head or squirrel-tail. He scans all around us. I am the Swiss guard, the badass freelancer whose protection means no other dogs/foxes/humans will snatch his prize. I am the goddess to whom the squirrel is offered, and he is my faithful vassal. Elliot is guiding me home, where we may feast on Squirrel, and sing praises to all that is good. Chloe walks sweep, making sure no enemies creep up behind us.
 
It is a very quiet walk, a funeral cortège. We’re moving together through the woods, performing not-knowing.
 
Some half-hearted early attempts to separate Elliot from the squirrel have yielded zippo. But, after about thirty minutes, the natural end of our walk is coming close, and no matter how committed I am to Elliot living out his dog telos, the ex-squirrel can’t come home with us. I guide us to a spot off the trail, ask both dogs to sit, ask Elliot to lay down, and then ask him to let go of the squirrel. Amazingly, he does. I ask him to back away, and he does. Now what? I cover the squirrel's body with a thick layer of leaves, telling her she was a beautiful beast, and wishing her safe travels. Then, in a clear-cutting voice, the funeral chants:
 
{for the squirrel}
Anicca vatha sankhara
Uppadavaya dhammino
Uppajjitva nirujjhanti
Tesan vupasamo sukho
All conditions, truly they are transient - of the nature to arise and cease. In their cessation, bliss.
 
 
{for Chloe, Elliot & I}
Aciram vata' yam kayo
pathavim adhisessati
chuddho apetavinnano
niratthamva kalingaram.
So too will this body be: flat on the ground, cold & lifeless, as useless as a rotten log.
 
I chant each of these verses three times. Then, sadhu, sadhu, sadhu (it is good), bow, and the dogs and I turn as one and walk away. Elliot gives my hand a little kiss, and I decide not to leash anybody on the way down the hill, past our neighbors' houses. Three big black beasts, striding in unison through the gathering November gray. A thrill runs through this ancient body, consisting of a village witch and her two dogs. On any day worth living, we make the journey from wild space to home, and back.
 
Elliot’s got the barfs, and that sucks, but not enough for me, or him, or anyone, to regret our squirrel-dance with What Is. He'll live. We'll sponge up the grody puddles, dry his bed in front of the pellet stove, and feed him white rice for a couple of meals.
 
Larissa shows me a picture of Kali, tongue sticking out, that she painted yesterday, while making space to see who might show up. A dead squirrel. A blue lady with a garland of squirrel-skulls. I'm with Her, Larissa snorts. And, oh yes, how true, how true. I'm with Her – the one who embodies what is absolutely workable in every situation. The one who brings tomatoes forth from bleak fall days, wrapped in the disasters of war. I’m with Her, the one who is open to the whole story, and doesn’t need it sanitized for her comfort. Kali’s carried every one of us, lifeless, in her mouth, over and over since time began, and she’s never once used the euphemisms “passed on,” “crossed over,” or “passed away.” How could she, with the weight of my torso hanging out one side of her mouth, and my bottom shining upwards from the other?
 
Kali knows it's true: death is white light, the child, re-joining the mother, white light. She also knows that there's a lot of meat involved – all the stages of meat-transfer from one body to many others. When Elliot sets the squirrel down, I see that underneath the plump back is a belly that’s already caved in, helped along by the steady pressure of the dog’s jaws. In that pressure, some kind of transfer happens, and in that transfer are the seeds of today’s fresh crop of dog-barfs.
 
That sucks, but not remotely as much as preventing the contact, breaking the chain, living panicked at the idea of being with Her. Yes, I walk with half-wild dogs who roll in crap, and occasionally see humans not as benevolent overlords, but full-bore vivisecting motherfuckers. Yes, Elliott has a mild case of the corpse-induced barfs, but he’s free, I love him, and he kissed my hand, after I blessed his dead squirrel by recognizing we’d all one day be just like her.
 
