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Bit by Bit, the Bark

Posted by sweet in Dog Musings | Dog Training - (0 Comments)


Cholula is so close to the bark on command I’ve been trying to get her to do for a year and a half. I keep thinking my next post on this will surely, surely be the video of the bark I’ve been working towards. But instead it seems Cholula and I are on one of those journeys where each step covers half the ground that is left, on and on into infinity.

Kevin Behan said recently, while trying to teach another dog to speak on command who kept glancing away from him, avoiding his look, “What we want is always the hardest thing, the path of highest resistance.”

With whatever combination of my ineptitude and Cholula’s avoidance-heavy temperament, bringing her along that path of highest resistance is indeed the hardest thing for her. But I don’t blame her. How many paths of highest resistance do I avoid in my daily life, in order to keep life running smoothly and easily, but at the cost of not working on the things that really matter? We are in this together, Cholu and I.

So, Cholula, tied to a tree in my back yard on a leash with a flat collar; me in front of her, plenty of dog kibble in my fanny pack, worn backwards so I can easily get it with my hand:

Me: “Speak!” (I draw myself tall, hand holding the food at my heart and jiggling. I pounce lightly towards her.)
Cholula: Snaps her teeth so hard they click, without letting any air out.
Me: “Speak!”
Cholula: Bows, shakes her head, sneezes.
Me: “Speak!” (jiggling the food harder. I used to feed every sneeze; now, at least once she is warmed up, I stretch it out, wait for the noise.)
Cholula: Sneezes harder.
Me: “Louder. Give me the noise. Speak.”
Cholula: Meets my stare, her ears flattening, and holds it (something she wouldn’t do for a long time).
Me: I open my eyes wider. “Speak!”
Cholula: Holds my stare, then turns her head away from me, as if to gather her energy (it may still be a kind of avoidance but it no longer feels like that; it is a deliberate, slow move of her neck, and once she is no longer staring at me, I can see her inhale), glances back to my eyes, and makes a quiet but distinct, quite deep, “HHHHHaaaaah” in the back of her throat.
That I feed.

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Cinco de Mayo 2012 on the National Mall, this Saturday

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This spring, my girls’ dance troup, the Micro-Monteros, who dance with the Maru Montero Dance Company, have gotten to perform in a number of places, including the rooftop of Univision, right across the street from the Capitol. Looking forward to Cinco de Mayo tomorrow, I wanted to re-post our 2011 Cinco de Mayo photos from last year in celebration of the upcoming event this Saturday on the Mall, at the Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument. My girls will be dancing at noon and 1:45 with the MicroMonteros–there will also be crafts and games and horses and all sorts of things.

Also last year, I wrote about why and how I’ve come to love the Zapateado dancing my girls perform with the Maru Montero Dance Company.

We’d love to see you there –

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Blossoms: Rose, April 28, 2012

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A lot of D.C. rowhouses have a rosebush blooming in the front yard, like this one I passed on my way to work last week. Some of the rose bushes are carefully planted in fully landscaped gardens; others, like this one, exist as the yard’s sole decoration. If my experience is any guide, rosebushes in D.C., when planted in a place that gets enough sun, take some work the first few years–pruning, watering, smushing of aphids, plucking of diseased leaves–but then, at least in the spring before the pests wreak their havoc, they’ll thrive pretty much on their own. Whether perfectly pruned, or overgrown and straggly, they offer the sumptuous beauty of their flowers to anyone who passes by. It’s a gift, a thoughtless generosity, by multitudes of people who keep most of their treasures behind locked doors.

Dogs, After the Creek

Posted by sweet in Dog Musings | Dog Training - (0 Comments)

The dogs don’t get any more relaxed than this. I’d taken them to the creek on a Friday morning with my son, an old ford that is deep enough in places for the dogs to swim, and that flows into rapids, and that has a bank of soft white sand. Kevin Behan suggested to me that Pundit’s insane love of water is a reflection of my own love of water, and maybe it is. There was a time, when Pundit was still in his prime and before I had kids, when I took Pundit to the Potomac River with my kayak. As I paddled the quarter mile upstream to the main rapids, he swam beside me. He ferried small rapids, pulled himself out on rocks, leapt to other rocks and back into the water to ferry some more, his small paws paddling rhythmically, his determined puffs of air as he swam making him sound like a seal. He has lost so much strength. I could see the little rapids of the creek pulling him downstream as he struggled across. He lost sight of the stick in the water and circled around, unsure. I threw him another stick and he got it, brought it back, and barked for more. I threw his stick in a few more times and he seemed to get his rhythm back, swimming more smoothly and doing better at finding the stick, sticks he once would have been able to mark and swim straight to. And then he took his stick over to a spot in the sand and contentedly chewed. Even there, I had to help him once, when a wood chunk got stuck between two of his old teeth.

