From the Top by Michael Perry Page B

wandered other paths in the years that followed, and generally prefer pondering to preaching, but I have never lost the thread of the idea that it is in those moments when we let our hearts fly right out of our chests that we are closest to understanding the mystery of our clunky lives on this earth. Or if not understanding the mystery, understanding each other. We are all related, says Paul LaRoche.
    Whether they emanate from the Bible on my lap at a gospel meeting in a bank basement or from a Native American flute, those things in the air that we cannot touch, that we cannot grasp, are nonetheless the things that can lift us above every earthbound worry. At times tonight I can feel the flow of long-gone buffalo, and I yearn for the idea of prairies before man—any man—and in that yearning is something even a lapsed, post-Calvinist Scandihoovian knucklehead can recognize as transcendent and universal, something between this time and time past, and I wonder as I hear the flute whipping like a prehistoric wind if perhaps that is the most universal human longing of all—the longing for the beginning of everything, for a clean slate and afresh soul, for a fresh humanity. What is the sound of a flute, after all, but human breath dancing?
    We will leave this tent soon enough. The clunky day-to-day awaits. Boots on the ground, pickup truck to the feed mill.
    But for just a little while longer, I would like to fly.
BLACK DOG
    Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin’…
    Back home on the farm I just came off a little stretch where I was feeling glum. Nothing big, no need for cards and letters, doin’ fine, just one of those deals. For reasons that I’ve previously classified as biochemical, genetical, banal, and foolish in the face of good fortune, I have off and on throughout this life found myself in the company of what Winston Churchill called—at least I think it was Winston, and I’m going with that even if it’s wrong just to spite Google by not doing the instant cellphone search that has come to replace our carbon-based brain cells—“the black dog.” Now my black dog is hardly worth talking about, really. I’ve had friends and acquaintance whose black dogs gnawed right through their breastbone and into their vitals and in some cases ate them alive. My black dog is smallish and nibbles at my belly button now and then, or walks in all wet and shakes cold swampwater on my toes, but within a day or two or a week at most, it wanders off to hide behind the barn and I can feel the sunshine again.
    I don’t mind that little black dog, because he tends to direct my eyeballs inward. Not just to gaze at my navel, but deeper, into the darker corners of those mysterious inward shadowy elements of ourselves we can’t really describe or put a location on but we feel with the very same heaviness as if they were clearly labeled on page 37 of some anatomy textbook somewhere. It’s good, I think, for me to look in the acorporeal mirror and seenothing looking back and wonder what’s missing, or what needs sunlight. Some of the best progress I’ve made as a human being has come when I was brought low enough to consider the worst I might be as a human being. Wasn’t any fun, but one hopes it pays off in the long run.
    Clearly these ramblings require a disclaimer. The real black dog—the big, lurking, foul-breathed drooler—is no help at all. It is one thing to feel a little down; it is another to feel utterly out. I do have a nursing degree and once spent time answering a suicide hotline, so you understand I don’t intend to minimize the real deal. Some battles are not meant to be fought in the dark alone. Don’t do it. Don’t let your friends do it. But as for me and my generally trainable black dog, I’ve learned to live with him, and as long as he’s around,