9 May, 2023.

I continue to be haunted by that moment in Cuillin’s euthanizing when he tried to break free of the circle of caring humans who had come to end his life, and I had to stop him and hold him, and turn him back to the needle.  Was he feeling better, well enough to have gone on for a few more days?  Was I denying him that natural outcome, interfering?  His life ended soon after, and I had brought it about.  And in today’s meditation, this fact took all my awareness, made me feel a guilt and responsibility, a kind of choosing his death, that denied me all presence of the Tao, that kept me chained to this earth and its polarities and the separateness of being that now makes Cuillin such a painful absence to me.  Without any sense of release in my meditation, or any sense of freedom from grasping, my meditation felt futile.  My head was full of words and concepts; I was nowhere near emptiness. 

            But I did come to realize one thing: that that moment of harsh choice, and my devastation about it now, pivoted on the meaning of non-action.  “Doing nothing” would have meant leaving him lying on the ice and snow, struggling with his breathing, refusing all food and water, as his lymph nodes grew and his organs shut down.  It would have meant extending his suffering because it was “natural” that he die a slow, agonizing death.  And into that process we were called to intervene.  And certainly if the “action” shunned in non-action is, as I have long called it, effortful striving, then I had to strive effortfully to decide on Cuillin’s death and to hold him still to receive it.

            And yet in meditation I also came to think that our decision and my holding him back from escape were a possible version of wu wei, the kind of action that is made without grasping, without projects, without self-love.  It went against my whole nature to end my dog’s life.  And yet I did so, without the least selfish reason, but out of love.  Was that moment—that moment of seeming action in which I held him still, and comforted and quieted him, before turning him back to death—the definitive moment of non-action?  Is it after all a kind of intervening against “nature” when all one’s own nature cries out against the intervening?  I will continue to look for answers to all this.  But today’s meditation at least gave me a clearer sense that the option of doing nothing—leaving him with his cheek pressed to the hard ice to die slowly—would have been precisely the wrong understanding of non-action.  I forced myself to will his death; I forced him to his death.  Yet in doing so, I think I did a better kindness that was closer to my feeble understanding of the Tao.