Turns out, the ordinary days were the best days...

This is the long version of a post I made this week.

It's been a week since my beautiful Border Collie Callie died. Trying to figure out a routine without her has been anything but easy. The house is silence and hollow.

Over the last week I have reflected on many things that have been going through this overthinking mind of mine.

I'm not sure these reflections are lessons but they are thoughts that have swirled in my mind this last week. Things that she taught me, she revealed and experiences she guided me through.

Turns Out, the ordinary days were the best days.

**the best parts of life are usually ridiculously ordinary

Callie didn't need me to have a ideal house, the perfect relationship with my body, the dream bank account or the healed version of myself.

she wanted breakfast

a walk

her spot on the couch

the door to the open

the yard to chase squirrels…

I think that's one of the things she's leaving with me:

stop postponing your life until it looks the way you thought it would be.

the coffee on the porch counts.

making dinner while dancing in the kitchen counts.

laughing with Brielle on FaceTime counts

a beautiful Tuesday evening counts

Callie lived almost entirely in ordinary moments and maybe she was showing me all along that ordinary moments are the whole fucking point.

**love doesn't have to be chased to be real

Callie never made me feel like I had to wonder where I stood. She did not know how to “ghost” me, I didn't have to interpret the silence. I didn't have to become prettier, thinner, softer, less complicated, more goal oriented, more detached, more feminine or richer so she would choose me.

I knew that when I walked into a room and I was her person.

She loved me. This Erin. The one who always showed up.

Period.

Love should feel like recognition, not an audition. It was never a test.

That doesn't mean human relationships will ever have a dog's uncomplicated devotion.

But perhaps the next chapter isn't about learning how to attract somebody, it’s about refusing to confuse uncertainty with love.

**there are witnesses to our lives who know versions of us nobody else does.

This is perhaps why losing an old dog can feel so disproportionately enormous.

Callie knew me before so much had happened. She knew the woman I was fifteen years ago.

She knew who I was before everything changed.

She knew Owyn.

Because when someone who knew Owyn dies there can be another little layer of grief underneath the obvious ones another living connection to him is gone.

But Callie also carried fifteen years of me.

She saw the Erin who nobody no one sees professionally. The woman dancing in the kitchen. The woman crying herself to sleep. The woman on her knees praying so hard.

The woman talking to her dog. The woman coming through the door exhausted after counseling so many or bearing witness to another death. The woman laughing at something so ridiculous. Callie watched me loose entire versions of my life and I still show up for her.

no performance

no credentials

no armor

just me…

And Callie seemed to think that that woman was pretty friggin great company.

Maybe I should believe her

**your heart has not become incapable of attachment despite everything it's endured.

After all of life's obstacles, challenges, betrayals, upsets and my heart shattered into a million pieces, I could reasonably have become someone who had never wanted to risk loving anything or anyone so deeply again.

But look at last Tuesday.

I was obviously still capable of enormous attachment and love.

That's why this pain is so raw.

My heart isn't failing because it keeps breaking;

it keeps breaking because somehow it keeps loving and that's a very different story.

**sometimes there is no lessons there is only love

I think this may be the most important connection of all.

Callie’s death isn't something I turned into a growth moment.

I didn't go looking for the meaning and why all of this was happening.

I didn't have to go looking and asking the universe what are you trying to teach me now?

Sometimes a dog lives close to 15 years, she becomes part of the family, she greets you at the door, she grows old, her body stops working. It’s her time to go.

In the span of 30 hours my life completely changed all over again.

The deepest reflection  Callie taught me wouldn't be about the death at all but maybe it's about this;

don't wait until something is ending to understand how sacred the ordinary days are.

Because somewhere among those thousands of ordinary days with Callie was a completely unremarkable Tuesday when she could still walk, I probably had 12 things on my mind, and she probably wanted something from me at an inconvenient moment and neither of us knew it was one of the good old days. That makes me think the legacy she leaves for me isn't about holding on tighter.

It is about being present in the ordinary moments.

Enjoy all the ordinary with Brielle, with the people who I love and the ones that come in and out of my life throughout all the ordinary chapters of my book.

With this incredible ordinary body that I'm so critical of, to perhaps embrace all the ordinary instead.  

To keep vision casting with my wild ridiculous dreams but not to forget the ordinary text, phone call, field walk, or road trip.

Callie didn't spend 15 years waiting for some future version of me to arrive she loved the one who was already here.

We spend so much of our lives waiting for life to begin that we don’t notice the life we’ll someday ache to have back is happening right now.

Right in front of you.

Embrace it before it’s too late.

photo by Frank Fenn