Bitter black diner coffee. I sit this morning, listening to another woman tell her friend about how her boyfriend is, or is not, getting used to her dog, Strider. There are sofa-questions, and cuddle-questions. The boyfriend seems to be doing OK, except when his primacy comes into question. It is disquieting to glimpse your woman as Kali with her hound, unless you’ve got the integrity to understand that you'd be in far worse shape if she weren’t. Drinking my coffee, I wish Strider, the woman, and her boyfriend their own beautiful don’t-know dance through the stages of love.

Insomnia only makes sense if you believe that your discomfort can generate well-being. My worry is knitting together the faulty brakes on every school bus traveling the sleety roads of New England. My obsessive thought binds the rapidly fraying threads of our national psyche. My bone-weariness is the price of life for those I love. How about this, instead? My willingness to surrender deeply means that I will know what to do when death comes. My gratitude radiates satiety into a starving world, and means I hoard less. Having rested deeply means, when my car pulls magnetically for the concrete divider on the highway’s new snow, I don’t freak out. I surrender, and rest into a place of safety that is even more present than the place of disaster that opens up alongside it.
 
When insomnia comes, it is this bodymind, awake, laying down. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to bring attention back down into the body, from where it is nattering away, checked out, elsewhere. Come! You are welcome in the weight of the ribs on the mattress, the head on the pillow, the hips feeling wooden slats through this skinny pancake of a futon. The feet are here as home. The body is here as home. Come! Eventually, I come home. This works for me in part because I believe in sleep. My mother, on the other hand,  is an insomniac who thinks sleep is a waste of time, robbing us of life even as death comes from the other end, gobbling. The enemy within: sleep. The enemy without: death. And us, bleary-eyed, wobbling out of bed mid-morning, after yet another night of oatmeal-eating and Kindle-reading.
 
Larissa said once, Dig deep enough and you’ll come up in someone else's basement. When I sleep, I find myself in a reservoir of confusion, pain, violence, wonder, and freedom far greater than any simple idea of this one life can contain. I find myself in many basements, understanding this life from an inter-being perspective. A few nights ago, I dreamed I burned my good tweed coat and cashmere-lined green leather gloves in a kind of alchemical fire, exorcising something from them that would otherwise have cramped my life. What is it? The distance of privilege. The witchcraft of separation. The belief that tweed or leather can keep a comfortable boundary between me and the basement-work of healing. In the dream, all was consumed, except for green fingertips sticking out perkily from the smoldering coals. It was a Tibetan juniper fire-offering – smoky, sacred, and greasy, all at once.
 
The next night, I dreamed of a female dog named Elvis, a puppy who grew before my eyes into her whole self. There was a long curving wound in her side, shaved down and sutured together with a meticulous line of staples. I knew this surgery had saved her life, and was the reason that she could now thrive. Show us how you put the pelvis back in Elvis! I coaxed, and she wiggled her tail in wild delight. This Elvis is the dream-descendent of another dog who came to me in dream years ago. Then, I saw a black dog laid out on the polished wood of a formal dining room table, a terrible gash in her side, a tag on a wire around her neck, marking her as a specimen, even though she was still alive. Who would do such a thing? Waking, I saw, We all would.
 
Sleep, when it does not come, is an invitation to learn the night. I've done a lot of walking around in the strange, quiet hours when most are asleep. In college, finishing up papers in the great Viking hall of the all-night law library, I’d pack up my books and luggable proto-laptop, and exit into the unknown. The streets were sticky with humidity and beer residue, humming with the orange light that brings out the stark unevenness of stone facades. Whatever thoughts I’d been knitting together about Dante or Ariosto, whatever revelations about who we are in the world and what keeps us searching, had time to settle into this walking body, these feet clopping and echoing, this sense of a private victory over doubt and inertia. I would climb down to the basement computer lab, print the night’s work, and collapse into bed.
 
In the monastery, full and new moons meant all-night meditation vigils. We sat, wired, in the shrine room, as the moon’s light penetrated our fresh-shaved skulls. Some eerie hours were for walking back and forth in the freezing field, sensing with the soles of my feet. Sometimes I would fall asleep prostrating in the nuns’ shrine room, and wake with the circulation cut off in both legs.

