The Dog And I: Playing An Ancient Game

Untethered and unshackled, dancing across the canvas of light and shadow

Source: Jonathan Foster

Part one

Occasionally, when I’m out with the dog, far offtrack in the unmanaged forest, unseen, unconstrained, I play a game called Ancient Forest Dweller.

Maybe it’s reckless to use the words play and game, too childish perhaps, likely to scare off the reader who imagines themselves to be a serious, proper grown-up.

But I embrace this recklessness and stand my ground, for there’s no frivolity in play. It’s the bravest gamble, where we must be stripped to the bone, dare to cast-off our adult armour and defy the ego’s flimsy and comical make-believe. There you are, once more. Remember?

So, I shall reveal myself as a fool, a child perhaps, a playful trickster that, on occasion, slashes the sanctioned facade and faces the world with open eyes and a foolhardy heart. Sometimes, with only the dog as clan, I’ll unburden myself and laugh in the face of ceremony, booted and bare pawed, the dog and I will become wild and easy and beautifully abandoned. We’ll play.

In the far off forest, away from the tracks of men, I’ll ignite the kindling of that which is always intensely blazing away, deep within my wild human heart, so effortlessly burning with the joy of life. I’ll allow that momentous pyre, if only momentarily, to burn away the domesticated, disempowered, dependent creature I’ve now become.

I know. I appreciate how ridiculous this all sounds. So let me start over, and try to explain myself, with the serious reader in mind.

When I’m out with the dog, deep in the unmanaged forest, meandering along the desire trails formed by the caramel coloured Roe deer that keep us company, like shy spirits, folding themselves into nothingness, or occasionally staring from the wild side, their black eyes pooling with curiosity and hankering, as the blueberries fatten in the dense undergrowth and the flowering fruit of the fungi pop across the forest floor like serene fireworks, occasionally, I might drop my pretence, and pretend instead, to be an Ancient Forest Dweller pacing through the trees. I’ll set free my ever probing, exploring and haunted mind and interface with the immaterial, embrace all this rawness and raze my beguiling castles in the air.

You know it too, this feeling that’s hardwired into our human software, playing this game of life, you know it too, don’t you?

I’m not inventing some paper thin parody, I’m not merely conjuring up a crappy caricature. I’m taking it seriously. I’m not messing about. I’m vicariously being that being, a supremely multi-faceted individual, as entangled as you and I could ever hope to be.

And then, of course, there’s the dog, perpetually in perfect character. If I remained forever in the forest, became an Ancient Forest Dweller, the dog would be there, beside me, in front of me perhaps, living the life, because unlike me, the dog isn’t a pretender. He hasn’t abandoned himself to a world of concepts and notions and affectations. He doesn’t even need to play. He is play.

Source: Jonathan Foster

I feel at one sometimes, as we traverse the trails on some snowy morning, wandering like spirits passing unseen through the glowing silver and chocolate orange pines, with my Paleolithic drone. An extension of myself through time and space, a gatherer of information I cannot harvest alone. Together, greater than the sum of our parts, made more powerful when united, more robust. And, of course, this twofold potency reveals a truth; that without the dog I am a lesser creature. And he? Is he lesser without me?

I know who is closer to this world, I know who didn’t abandon it and begin to draw lines where none should be and plant flags that none should see and intervene where none had asked. But thankfully, the dog, in his profundity, accepts what is, and continues to pace beside me, like an expert tracker keeping an eye on his fool slowly getting lost in the woods of life.

And at other times when the snow is coming down in an ocean of tumbling crystals, softening and quietening the world, and the dog is streaking between the pines, untethered and unshackled, I’ll be dazzled by the dignified and intimate manner in which he conducts himself without the slightest effort. And it dawns on me, the strange truth, that we, you and I, are stripped of so much we once enjoyed, so much that was once engaged and dignified and meaningful. And I’ll think of our far distant ancestors when they too lived untethered and unshackled by all that now weighs us down. So, I play, to rekindle all that is gone. I let go and I play.

Sometimes, in my game of Ancient Forest Dweller, I am flooded with a solitude that shines like a beacon on our collective loss. Where are the others? Where are the clan and kin? Where is the knowledge and mutuality that entwined us together, the rich river flowing through our bodies and minds, embracing us and holding us fast to the world? Where once the boundaries fluctuated, almost in and out of consciousness, morphing between material and spirit, this affinity, this communion, this life-blood is gone. Instead we have been severed from each other, severed from the forest, severed from ourselves.

