Flashes of Insight

Luna the Amazing Amazon Shepherd by Flash Silvermoon

My mare,Chinamoon has her head through the window of the computer room hoping that she can score a few more pears since its almost her 10th birthday.
My new kitten Star is fast asleep and cuddled up against the small of my back on the chair behind me while brother Red is on the floor curled in a ball. All in all,a most happy moment here with the Moonhaven Menagerie.
When I was at the Coffeeshoppe today, I ran into an old friend Steve, the Chiropractor who had once adjusted my dog Astarte.
He actually asked about China’s earlier incarnation,Luna, who is the Star of this chapter. Steve didn’t know anything about China but remembered how my ex and I would drive Luna around on a bean bag chair in the back of the car during her declining years with degenerative myolopathy. I had forgotten that he had known Luna because very few of my friends now remember her so the serendipity and timing of this walk down memory lane was quite amazing.
What was so interesting, is that I have been perched on the edge of telling Luna’s story for about a week now. Talking with Steve brought back many memories of Luna, my first dog as an adult on my own and the first of the German Shepherds that I was allowed to keep.
I almost didn’t get to keep Luna though. We met on the streets of the East Village in NYC some 30 years ago. Ms. Luna was not going to win any beauty contests that day but to me she was perfection incarnate in canine form. Luna was very thin with a torn ear and looked generally raggedy,lost,homeless, but hopeful. She knew that beyond the shadow of a doubt, she had found her long lost mother,friend,soul mate,and child all rolled into one…me!
I was not alone during this jaunt across St Marks and Second Ave. My partner and I were returning home from some woman’s gathering there on the funky Eastside and had actually been talking about the recent difficulties we had had with a stalker,and how it was a little scarey going home late at night.
I looked at this grungy canine walking next to me who had obviously just had a litter of pups and thought hmmm, a dog would be a very good solution. I was trying to present a very practical reason for adopting my new friend when Joanie said”What do you want with this ratty thing anyway?” I knew that if she was not seeing the glowing inner beauty of this dog’s soul,then she probably was not seeing mine either.
I silently told Luna to follow us home if she wanted to stay with me and she walked tentatively next to my side the whole way back. My excitement mounted with each step, but as I said, Joanie did not share my enthusiasm for my new found friend so I took Luna to my apartment around the corner that I was barely using to begin our new life together.
Being a responsible new parent but too thrilled to be wise, I took my new dog for what else,a walk! Luna being bent on pleasing me managed to drum up a tad of enthusiasm for what she surely didn’t need after weeks on the street: more walking. I figured that I had a very mellow dog but that was only because as I found out later, she was half dead. Being a Pisces dog as best as I could figure, Luna was fine with that illusion of mellowness if it would get her through the door and into a real home. Incidentally,we almost called Luna ,Demeter, as she had so recently had pups that were obviously not with her and we wondered if like Demeter, she went wandering, looking for her daughter?
Later in life, the iron-will and truly Amazonian spirit of this dog would proove itself many times over!
The next day, Joanie and I went to the local pet shop with Luna to get her food,a collar and other doggie necessaries. Because Luna seemed so content to walk with me and because I thought that I was honoring her free spirit,I didn’t immediately collar and leash her which was a huge mistake.
As we crossed East 6th street she lagged slightly behind me and a slow moving car appeared to either hit her or scare her to the point that she ran off so fast that we couldn’t catch her. I was devastated, my new love was gone so soon and I wailed my disappointment to which Joanie added,”She better come back, after all we just spent $40 on her food and stuff.”
We split up on the street and went in different directions calling Luna, combing every part of our East Village neighborhood. After 3 hours,we went home bereft and defeated. I created an altar for Luna with her collar and food on it and prayed and consulted the I Ching. The next day, Joanie went out looking one last time. I can’t remember the exact cryptic message from Confuscious that I received but I do remember that it said “after the beginning 3 days”
All night I contemplated this meaning. When Joanie cameback,she had some mildly good news. She had met a woman who had taken in a German Shepherd with a torn right ear and blue bandana but it was too much for her to keep Luna with her 2 great Danes in that tiny apartment on 2nd Ave. So, Luna was busted taken to jail…the Pound, and as predicted by the I Ching, 3 days after she was missing, we were happily reunited.
The next day, I took her to the Vet to have her checked out after her ordeal and was told that Luna had among other things, pneumonia, so we had to work fast to heal her respiratory system. No wonder she seemed so mellow!!