I remember walking home one summer dawn in Chithurst, as the birds and creatures woke, and knowing that something in me had pierced through by not giving in to sleep. Some mad vibrating exultation, some connection bridging the world of owls’ hunting and day-creatures stirring in their nests. I put out the nuns’ breakfasts, and then (can this really be true?) walked back up the hill, to start cooking the main meal in the big house kitchen. I can do this; it is done; I will rest later, falling deeply into sleep, earth, and home.
 
Nowadays I clench my teeth while I sleep, gnashing mercilessly on the hard plastic uppers and lowers my dentist made for me. I wake sometimes as though from a battle, a ferocious argument, or a slog over bitter mountains. During the day, that's not what I feel. At night, sometimes, it is. During the day, a father with a sick child in Venezuela bargains with militia thugs peddling the only medicine in town. At night, I hope he dreams he is swimming with orcas who raise him up out of the ocean, and set him down gently, reminding him of his belovedness. If my contribution is to dream off some of the world's suffering, then so be it. If by carrying someone’s hopeless misery in my sleep, I can take their insomnia, I am glad to.
 
The touch we feel through the tunnels we go down in sleep is a real contact. Now I feel practical recognition (and not some woo-woo thrill of specialness) when what I've seen in dreams turns out to be what I live in waking. One sets the stage for the other, and time loops on itself, unfolding in rings of meaning that we glimpse, or don’t. Insomnia and worry are ways of staving off this transparency, this cockeyed recognition that all around us, in us, and in between, mystery is dancing, flaming, and smoldering.
 
I want not to hoard. I want to sleep at ease, knowing that my life is devoted to waking up – mine, yours, and everyone’s.

Motion sickness is the feeling that arises when, on a very balmy November morning, you are driving somewhere, and you suddenly realize how much you desperately need to be parented: to be championed, understood, encouraged, and loved. You see this kind of parenting is not forthcoming from any external direction. You see how what is good about you, what is brave, what stands up for the dignity of life, and for the possibility of freedom, is not likely to get a big raise, or a lot of votes from the world, anytime soon. Then you notice what Leonard Cohen is singing:
 
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
 
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows
 
And your motion sickness becomes a motion sickness for us all. For how, given all we've been given, we choose squalor and fear. We choose to trap the beautiful wild creatures for their fur, bewildering them into things, just as we mistake ourselves and others. And now, at last, you are crying. Before, fierceness was the forefront –thundercloud of defiance, but this morning, this motion sickness is about seeing how desecration happens, how you’ve been doing it all along, and how it’s being done to you.
 
You show up for coffee on Saturday at midday, and just as you're reaching the café door, the Dartmouth Asshat Team shows up. Four of them. Tall, taller than you, yet still, if you look closely, pups. Soft faces, awkward bones not yet knit into manhood. They lay claim of the door, push by you, make a block at the counter, ordering $18 worth of lattes and blah blah each, on mommy and daddy’s credit cards, taking their time deciding, while you wait for a decaf coffee. To them, you don’t exist. They are the victors, after all, loudly celebrating the previous night’s conquests, while you sit in tweed and sunglasses, reading at the bright edge of the terrace.
 
I should have stomped on their feet. I did not. Instead, turning from the counter with my coffee, I see one of my students from last summer, someone in many ways like the Asshat Team (and perhaps even their colleague). I've never been so glad to hear “Hey, Professor!” Bright face, glad of his studies, glad to tell me of his work. So, this is important.
 
The parenting that I desperately feel I need, I must give myself, find through benefactors, and then beam forward onto others, as I did with this kid, last summer and now. I tell him I'm glad he's drawing; I tell him I'm so glad to see him well. Not because he is a victor, but because he is a beautiful wild creature, who deserves to be free, to know the world through his own capacities, and thus to love it, and in turn to parent it, and be parented by it.
 
I know we can do this. I know it's not easy. I know there is no choice. I know it's important to feel the full depth of grief and anger, because otherwise, we run around "there, there-ing" one another, and being conciliatory in ways that only keep injuring what is holy in the world.
 
