Respecting that darn Yellow Dog

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"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans"   Allen Saunders

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“The truth is all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity"

James Hollis: WHAT MATTERS MOST: Living a More Considered Life

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"Coyote is an anarchist. She can confuse all civilized ideas simply by trotting through. And she always fools the pompous. Just when your ideas begin to get all nicely arranged and squared off, she messes them up. Things are never going to be neat, that's one thing you can count on.   Coyote walks through all our minds. Obviously, we need a trickster, a creator who made the world all wrong. We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes, gets into trouble, and who is identified with a scruffy little animal."

Ursula Leguin, "Coming Back From the Silence"

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I do think Ursula Leguin has it entirely right.  A great deal, if not most, of the human experience has to do with the human hubris (I  do like that word, which rhymes with nothing I can think of) that makes us think we can somehow "control" things.  Actually, all the things that mostly count it seems to me we can't "control".  Rather, the Gods or Goddesses or Fates or perhaps most of all Coyote/Trickster enjoy creating the necessary chaos of uncertainty.  

Yellow Dog

 

Coyote howls a midnight serenade

to the desert tonight,

Her chorus answers, noisy as all hell. 

She brays down a tale about the frayed moon,

a prairie dog’s misfortune,

old dancing bones,

and all my carefully conceived plans.

 

Coyote is running tonight

between the splintered shutters

of my house of doors,

laughing through every tattered crevice

in all my certainties.

 

That yellow dog

Is a real pain

 

(1996)

 

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent,

intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Ursula Leguin