Meditation on my dog

I look at my dog and see the person that I am and the person I want to be. Radar is, in his quietest moments, looking at the world, looking through the world, above it, below it, yeah, he transcends it. He is alert, living not as a dog, but a frozen beam of light. He is magnetic, not merely larger than life, but larger than himself. Any martial artist worth his salt would envy this clarity. The Shaolin developed the five animal style of Kung Fu, incorporating the natural motions and rhythms of the animal kingdom into the postures, strikes, and blocks of the human world. When Radar stands on my brown aztec porch, the wind blowing in his brindle fur, I’m convinced within him lies the secret of a Terrier Kung Fu, the ability to harness charisma, presence, majesty, into its own martial style. The style itself, its practice, its execution, imbues the monk with an expanding sense of courage.
He survived that awful night just as we did. He barked before I opened the door. I brushed it off as his usual theatrics, and there was a moment I thought, inexplicably, about not opening that door. He should be dead. Men that vicious should have shot him or beaten him to death, but despite the noise he made Radar lives. In his canine memory is he haunted by that night? Does he ever feel an instinctual irrational pang for a thing greater than his IQ or is it gone, cleaned from his fur by a soft breeze? Does he know that his father sees him as a totem, a myth, an irascible die-hard?