My/our assholery is coming back to greet me/us in a big way. My/our willingness to fudge the details, take the costs out on others, invent beautiful stories that make it all into Science, Defense, Economics, the Arts, and Education – all of that is showing up now. Hello! You would rather diddle around on Facebook, than do something meaningful in the studio, or in your town? Congratulations! Here is your future. You would rather pursue the Spiritual Life, than go find out why your $12-an-hour neighbors are beating the shit out of each other in their driveway, just below your window? Good news! Here’s your president. You would rather pull in this fat salary made of student debt, than inquire what other, less ruinous, forms of training we might make available to one another? Well, here’s Planet Greed, and have we ever got a spot for you at the table!
 
The magic is running out, and we know this because now the spinning of the wheel is making itself more apparent, wobblier, way more likely to result in motion sickness. Pretty much this is what the wheel of life says: when you are in the upper reaches of the cycle, it is very easy to get supremely comfortable, and assume that your excellent qualities of judgment and hard work have got you, at last, to your just and final reward. It’s easy not to notice the tiny incremental shifts, the way the moon is getting slimmer, or fatter, day by day; the way the anemone leaves curl at the edges, getting brittle and brown. The truth is, the wheel is turning, and if you identify with your place on it, and not with the space all around it, you’re going to have a shock when it turns you towards the animal realms, or the hungry ghosts. Shit! Now it’s my pelt they’re after for their stupid Canada Goose parkas – my under-feathers they’re going to pull out while holding me down, so they can do it all over again, in four months. Shit! Now it’s me making $12 an hour and giving some rich asshole the finger, as he drives by in armored splendor. I feel sick. I think I might throw up. I need my mommy.
 
OK, so that's kind of a Versailles perspective. What about if you're already among the hungry ghosts? What about if you're already among the animals? There, I don't know. The Jataka stories are all about animals who decide spontaneously to manifest generosity. The gorilla saves the hunter who’s fallen into a hole, and then collapses, exhausted. The hunter takes a rock and brains her, planning to eat this dumb animal before resuming the hunt. “Oh, poor Man,” she says, “Now you’ll never be happy.”
 
Here’s a big round of applause, gratitude, and tears, for all the animals out there who are giving themselves to us, every day, quite possibly saying, "Oh, poor Humans, now you'll never be happy." Chloe and Elliot, deeply beloved animals, are right now sitting indoors on a sunny day while I write. That’s definitely fucked up, and it’s definitely the best I’ve allowed myself to think of, in part because I haven’t thought about it all that deeply. What else would I do, if I made it a priority to figure out a way to live that valued their happiness as the highest good? Dog lives are short. How could they be better? Out of boredom, Elliot munches on an old Morton’s salt box . This is not the best use of his wild-deer leaping body, or his bright eyes. Chloe lays in her crate. Why?
 
We are told: self-care. We are told not to burn ourselves out, to avoid motion sickness, to be reasonable. But, I am pretty sure we're capable of better than this. I'm pretty sure we're capable of moving through the discomfort of motion sickness, the wild Technicolor yawn of change, and finding new ground.

Not THAT again. I mean, have we not yet seen the steaming poopiness of THAT, the way it comes on all sparkling activity, and then reveals only the sad truth that you did not win the skidoosh-mobile, or even the $100 gift card, and your drawers are overflowing with useful coupons you will never use? That again.
 
Some people have been telling me about their election anxiety – how they can't sleep at night, how they feel fear overtaking them at the strangest times, how they can't quite believe what's happening. One friend writes to me that, in addition to insomnia, she has experienced the arrival of the Bobcat of Peace and Justice in her yard. To that, one surely cannot say, “Not that again!”
 
For myself, there is the sense, which I've also heard from others, that a lot that's dark and twisted, and formerly hidden, is now dark and twisted, and out in the open. It takes a certain frame of mind to register this as progress, but, given how powerful a force denial is, I think the parade of THAT again that we are currently savoring as a country is serving to shake at least a few of us out of chirpy notions such as, We are so beyond racism, sexism and class bias! We are not. It’s everywhere. Sniff around. That, again.
 
I'm convinced that spending time actually doing something human, enjoyable, and creative with people who aren't like me is immeasurably more useful than all of the 100 kazillion Facebook comments posted since the beginning of time, rolled up into a giant unholy sausage with all the sniffy blog posts and TV oratorios. More useful, in other words, than the Turducken of rhetoric we keep eating, while thinking it tastes nasty.
 