Cholula is not especially comfortable in the water, but maybe again because she feels the draw it holds for me, she tries. She followed Pundit out into the creek, grabbed a stick, and brought it back, picking up her feet too high, stumbling a little on the pebbly bottom. Then her ears tensed into total prey mode as she honed in on some tiny bubbles that were floating downstream in a solid circle. She stalked that full moon of bubbles, poised as it floated towards her in utter concentration, and then snapped her jaws right onto it. She looked up at me with creek water running down her chin, surprised that she’d come up with nothing but water and air.

But that’s not why this photo, taken back in our yard after our morning at the creek, shows Cholula as relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. It turned out that the creek was the perfect place to get to Cholula’s bark and bite. After we had played at the water’s edge with the dogs for a while, we settled on the sand, warmed just to comfort by the sun. My son and I played with the sand, some rocks, and some fluffy seed things from the huge tree overhead, which he pretended were worms. Mostly, we had the place to ourselves. But from our perch we had a perfect view of not only our side of the creek and the dogs who occasionally walked by behind us along the drive, but also the other side of the ford, where a muddy bank led into a wooded path along the creek where people would walk by with their dogs.

Cholula, having staked herself next to us in the sand, interpreting the spot as our own, got a full-fledged charge every time she saw another dog, whether it was across the creek or alongside of us. I started goading her slightly and encouraging her to speak whenever she honed in on a dog, and a torrent of barks emerged, almost a rolling chant of barks, varying in pitch and measure–some high, some low, some clear, some gutteral, some more like howls and others more like whines, some with even a kind of yodel and a rolling growl. She barked right in my face and snapped her teeth at me, unconstrained. It sounded like she was accessing something deep in her soul. And for days afterwards, she was an especially sweet and mellow dog. I hoped that the experience might be our breakthrough for speaking on command. But in the yard, without the stimulation of those dogs looking her way, she’s still sneezing, rather than speaking, on command. I have a new respect for what she is holding inside, and a renewed hope that I’m going to get to it.

Another thought I had after that morning by the creek, that doesn’t exactly fit in this post, but I thought I’d add it anyway, is of two things I’m especially thankful for about Natural Dog Training regarding my journey with Cholula. The first is that in my first telephone conversation with Kevin Behan, Kevin released me from feeling guilty about not bringing Cholula on family outings she wasn’t ready for. For a long time after that conversation, over a year, I basically never brought Cholula with me in the city on hikes or walks in the park with my kids. When I didn’t trust her not to lunge unexpectedly at a random dog, having her along just made the experience more stressful for all of us, but before I spoke to Kevin I had this sense that I needed to bring her out with us, to give her as much stimulation and exercise as possible in the hopes of helping her calm down. Kevin explained that for a dog in her state of fearfulness and, as he called it, constant charge, stimulation– including the stimulation of exercise–would only make things worse. He released me from feeling guilty about not taking her on our family outings, and from worrying about giving her as much exercise as possible. As long as I ensured her morning and evening walk around the block, and a chance to pee before bed, that was sufficient–and the additional walks and hikes, and, as she improved, eventually jogs, my husband or I did take her on fairly regularly but without the kids, when we could fit them in, those were extra–not something Cholula had to have. This was good for both her and the family. And now, I am thankful that, due to the changes in her that have come about through my efforts to work with her using Natural Dog Training, I’m more and more comfortable bringing her along. She is so much less reactive, so much more relaxed, and I am so much more aware of what might set her off and how to handle it, that, slowly, the crazy shelter dog is becoming the family pet.

