God Has to
Go Outside
My dog is waiting for me to finish explaining the universe.
He has been patient. There is a limit.
I’m looking at a screen, connecting things that probably don’t look connected to anybody else. A woman’s handwriting. An unfinished song. A photograph from a life where I had a different last name. Another idea for helping somebody stop being afraid of the life they actually want.
Lion is looking at the door.
Between us, we have identified two different priorities.
I call him God.
His full name is Lion Laguna. He is a black French bulldog with the physical presence of a nightclub bouncer and the sleeping soundtrack of a motorcycle trying to start underwater. The name Lion is ambitious. He appears to believe he can carry it.
When I say God, people do what people do. Some laugh. Some get uncomfortable. Some hear a theological argument and start assembling their response before I’ve finished the sentence.
Lion does none of that.
He wants to go outside.
I have spent a substantial part of my life talking about a love that doesn’t have to be earned. I have put it in books and on stages. I have carried it into rooms where people didn’t expect a pastor. Later, I carried it into rooms where people didn’t expect that same pastor to show up with cannabis, a light, a playlist, or a question about consciousness.
I have tried a lot of doors.
I’m not ashamed of being curious. Curiosity has given me a life I could never have scheduled. It has introduced me to people I would never have met by staying respectable. It has taken me from a church platform to red rocks, from a marriage certificate to a screen full of music that didn’t exist an hour earlier.
But curiosity also has a practical problem.
There is always another door.
You can become so interested in what might be on the other side that you stop noticing who is standing beside you on this one.
That is where the dog comes in.
He brings the entire conversation back to a body. A door. A walk. Now.
Not the version of now I can turn into a slogan. The inconvenient one that requires me to stand up.
When I look back at the women I have loved, I can see that I was often trying to give them something enormous. A future. A new way to see themselves. A world where the old rules didn’t get the final word.
Sometimes that was beautiful.
Sometimes we made things neither of us could have made alone. We laughed. We traveled. We listened to music that seemed to recognize us. We believed the next chapter might be bigger than the room we were standing in.
Sometimes a woman needed something smaller.
My attention. A clear answer. An ordinary evening that didn’t have to become the beginning of an extraordinary life.
This is not a book in which I discover that imagination was the problem. Imagination has been one of the great loves of my life.
It is a book about learning that another person is not an unfinished part of my imagination.
Daisy had a life before she met me. A voice. A body of work. A private language on notebook paper. Jamie had classrooms, choreography, family, friendships, questions, and dogs she loved before Lion ever climbed into her lap.
The women who helped me see differently were not waiting in the wings of a movie about Craig. Some loved me romantically. Some offered friendship, guidance, generosity, or a place to rest. Some knew versions of me that no longer fit the description on my website.
Their lives did not begin when I noticed them.
They do not end where my access to them ends.
I need to remember that before I write another sentence about what they taught me.
There is a version of this story that would be very easy to sell: a man gives everything away, loses everybody, travels through the universe, and discovers that the dog was the only one who ever really loved him.
Great trailer.
Too small for the truth.
The dog’s love doesn’t erase the love I received from people. A quiet room doesn’t prove that my entire life has been emptied. A relationship can end without becoming a lie. Someone can need distance without becoming the villain in my next chapter.
And being alone can still fucking hurt.
I don’t have to make that hurt impressive before I’m allowed to admit it.
The question that interests me now is not whether I was loved enough. I was loved in ways I am still learning how to recognize.
It is whether I can receive love without immediately turning it into something I need to build, explain, preserve, or defend.
Whether I can remember without recruiting the past to take my side.
Whether I can stay open without asking somebody else to stay trapped.
Lion moves closer to the door.
I close the laptop.
For a few minutes, the universe will have to manage without my input.
God has to go outside.