20 21 The spring within Andreas Weber Last summer, in the late afternoon, we often went to a little brook. When the numbing midday heat started to subside, I carried my ancient dog outside, up the stairs in front of the church, and then following the road to the cemetery. I held her tucked under my arm, clutching her left paw with my right hand, so that she would not fall. We had been walking this road to the terraced hills above the town many times over nearly two decades, at all seasons and weathers, through all the eras of my dog’s life. When she was very young, she would dance crisscrossing the snowy cover on the road in winter, an effortlessly flexing muscle of joy. On balmy June days, she would lose herself chasing lizards into the clefts of the dry stone walls, her tail spinning wildly. Now she could barely walk. The way, flanked by hazel bushes and wild carrots, knew us, as we knew the way. When I sat the dog down, she would sniff a little, but mostly stand where I put her and blankly stare into the distance. No more chasing lizards. No interest for the cats on our way. She had really become old. To me it seemed in these days that she had partly passed over into the other realm, like the late summer vegetation had, with the rose hips maturing to dark orange and rich creamy hues, with the occasional yellow leaf slowly sinking. The dog had started to become part of the landscape, not so much its actual, still lush manifestation, but slowly floating into the invisible foundation of being, in which there is no clear separation between single individuals. In which there is only life. During the summer, which was her last, we contented ourselves with stopping at the little brook. A path to the left of the road led down to a shady cascade where water jumped from stone to stone, forming transparent pools among mossy boulders, speckled with yellow patches of late afternoon light. I clamped my dog firmly while I slid down the path, clutching elder branches and elderberry twigs. Then I sat her in the fine gravel on the bank, so that her forepaws touched the water. Often I had to readjust her position because she tried to lick water from the pebbles, so much had she lost her sight and sense of direction. And then, with the black fur of her legs floating in the current, she drank, at length and with devotion, abandoned to the place and to the moment. Water skeeters slid across the golden and turquoise hues of the glassy surface. A huge firefly came to greet us regularly, circling around my old companion. After she had drunk, she just stood, motionless, oblivious, the forepaws immersed in the brook, her gaze lost between the whispering eddies and the soft afternoon light. What she stood in, what she drank from, was herself. I did not move around much in those last summer weeks. I didn’t take the bus down to the coast, as the ride was bumpy and it was too hot for my ancient dog down at the sea. I had no car to take her up into the hills to walk the wild paths we had been roaming for many years. Our orbit was restricted, a very small circle around the house. The little brook that sprang from the rocks was the outer limit where we could go. So it became our world, complete with everything: the hazel and alder and elderberry leaves, the slender grey stems with their pale lichen covers, the flies and moths drifting through the oblique light under the foliage like sparks from a fire at dusk, the charcoal coloured pebbles with their jagged white lines, the water skeeters, an occasional last blackcap’s song. Our hidden brook became a focus of all that there is, gleaming in the waters like in a lens, a single point where the lights of flight end, and begin. In these long slow hours, which accomplished a friendship spanning nearly two decades, my thoughts often merged with the living layers of the place. I was absorbed by what subsisted there, as though I could see with the moss and the fallen leaves as my eyes. As though I could see, I am tempted to say, through the love for my old dog friend into how this love anchored our lives in reality. It was a kind of bifocal vision which made me see from a material perspective and with the eyes of my heart at the same time, in parallel. The heart, my inner experience, and the things, the diligent water, the playful insects, the sparkling light and my slowly drinking dog, taking into herself this water and this light, were not separated from my experience. It all was one big chunk of being-thereality. And in this big chunk, there was literally no border between my dog drinking the water and the water itself, between my dog being the source of my love and the water being the source of it. Everything and everyone including myself was the spring of life, and everything and everyone was the manifestation of this spring as living things. It made me a bit dizzy and very happy, so I often added my own spring of water into the picture, when tears where running down my cheeks, being so much the center – and all the periphery – of what there was. The brook whispered its silvery whisper, and my dog drank its glistening water, and my tears fell into this water, only slightly stirring its surface. There was some profound mystery here. A transubstantiation happened. All of us were water meeting itself, separating into individual existences for a short while, and coming back to itself as one. All of us were the water and the experience of water meeting itself, being separated and then meeting itself again, flowing together for another eternity. In understanding what reality is about, it is essential that we see with our own eyes and believe what they show us. And it is even more important to perceive with our own hearts and believe in what we perceive. Both our eyes and our hearts tell us that there is only one compound reality in which nothing is separate from one another, albeit this one whole appears as a myriad of single things. Looking in the opposite direction, every thing properly perceived lets us understand that it is not separate, that it is not a mere object, but a way in which the one reality appears. We could even say that it is a way in which our own existence is an expression of one compounded whole. Mystics tend to perceive this way. Lovers do. Who has freshly fallen in love tends to see the own blissful state of being welling up everywhere, perceives the air full of minuscule electrical sparkles, and sees a smile on every face. The intense days at the end of my dog’s life made me very sensitive to this double vision. The view from the heart and the tender gaze are not poetic fiction, mere projections due to mystical rapture and the flight of phantasy. Seeing with the eyes of the heart is, so do I believe, an accurate knowing of what is true, and what is real.
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