To escape the emptiness we push further on, the dog and I, penetrating deeper into the forest, away from the estranged bare present and toward the storied swollen past, where finally my eyes begin to see that which has been erased. In the scattered shafts of sunlight I see the trolls and fairies and elves and gnomes and spirits dancing across the canvas of light and shadow. They’re everywhere, tip-toeing, darting and scampering between the trunks as they peek and wonder where we have been, lurking in the twilight and whispering in the trees. I see phantoms moving through the groves and elves emerging from darkness below fallen trees. I hear the cracking of their pattering as they flutter along and disappear, and I am alive again as these forest spirits laugh and rejoice at my dissolving cultural order.

A grey owl drops from its perch and into silent flight, weaving through the dense branches and away. We listen to the drumming of woodpeckers and the applause of the birch trees in the breeze and smell the unyielding freshness in the icy air.

As we move together, booted and bare pawed, lightly panting, the crow’s cawing high above us, spreading their mischief and warning of our existence, the dog looks at me quizzically and I cannot explain to him, as he eases into his rhythm, that I have been wrenched from this world, that I am lost, that I am trying to find my way back to a place I do not know, but yearn for, to a place from which I have drifted, disorientated, now aching to return.

Part 2

Last winter the dog and I tried playing in the city. The evening was fast approaching. The world drugged in snow, colonised by an ocean of hovering ice and all sound muffled in a bruised, tender light, as the city transformed into great lines of brutalist igloos, like a terrible Angakkuq vision.

As the light of the day skulked away, leaving only the street lamps to host their finite and furious universes, the pummelling wind tumbling galaxies of snow in bulbs of luminous mayhem, and the blue faced cold streamed toward us in a festival of frozen yielding, the dog and I, like two vessels emerging from whence we came then plunging back again, blipped in and out of the pockets of light.

The wind then dropped and time seemed slowed as sheets billowed from the heavens, and I heard the rhythm of my footfalls creaking through the new fell snow like the wooden planking of a ship stretching and squeezing in the rising and falling tide of a gentle sea, whilst the dog trotted effortlessly along beside, without a sound. And because I was playing, I saw this urbane place through the eyes of a stranger, an Ancient Forest Dweller perhaps, or a child.

And I saw that in this city the snow is an intruder, knocking on the door in the night, forcing itself in against the will of those inside, disrupting the way of things. Something to be managed and shifted and controlled.

Whereas in the forest snow is the nature of things, the blooming of a great rhythm of flowering moments through which all of creation dances in the flow of infinite time. So that eventually, and inevitably, a snowy forest arose upon the stage of existence. And so did we, rise upon the stage of existence. And so did this city, rise upon the stage of existence, a strange and new expression of the ancient information that gently meanders through we know not what. And I understood that we are brethren to the ancient snow, not alien to it, and we should rejoice as it entombs our ephemeral twinkling cities, fragile as they are, like surface tension on a pond.

And in my playful demeanour I smiled at the hilarious swagger of the city buried in avalanches of time, struggling toward its inevitable fate. And I began to yearn for the forest pathways formed by the meanderings of animals, not shaped and pounded and hammered, but spawned from the collective urge of hearts leaving traces across the landscape. And I realised that to follow these forest paths is to surrender to a truth of the world; that all things built will crumble, and all concepts imagined will dissolve in the enormity of time, and all straight lines are a conceit of those who believe they’ve conquered the invincible.

Source: Jonathan Foster

And, lost in play, I’m was not afraid of our insignificance, but instead I embraced the truth that I am but a twinkling flash of consciousness bearing witness to all this wonder. And I know that I am already home, that I have always been home, that all I need do is open my eyes and see that which has always been. And with joy and courage I cast aside all that is imagined in the craving minds of men and instead embrace all that is formed by the rhythms of time.

So the dog and I skate along the rich river of ancient information flowing through our bodies and minds and hold fast to the world like the Ancient Forest Dwellers we have always been and always will be.

Let me ask you now, is it really so reckless to play? Is it really so reckless to cast off all this faux armour and pretension? Is it really so reckless to follow our paths like spirits dancing across the canvas of light and shadow, to reclaim clan and kin and communion? Is it not glorious to roam the forests of our minds and face the world with open eyes and a foolhardy heart?

Think of the dog and I, on those occasions, when the weight of life all feels like melancholy and burden, and remember us, pattering along in the scattered shafts of sunlight, playing like fools, dancing to the rhythms of eternity, like impish children of time, before we once again fold ourselves into nothingness, having momentarily emerged from whence we came only to plunge back home again.