At one of the rural New Hampshire schools where I’ve been doing soil murals this fall, the kids tell me about their parents’ hunting, and their own. One little girl says her dad can’t hunt this year because he got a ticket. Another kid tells me that her dad and uncle, after dinner last night, took off after a huge black bear ambling by at the edge of the woods. They didn’t get the bear. With ticket-girl, and bear-child, I get little windows into what might be going on in households I might otherwise not have the tools to imagine. At another school, the teachers tell me that in one second-grade classroom last year, two kids lost parents to overdoses.
 
These are things that, in a newspaper, might sound like that again, but, from the mouths of people I know for their precise, unique way of drawing a mushroom, a lily pad, or a worm in a burrow underground – these things land in an embodied way. What will it mean for the family whose dad is not hunting? Will they eat less? Well he sulk at home irascibly through the winter? What about the kids whose parents died? Is there someone else around who can appreciate them, give them boundaries, keep them safe?
 
Effectively, an Artist in Residence is a Foreign Exchange Human. She doesn't know who the lunch-lady is, or about the careful calculus of pizza slices, and the way that free lunch tickets must be gathered before the kids eat. But she's learning. What is it like to have a classroom where one kid basically shrieks in terror if she’s not allowed to do things in her own time? What do kids know and not-know? In a school where many of the parents are loggers, kids know trees. In a school with an ambitious science teacher, kids know bugs. In a school where 40% of students have English as a second language, kids’ knowledge centers are so occupied with basic reconnaissance of what the hell is going on that there’s not a lot of extra room for factoids. Still, someone might tell you spontaneously that she is going to be a Doctor who also schedules people in an office.
 
When we say, not THAT again, we are assuming that we know a lot about THAT, coming down the pike, which is OK, as long as we know that's what we're doing: assuming. Sometimes I feel like recognition – I see you, Buster, and don't think you're fooling me – acts as a kind of talisman. When a certain potential is seen and recognized, it becomes less potent. It’s been set free from having to be THAT again, and it can try on another costume, or show off some minority-report version of itself. Often, even if we say we hate THAT, we crave it, too. We will do anything we can to cram the mystery that is headed our way into a shitty little THAT-box, so that we can rest at ease in how prescient and wise we are.
 
None of this means that it is somehow our job to let every unknown run its course. Sure, it could well be that a Trump presidency would include – I don't know – a baseball tax credit, or something else that people would enjoy. Or it could be that some very capable person would receive a start in that administration, and go on to do great things. Doesn’t matter – there’s enough that stinks around Trump to make the experiment unwise to run. Let some other quantum universe work out the stream of consequences, if it must run its course.
 
Being in the moment is good, as long as your senses are clear, and you incline towards compassion and non-harm. Elliot the Dog is very much in the moment, but his senses are conditioned by fear. He's flickering at old pains that always threaten to become new again. I’m not sure what was happening to him, in the crucial six months when you’re supposed to desensitize a puppy to all kinds of fears, but it wasn’t good. Some fears wear out for him: he’s no longer terrified of the large blue exercise ball I sit on. He’s OK with feathers, or maybe that’s only because we don’t see them much, these days. He will sometimes agree not to surge at the door when the mail comes. But there doesn’t really seem to be, in him, the ability to self-soothe, to seek ground, to come back to the peaceful feelings in the pads of his feet. He’s on high alert for THAT again, always.
 
I hope, whatever happens tomorrow, that we as a country can commit to the peaceful feelings in the pads of our feet, and behave. I hope that we can let go of the urge to lump all our pain together into an unbearable enormous blob. I hope that we can put down the rocks we might otherwise hurl, thinking wisely, Not THAT again. We’ve stormed the Bastille, and ridden all night. We’ve hacked our enemies to pieces in holy war, and still the milk runs out in the refrigerator, and still our kid fails to get the prize. I hope, tomorrow, we can choose to align ourselves with the best THAT we can muster, and stick with it.