The Chloe Chronicles: Part X--"Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie"

Dear Readers -

Apologies for the long delay in my posts. My father fell ill in October and eventually died in November, so I understandably missed several weeks of posts. Right now I am on retreat at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, doing bardo practices for my father during his 49 day between-state period. I feel this is a very important time to be in focused prayer and ritual, for the benefit of my father and family and ancestors and all sentient beings—including dogs.

I thought I would share the tenth (and final) installment of my Chloe Chronicles series that appeared in Bark magazine as a serial column for a few years. There are still a few more essays from the series that I have not posted here on Substack—and that is because I am posting them here out of order. (I wish I had a more organized mind, but I just don’t, and that’s okay. We have to be okay with not being okay, right?)

Anyway, here is the piece, which originally appeared in the December 2013 issue of Bark. I submitted this piece to my editors in late September 2013; by the time the magazine came out, Chloe had died, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, from an undetected spleen cancer.

Ah life, there is so much joy and so much sorrow, side by side, and our job is to be present with it ALL.