When experience plays like a shadow

This morning I took my Polish sheepdog, Nemo, into our local art store to visit with Duffy, a wheaten terrier who could be Nemo's twin. Duffy's owner, Richard, showed me a print he'd made -- not so different from this image -- after inviting a bunch of people in an art class to draw squiggles on a piece of glass. "Look at all the differing emotions there," he said.

Nemo, who is diabetic and has an incessant craving for food -- especially sugar -- ignored Duffy and spent his time prowling the store, looking for something edible, and eventually found one of Duffy's bones hidden in the back room. Duffy, after his initial excitement at meeting a new friend, quickly realized Nemo was a bit of a dud as a playmate, and lay down in his customary position on the floor, polar-bear style with his back feet splayed out to the sides.

And so it was that each of us returned to our natural stasis: Nemo searching, Duffy resting, Richard teaching and me watching and listening -- it reminded me again of that study done of lottery winners and calamity victims: whatever life brings in the short term, in the long run they return to their natural state. Two years after the exhilaration of winning the lottery, normally unhappy people are unhappy again. Two years after the sadness and grief of a heinous loss, normally happy people are finding joy again.

Examined from this perspective, life becomes little more than a Rhorshach blot; what we see and feel colored almost exclusively by our unique vantage points. What is sent our way doesn't define us; it is our response that defines us, that describes and interprets the picture we see.

Perhaps the only way that interpretation can evolve is by creating the time to really look at what lies before and around us. Because even this apparently random graffiti has gifts within it -- the dancing red pony, the silver lining at the top, the splashes of sunshine yellow being piped in on the right; the stiff grace of the torn and aged bamboo, the playful curves of black that leap and dance across the wall's canvas like shadows over a teal sea... each echoes on its own frequency in the chamber of the heart's experience.