Barnaby was like a mood, a fragrance of the harmonious inner life, permeating everything with which he came into contact. He knew sorrow and he knew joy, and he held them in a delicate balance of serenity and peace. He knew how to respond equally joyfully to an invitation to walk or talk or sit together, which seems to me to be a particular kind of training in grace -- a willingness to respond easily and happily to even the most modest adventure together. Perhaps it could be said that within his framework of being a dog, he lived life as a spiritual exercise.
If we cannot see the multitudinous splendor of light in every form when it is right before our eyes, then we have to be awakened, jolted out of complacency, cast down from the ivory tower, and buried under the black earth of all our materialistic fantasies. It’s quite a shock and painful. Fearing loss, fear will bind us to forms that have already collapsed and are dissolving. But light is there even in the darkness. At the point where one dies, at the point where one stops trying to assert the ego, at the point one gives up in despair, at the point where one says, “I yield. I give in,” then one finds the Divine within.