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Blossoms: Iris, April 20, 2012

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The Irises have come out all over D.C. They are such an extravagant flower, like butterflies, their petals seeming to defy gravity as they unfurl, folding into each other in irregular carresses, shaped and re-shaped with every bump and breeze. When we first bought our house in 2000, the first time I had a yard of my own, I thought I might plant a vegetable garden. But I casually threw some sunflower seeds into the dirt, and the moment I saw my first blooming sunflower, I was hooked. I went through a few years of flower gardening frenzy, including some when I bought too many bulbs and planted them haphazardly everywhere there was free dirt. Then I had kids and more kids, and very little time to garden. But some of the bulbs still come up. This iris bloomed in a hazardous spot, right off our main path down the garden where strollers and bikes are daily wheeled up and down and children run with bats and sticks and backpacks hanging from their hands–and right by the rarely latched door that connects our yard to our neighbor’s, and that is opened and closed by kids’ hands and dogs’ noses with a multitude of reasons to hurry and few to be careful as they come and go. But so far, the iris stands, lovely in the sun and heedless of our chaos.

Taking Flight in Othello

Posted by sweet in Nature | Poetry | Travel - (0 Comments)


While we were in Eastern Washington state to visit my father-in-law, we went to Othello to see the Sandhill cranes, which stop there every year in late March on their way from Texas to Alaska.


We found them, hundreds of them, in and above a cornfield off the highway, along with geese and a huge flock of little black birds. The field was fenced off from us, but we stepped out of our rented Minivan into the rain to watch them.
On the ground, these hundreds of birds, at least three different species, created a tremendous cacophany. But when they took flight, they soared, shape shifters in the air, seeming to mimic and re-mimic the mountains behind them.These birds, so loud on the ground among the dry corn husks, irritated, chatty, frantic, seemed in the air to have no trouble forming and reforming their lines, working within the air space, rising and then settling again.
The cranes fly from Texas to Alaska, and then back again, every year. We stepped out of our minivan to watch them.
Simultaneously many birds and one bird, they soared. These four seem to inhabit the position of the bird in front of them in the space just left, as if the image could be of one bird over time.
Not touching, in the air they communicate through sound, vision, and motion,
creating, breaking, and re-creating different alignments that serve their purpose.
Sometimes they floated in pure, effortless motion, at one with the air, the mountains, the fields, their hollow dinosaur bones exquisitely perfect for their mission, to take this long journey and to raise chicks who in turn will take this long journey. They live to move. They move to live.
How do they know where to go? How do they get there?

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Blossoms: Weeping Willow, April 2, 2012, Kennewick WA

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I’m sure Washington, D.C., is continuing to blossom like crazy this week, but I’m with my family in Kennewick, Washington, visiting my father in law. It’s earlier in the spring up here and the trees are just blossoming. Alongside the roads, in the hollows and valleys of the dry hills, stand weeping willows, their light yellow-green tendrils cascading around them like hair, like a gown, half tree, half maiden, presenting themselves in the breeze.

Cholula and the Bogeyman

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Recently, something strange started to happen. My kids pointed it out to me—“Mama,” my oldest daughter said to me one day, laughing, “Cholula’s not just scared of the hallway to the kitchen, she’s scared of the stairs and the hall upstairs too.” “Yeah,” said my other daughter, “she’s scared of the whole house.” It was true. In direct contrast to continuing progress in her training outside, Cholula was getting stuck at various points all over the house, so stuck that she would whine from her various perches until one of us went and either walked with her past the frightening spot or called to her until she got so excited she could dash past the spot all skittery nails and splayed limbs. I wrote to Kevin Behan on his website and asked him about it. He responded (in short), the entire exchange is here—

I suspect you’re now dealing with the first instances of fear in her life as [she looks] to find a predator to justify the release of pent up energy. The bark will be really important to get her to release her fear. She’s processing fear outdoors (i.e. her improved abilities and behaviors outside represent a new ability to move through her fear) but still experiencing it, and so it needs to find an outlet and so [she] concocts a predator from innocuous stuff within a context from her past.

I’ve been continuing to work on the bark on command. This too is quite something to see—she will curl back her lips, gnash her teeth, shake her head, sneeze, emit a short growl—watching her these past weeks work to try to find the noise and not quite get it, I’ve realized that to ask her to bark on command is to ask her to give up everything she learned about life before she came to our house, when unhinged barking at real or imagined attackers was a primary means of stress release, while silence and subduedness in the face of her owner was how she avoided trouble. Although, of course, she didn’t actually avoid trouble with these coping strategies—in fact, she became trouble, ending up in the shelter twice and then attacking a dog outside my house shortly after I brought her home.

