I was just thinking how nice it is to feel soft fur on my toes. No, I don’t have furry toes! Dogs like to lie against me. Sometimes it’s on the furniture with me, but often they’ll sleep on the floor at my feet with some part of them against my bare foot, not really a full head on my foot, but snuggled up against the low sloping side of the foot until I can feel the gentle pressure of neck, ears, or jowl on my toes. The fur is so soft and the contact so endearing that I don’t want to move, even if the dog hasn’t drifted instantly into sleep.
This is how I often sit, with laptop on my lap, or phone in hand, or book in hand (an electronic device and physical book often being the same thing). The dog dreams and the dreaming state travels up from my toes into my mind—for what is either reading or writing but an induced dream state, an entry into an imaginary world?
Stay still, don’t think of what else you should be doing, just be there barefooted with soft furry dog, daydreaming until the dog shifts in sleep and you are untethered. Still I linger, again measuring the physical needs—food, drink, bathroom—weighing them now against my relaxed dreaming mind. Stay or go, either way I know I will return to this place, this state of mind, that dogs will always sleep on my toes, drawn to my stillness as I’m drawn to theirs.
