My husband and I have been on a journey of sorts. This year, well, sucks. Covid, layoffs, political tension, grown children still living at home. We, like many others, are trying to simply navigate our way through all that is 2020 and stay sane.

As such, we’ve been meditating a lot. We have discovered different varieties – and are working through guided teachings, affirmations, and positive programming to help make “the suck” that is 2020, a little more bearable.

We’ve been getting pretty good at it too! We’ve mastered a nice routine, and have been working daily to find some nice, centered, calm.

Until recently.

We have this dog, Moose, that came back into our lives. We got her when she was a baby, and raised her for two years. Long story short, with much travel and life happenings, my brother inherited her. She then moved on to be a Hospice companion for an elderly woman, and just two weeks ago, found her way back to us.

This French Bulldog is almost 12 years old and looks every bit her age. A stocky 20-ish pounds, she is a mutant. Her black short hair has become a nubby charcoal-grey, riddled with skin tags that resemble fat, rubbery worms sticking out at all angles. Her once bright, puppy eyes are clouded with watery cataracts and her hearing is shot –  she is as deaf as they come.

She is pig reminiscent. Her wrinkled, smooshy face, and flat, stout-like nose noisly roots the world around her and blows misty snot out with every deep exhale. She burps and farts. She snorts when she breathes. She gags when she runs, and she chokes as if she were dying any time she gets excited. The folds in her face itch with old skin that she mashes and rubs relentlessly into the floor to get relief from. She has no “elimination control”; poop falls out of her as she waddles around and 2 out of 5 times she misses the doggy door and pees all over the floor. When she lays down, her little legs don’t bend well, so they stick out straight from her rotund little body like a little, dead-doggie corpse. And, she snores. This old girl, can’t sleep without house rattling, floor rumbling snores. I don’t know how such a small creature can make that much noise – but she is LOUD.

She sleeps downstairs, where, in the morning, my husband and I usually come grab our coffee, and with the rising sun, put on a nice meditation to start our day.

This ritual has become ridiculously Moose-challenged.

As we breath in, she is snoring out. As we are surrendering to peace, she is surrendering her stinky farts. Settling in to calm and quiet is impossible as it’s consistently interrupted with the loud, rythmic cadence of her mere existence. She is a constant, and continuous source of ongoing noise.

Believe me when I say, I am noise-challenged. I always have been. I am the woman who yells out the window at the loud neighbors partying past 8pm (they don’t love me). I change hotel rooms until they get me the quietest possible one.  I sleep with ear plugs and often, noise-silencing headphones on top of those. Outside, interruptive noise affects me deeply – triggering an emotional (anger) and visceral (tension) reaction. My therapist would say it’s a control issue – I would likely agree.

So normally, this dog would be the biggest of all triggers for my noise allergy. Yet, despite her many, many flaws, I love her. So, rather than get mad, as I normally would, I can see this aging, pathetic doggie who is simply just being her.

And I can’t help but almost laugh at the irony I just figured out.

Noise, particularly noise I can’t control, is my cryptonite. Yet God, during a time I am so desperately seeking peace, put the loudest creature he could find right in my path.

My pastor once told us that things or people (I am sure dogs too) in our lives that rub us the wrong way, are simply “heavenly sandpaper”. Their grating and irrritating behavior are there to smooth our rough edges; purposefully placed to shine us up in places we may be little smudgy in. As they grate us, they actually polish us –  during the times of greatest irritaton, we are actually evolving under their light pressure.

Moosey is my heavenly sandpaper in this chapter of life. Here to remind me that the choices I make and the way I react are all in my control. Her not-so-subtle noise pollution is a reminder that there will always be imperfection, and I can reject it or accept it as part of my life lesson in order to grow. That peace is mine to seek, and easy to find, I just need to let alot of shit go in order to find it. That small sound may be irritating my ears, but what is irritating my soul? I need to explore this.

So I will keep seeking, meditating, trying to become a better me. And I will keep listening to this aging dog live what are probably, the final days of her life.

My lesson today though, is that placing so much emphasis on finding refinement through meditation, may not be so critical. If I look close enough, I just may find that same refinement in the small gifts of irriation (aka heavenly sandpaper) that God sublty, and not so subtly, keeps placing around me.