Her newly neurotic behavior has mostly faded in the weeks since I wrote Kevin. Cholula is back to her old way of being now, with only the one hallway between the dining room and kitchen still bothering her. It is quite something to see her trot up to it, come to a sudden, foreleg-splayed stop, turn around and tiptoe backwards through it, lifting each leg higher than necessary as if pulling her paws out of something sticky. While Kevin gave me some tips to help her through it, I think her neuroticism in the house subsided largely because we are at something of a new plateau. That is, when she first mastered her calm sit/stay, when she started reliably sneezing on command, with her corresponding increased ability to handle and even play with dogs we meet out and about, she was living in the outside world in a mode past her comfort zone, and it freaked her out. As Kevin wrote above, it freaked her out so much that she manufactured bogeymen all over the house to take out her fear on. Now, we have been doing these things long enough that we have established a new comfort zone. And so she’s back to her one old fear in the house and the rest of the house has returned to innocuousness. For now. Until we make another leap. I’m still working towards that real bark.

Working with Cholula’s fear has helped me understand how I get caught in my own. I know her feeling, of moving forward in one area only to find that other, previously easy tasks have become seemingly insurmountable. Take my website redesign. I’d been wanting to redesign my website for a long time, and because I don’t have many technical skills or much time, I’d decided I should hire someone to do it. Both committing the money to it and finding the right person were hurdles that kept me from moving on this for a long time. But recently, through a combination of readiness and chance (a post for another time) I got it redesigned. The redesign is almost everything I hoped for. But I found myself obsessing over minor details that bothered me and, even worse, feeling on the one hand filled with new content-related ideas for the site and on the other hand, having a new difficulty finding the time to create any content at all for the site. Following through on my own commitment to improve the look of the site pushed me out of my comfort zone and sent me into my own neurotic panic. And part of coming out of it is accepting that, like Cholula, I don’t have to—and maybe I can’t—make the whole transformation at once. I can pause at this new plateau, and practice, and trust that eventually, I’ll be ready take the next step.

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Of Blossoms and Federal Buildings

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the White House


I love cherry blossom season in D.C., but after so many years of photographing the cherry blossoms, I’ve been trying to celebrate the season a little differently. Last year when the trees—not just cherry—were blossoming all over the city (several weeks later than this year), I put up one of my favorite posts, on how the blossoming trees cast their splendor over some of the most prosaic buildings of the city—a 7-11, a liquor store, a run-down elementary school, a construction trailer covered in graffiti. This year I thought I would celebrate something different—how for these few short weeks, the blossoming trees transform some of the many federal buildings in the city—and in transforming, reveal something new. These buildings, many of them marble, were built for permanence, meant to remain unchanged by time, to embody with their beauty—or at least their solidity (some are more beautiful than others)—a confidence in the federal government, an assurance that the institutions housed in these buildings are bigger and far more enduring than the people who walk in and out of them, doing their jobs or interacting with their government.

Many of the trees that adorn these buildings with their blossoms have probably been here as long as the buildings they enhance. In flowering each spring, they celebrate a different kind of endurance—a cyclical endurance, based on not on fixed, unchanging markers such as marble pillars or carvings, but on renewal after a dormancy, the beginning of new growth. While the blossoms are ephemeral, the trees, like the buildings, last—longer than the individual birds and bugs that move in and out of them daily, creating a springtime racket among the branches, in the shadow of these heavy buildings with their square corners and perfectly cylindrical pillars. The blossoms fringe the buildings like tulle skirts, or corsages, or bouquets—asking us at least for these days to celebrate with them the joy of impermanence, the gift of the fragile, the delicate, the passing that is also vital to our lives.

This two-week jump on the usual blossoming season has given a lot of us who live in D.C. pleasure tinged with unease. Maybe another message to take from these fleetingly beautiful days is that the fragility of these blossoms has value, and is worth protecting, before it is too late.

Department of Treasury

National Archives

National Gallery of Art

The Building Museum

Department of Labor

Federal Trade Commission

The Capitol

Library of Congress

Supreme Court Close Up with Blossoms

Supreme Court with Dramatic Sky

Blossoms, March 13, 2012

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Springtime in D.C. The trees blossom in lacy counterpoint to the solid government buildings, calling attention to the frenzy of life that underpins us all.