Heather Stewart Poetry

There is something majestic about dog that gets to just be a dog. I had the privilege of spending my weekend seeing majestic dogs of all breeds just be dogs. By that, I mean that I was at a dog sport event. Don’t get me wrong, I love to leave my dogs off leash in our yard to play, chase, chew on things, drink directly from the pond, and even dig a little. Dog sports are just a whole other things sometimes.

There are a lot of options and some dogs just love to do things unexpected, but there are some sports where the dogs gets to do the thing it was bred for, the thing that makes it come alive. This can be different by breed, but it seems they all love to chase. So there I was, watching all breeds and pedigrees chase grocery bags on pulleys while their people cheered for them.

It always reminds me of this passage:

The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

What we generally call obedience is mostly teaching a dog to live in our world while respecting boundaries set by humans. I get that there are people out there who want their dogs to be obedient little soldiers or something, but that doesn’t seem to be the relationship I run into most often. These events have plenty of obedient dogs. They just aren’t expected to be on their best behavior there. One of the hosts called it Disneyland for dogs and I couldn’t agree more.

To Mary Oliver’s point, there is a kind of poetry to seeing some of these dogs cut loose and run as fast as they can after something and be allowed to catch it and to get all the praise and love one can hope to get for it. There’s a different verse for every breed out there too, from the Boston terrier to the Belgian malinois. It was simply joyful.

Some of those dogs may be expected to act like “chairs” in other settings, but they leave the field with a confidence that has its own beauty. That was where I found in the poetry in my life recently, where did you find yours?