As she recovered, her true nature began to show itself and what a difference, this girl was fierce, protective,quite sexy, and loving. I never knew a dog,especially a female, that humped everything in sight! But Luna did. Sometimes I would bring her to the Club where I was performing weekly. She would lay down next to me on the stage as I pounded the keys of the piano and I think she would literally “cruise” the women there til she found one that she liked. Then without hesitation, she would go wiggling over doing what I call the “Shepherd Slink”, to greet the new woman ! She could spot someone with good vibrant energy a mile away.
While we were living mostly with Joanie and her 2 cats, Luna tolerated her feline roomates but this was clearly a behavior she mustered up for keeping her place in the home and not at all her preferrence as she proved later to have a real love/hate relationship with cats.
For some strange [not really so strange] reason, Luna would vomit everyday around 5 o’clock. I wasn’t communicating directly with animals yet and took out my Tarot Cards to try to understand her sudden and repeated illness. The cards revealed what any fool could have noticed…everyday at 5 was when Joanie came home …duh… and that was when Luna would become sick. That was it, the writing was on the wall or rather the floor, this relationship was doing neither of us any good as I had been suspecting for some time. So I officially moved all the way into my apartment around the corner with Luna and she never again got sick at 5 pm!
Luna had basically figured at this point that I was her significant other and that worked pretty well for me most of the time. However,if I was out too late, Luna would dump her dog kibble all over my bed,usually by the pillow.
If it wasn’t so funny,it would have really been annoying. Her most impressive move was when I actually spent the night out, I came home to rest and she had layered her kibble beneath the sheet, on the sheet,and over the sheet and blanket and finished her work by dumping the remainder smack in the middle of my pillow! Ah, close your eyes and you are sleeping in doggie crunch and munch. I roared with laughter trying to figure out just how she managed to make these layers?
One of Luna’s most amazing feats took place when Joanie and I were visiting with some friends at a country home in Chappaqua,NY. Some of the women were swimming in a small lake and the rowboat that had been tethered began to drift away from the shore. I was standing on the dock and as a joke I shouted to Luna who was frolicking w/ women in the water”Hey Luna, why don’t you go get the boat and bring it to shore.” I never dreamed she would actually do it! That dog began swimming around the boat. I said to my friend,”Oh she’s gonna be like wonder woman and create a whirlpool and spin the boat in!” But Luna was way ahead of me,and she often was, She had figured that there was a rope, which I might add, none of us even saw and was looking for it, swimming around and around til she found it and took it in her teeth. To our amazement,Luna towed the boat to shore!
Luna and I shared many adventures through my twenties in NYC. We both needed to settle down with mates of our own specie and so we hooked up with Pan and , Prairie Dog,a real misnomer,because he was huge!
I was still not grasping the zero-population ideology that I embrace now,and one steamy NYC night,Prairie made Luna a mommy.
In 1975, I moved to North Central Florida, Melrose to be exact, and wound up living in the town’s first church. Though in a small town, we had access to the lake only 1/2 block away.
Melrose Bay had a delightful beach where Luna and I swam every day. Sometimes she would swim out and chase the water skiers who were not supposed to be there in their dirty gas spilling boats. I remember fondly the sight of Luna flying through the waves chasing a particularly obnoxious bunch who started to shake a 2×4 at her before they realized that she could almost catch them. Luna was a water spirit like me and loved to dive off docks…pools etc. She had the funny habit of playing lifeguard which turned out to not be so funny sometimes when she literally would try to pull people out of the ocean or pool. I always had a lot of explaining to do needless to say. Seems like she did grow out of that after awhile.
She and Prairie loved to follow us in the water when we went boating and would attack the oars.
Inside the “Temple”, Luna could chase spirits and it was always a little disconcerting the way she would stare at some point over my shoulder that appeared to me to be empty and just stare and glare. With the exception of Prairie, Luna didn’t really like other animals as a matter of fact she was downright aggressive with other critters much to my dismay.After her life on the street where all other animals were competition for survival, she was, shall we say, not the Dog Park poster girl.
She loved people though even after the disease of degenerative myolopathy silently crept through her body.I wish that I knew then what I do now about holisitc healing because I probably could have helped her even more but hopefully you, the reader will learn from these tales and find better ways to help heal your 4 leggeds. Accupuncture, homeopathy, and massive IV treatments of Vitamon C might have saved her but as Maya Angelou says,”When we know better, we do better.”
