Balance in my life is very important to me and my foo dogs were the visual representation of the way my world remained spinning. It was the female lion that I lost, I know it, because the dwelling was protected—the bills stayed paid, the lights stayed on, and it was physically intact. The beings inside though, there was quite a bit of unrest and torment going on there. 

 

By Holly Herring

I had this pair of cheap, white, ceramic foo dogs for a long time.

Once I moved to a new apartment and when I unpacked, just one of them was lost. I kept the other one around, waiting for its pair to pop up somewhere weird, but it never happened. What followed was a couple years of bad luck in my personal life. 

Now, I have been attracted to foo dogs because of their protective nature. In fact, they are actually lions, not dogs,  that resemble some of the dogs I have known in my life. They are protectors and the pair is balanced.

There’s a female lion (placed on the left) who has her foot resting protectively on a puppy to symbolize nurturing and protecting the beings inside a home. Then there’s the male lion (placed on the right) who has his foot upon a ball and he is the protector of the dwelling itself that contains the household beings—this is yin and yang. One has an open mouth and the other a closed mouth as if to breathe in and out an “om.”

Balance in my life is very important to me and my foo dogs were the visual representation of the way my world remained spinning.

It was the female lion that I lost, I know it, because the dwelling was protected—the bills stayed paid, the lights stayed on, and it was physically intact. The beings inside though, there was quite a bit of unrest and torment going on there. 

I feel like I lost my mind when I lost my foo dog. I had dressed my longtime companion, my best friend Ally the dog, in a lion costume for the handful of days before she passed away. She didn’t even try to shake her scratchy costume mane off her head. It was as if she were trying to be that lost nurturer to me right up until the day she died. 

A full year passed after my pet dog died and I still hadn’t found that lost little ceramic foo dog.

I was completely unprotected inside my strong dwelling. No female foo dog, real or ceramic, graced my life anymore and I was feeling more and more unsafe. I was losing my way. I finally gave away the male foo dog before packing up and leaving that dwelling.

Now, I found myself completely unprotected, both inside and outside of my dwelling. There were no willing foo dogs falling in my path begging to grace my shelves or my doorstep, so I remained unprotected. 

I have made some hard realizations and also some easy ones. The easiest of all is that I am going to need to find myself a nice, complete pair, of replacement foo dogs.

I will carefully examine them to see that the yin and the yang is represented and then, I will never let either of them go again. 

 

Photo: Pxphere

 

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Grief, Love and Loss: Practicing A Year to Live {Part 3}

Coping with the Loss of a Pet

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Holly Herring
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