Church of the Dog

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS church of the dog

Kaya McLaren
lives and teaches on the east slope of Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State. When she’s not working, she likes to telemark ski, sit in hot springs, moonlight hike, and play in lakes with her dog, Big Cedar.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Daybue Publishing 2000
This revised edition published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright © Kaya McLaren, 2000, 2008

All rights reserved

Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-4406-3055-2

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Aknowledgments 2000

Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to write, especially my uncles, Scott, Rick, and Doug, Aunt Trish, Elizabeth and Brian Frederick, and Karen and Doug Harris.

Thanks to my parents who raised me to believe I could do anything.

I’d especially like to thank all my students who were in reality my teachers and whom I love more than they will ever know.

Thanks to Gram, Char, Tess, Sue, and Jamie for reading my first draft before I sent it off. Thanks to Raymond Teague from Unity Books for his encouragement and enthusiasm. I’d like to thank my original editors, Elizabeth and Chris Day, who helped me become a better writer.

Last, I’d like to thank Tasha Good Dog for inspiring me and for watching over me like an Angel.

Acknowledgments 2007

When you know better, you do better, and so this book went through another phase of growth since its original publication.

Thanks to all the book groups who read it and invited me to meetings. I thought about the things you said and the questions you had, and you are the biggest reason for this new incarnation.

Thanks to Meg Ruley and Christina Hogrebe at the Jane Rotrosen Agency for changing my life. Every day I thank my lucky stars for you. Thank you, Kendra Harpster, for being my partner in creativity and for using your powerful pit bull Mojo to make miracles happen for this book.

Thank you to the people who shared their experiences with me: Savannah Davidson, my cousin who spent summers working on her dad’s boat in Alaska; Mary Roberts, third-generation rancher; Andee Hansen and her husband, Sandy, who have driven to and from Alaska several times; and Jan Covey whose husband in Heaven gave her auto repair counsel.

I’d like to thank Bill Hawk, my high school English teacher, who taught me to write well, and Julie Sommers, my high school creative writing teacher, for her strong encouragement.

Tasha Good Dog went to Heaven in 2001, but I like to think she guided me to my next dog angel, Big Cedar, who sits by my side as I write this. Thanks to everyone who made it possible for the Sun Valley Animal Shelter to be a no-kill facility so that he was still alive when I finally answered the call. There are a lot of dog angels in shelters waiting for you to embrace them, people. Go out and adopt them.

summer

I am transplanting my hopes and dreams into my Gram’s garden. They look like irises and lilies, but they feel like my soul, and I couldn’t leave it all behind. He took enough of my soul. Right now it feels like it will never grow back, but I know that just like the irises will reproduce every year, spreading to fill in the empty spaces in the garden, so will my soul. Gram is not much of a gardener. I know my soul won’t be hacked back, trimmed, or subjected to control in any form. Gram has always known what my soul needs. I call her my faith keeper.

She opens the back door, sees me, puts on her jacket, and smiles as she walks over. “I thought I heard a garden spirit at work out here!”

“I figured you wouldn’t mind giving my flowers some sanctuary, ” I say.

“Not at all.”

“I couldn’t leave them behind.”

“Oh.” Although she doesn’t ask, I can tell she’s curious about why I canceled my engagement.

“The other night I had an allergic reaction and needed to be taken to the hospital in the middle of the night. He drove me, and the whole time I’m thinking what a good friend he is, because the hospital is an hour away, and he was so kind. At the end of the week, though, he was doing bills and tallying my half of everything. At the bottom of the weekly bill he created for me, there was a ten-dollar charge for gas used to take me to the hospital.” I could go into how it was symbolic of how he kept score, of how he always feared not having enough or not getting what he felt was due him, but I won’t open that can of worms. “I almost married a man who charged me ten bucks for a trip to the hospital. I wouldn’t charge a stranger ten bucks for a trip to the hospital.”

Gram erupts in laughter. “Did you pay it?”

“Yes, I paid it. Best ten bucks I ever spent. Now I can leave without going through the courtesy of trying to be friends. I don’t owe him anything. I can go and never, ever look back.”

Gram, coming from another generation where men treated women differently, laughs and laughs about my ten-dollar charge. She laughs so hard, she can’t speak. She laughs as she walks to the other side of the house to dump a bucket of weeds, and she laughs the whole way back.

“Mara,” she manages to get out, “two words:
great escape
.”

What I didn’t tell her about the trip to the hospital is that . . . well, I don’t know how to explain this. I think I brought a man back from the dead . . . twice.

I can see energy, but not all the time and not all of it. And you know, I didn’t ask for this ability, and sometimes it really freaks me out. Most of the time I don’t look for it. I figure it’s none of my business. Sometimes, though, it’s just there.

Anyway, I heard this code blue alarm going on next door, and I figured I didn’t want to absorb anyone else’s energy, so I started picturing white light coming out of the tops of fir trees, down through my head, and filling me with so much light that the excess poured out of my hands. Since I discovered this technique, I stopped passing out every time I got around someone with a disease or injury.

On that day, though, it wasn’t working for some reason. I don’t know why. Then, out of nowhere, I thought of the saguaro cacti in Arizona and pictured red light coming out of them and into me, just like in the other visualization.

The minute I started thinking about red light, the code blue alarms stopped. I held that thought for a few minutes, but then my mind wandered, and instantly the code blue alarm went off again. I thought of the cacti with the red light, and the alarms once again stopped.

I looked down at my own body that had been covered in huge hives just five minutes ago, as it had been for the last twelve hours, and was startled to see my skin almost completely clear. That was the moment I realized that even though I don’t know much, I knew more about healing than the doctors or nurses ever would. I took off the stupid ID bracelet that had been hurting me and the crunchy gown that reeked of bleach and had been making my skin burn even more. I put my soft cotton flannel pajamas back on and ran like hell out of there.

I’m figuring out that other people have this ability, too, only no one talks about it because none of us wants to be called crazy—especially when we often don’t know how to interpret what we see.

This is why I love art. Art is the medium those of us who see the unexplainable converse in. It’s safe. And those who don’t see the neon dots floating around people, the sparkles falling from the sky, and the auras, of course, can just write it off as imagination and creativity. In that respect, it’s a coded conversation.

For instance, last week I saw this artist’s work in a gallery who is clearly one of us. She paints the energy of the forest. Vibrant. My eyes watered as I stared at her work. I felt so full of appreciation for our beautiful, alive planet, and knowing she understood eased my loneliness.

Naturally, I’m enthralled with light in my own art, which is why stained glass is my passion. I can appreciate the translucence of watercolor, but stained glass that actually uses light . . . oh, it takes my breath away. I spend a lot of time thinking about the existing great works of stained glass.

Historically, stained glass was used to teach illiterate people about the Bible, and while some images are nothing short of heavenly, some I find rather disturbing. If you, like me, are of the mind that everything is either love or fear, and you see that some of those windows promote fear while Jesus promoted love, you can see why I believe more windows are needed that truly represent the universal truths of love. These truths were articulated by all the great prophets. They’re not that complicated. This is why I’ve dedicated my life to creating windows that show what God truly is: love, light, life, and the power of creation. I also try to create windows that convey how we are all connected by virtue of God residing within us all.