Luna had an iron will, that is one thing that I will always remember about her. Even when her back legs were so paralyzed that I had to carry them in a sling, she could pull all of me down the street with me pulling as hard as I could to control her with a choke chain collar! That’s right, a two legged dog could almost pull me off my feet for several months before her disease progressed. Little by little she lost things, like her voice however when we would take her to NYC for visits she would sit in the car on her bean-bag chair and look deadly fierce flapping her barred teeth at all who would come near our car. They didn’t know that she couldn’t have gotten to them and possibly neither did she as this disease is not painful and that is the problem, the mylon sheaths for the nerves deteriorate and she bit by bit lost all feeling in the affected parts. It is merciful in the lack of pain but deadly in that it eventually hits the brain stem if you are lucky enough to keep the dog healthy enough not to go into kidney failure first…which was always a distinct possibility.
Hence the creation of Luna’s cocktail which we called her cup of coffee which I made for her 4x a day. This consisted of marshmallow root tea laced with extracts of uva ursi and a kidney/bladder combo. To make it more desirable, I added a little milk and honey and did she LOVE IT!
This mix kept her kidney /bladder function working til she died which was an accomplishment. I also had to express her bladder for her 4x a day at least after she could no longer walk. She could move her bowels herself so I was always changing her soiled sheets from her chair. When caring for any terminally ill being, you must both become more intimate and more detached at the same time and it is an extremely hard line to walk. I had to become her hands and feet and know when she needed to eat, drink, and all other bodily functions. She in fact began my training in Animal Communication.
Luna could actually swim for months beyond the time when she stopped being able to walk and I took her to the beach everyday rain or shine so she could swim and feel good about life. I had many consciousness raising sessions with onlookers at the beach who couldn’t believe that I would do all this for a dog. I asked one nasty guy who was disturbed by our very presence if he would put his mother down if she became handicapped and as I looked into his face, I knew the answer.
Everybody loved her and hailed her accomplishments daily which was just what she needed.She was so fierce that even when she was totally paraplegic, she would still try to chase and bark at other dogs. It was this iron will of hers that surely was keeping her alive in addition to my round the clock nursing.
For about 2 years, she was my life. I did other things but I was never without her on her bean bag chair, carrying her with me in my arms or in the car and finally in the last week, I would walk her around the neighborhood on her bean-bag chair in a shopping cart. Her spirits did not visibly sag until the last week of her life which was amazing.
When I performed at Sunland,a facility for the retarded and mentally handicapped, I would always take her with me and she was their fave. This was long before the use of dogs as helpers in hospitals. They could all relate to her sitting somewhat handicapped on her red bean-bag chair next to me and the grand piano. They could go up and pet and hug her without any fear as she was just a real sweetheart with people.
One of my favorite adventures with Luna after she could no longer walk occurred when a friend and I were returning from a snorkeling trip in the Keys. My father had booked a room for us in a fancy Miami Hotel. He got these rooms for free as he was VP of a Bus company so these were comps. He was always quick to remind me to dress right as I was “representing him. ” And oh how we represented!! This was an absolutely hysterical grand entrance into this grand hotel lobby. For starters,we were dressed like street people as we had just come from a long ride and a day of exploring the undersea realms and looked like hell, and we weren’t counting on having a valet for the car and our belongings so negotiating this supposedly discrete entrance in front of the imposing white marble columns was almost impossible. I could almost not contain my hysteria as I passed the valets our suitcases bags of dog stuff and Luna’s pee bucket. I of course at this point had to help her express her bladder as we moved her so there I was and there we all were trying to look like nothing was out of the ordinary as she relieved herself on the curb of this posh entrance before embarking on the ever so discrete trek throught the lobby to the freight elevator with Luna wrapped in her blanket in my arms like a big baby and me hoping that her colon would hold her more solid waste til we got upstairs or at least into the elevator. I had arranged this elevator entrance before we arrived anticipating the need for discretion but shall we say, the plan got shot to hell and we nearly died laughing with each slapstick blunder. Once we got her upstairs to our suite she acted like her queenly self and stared out the window smiling at the ocean. This was one of my fondest memories of her last months.
The day Luna crossed over, I was with her and running errands with some friends. She was in the car of course and I had run into a copy center when my friend Luana ran in and told me to come back to the car . Luna was starting to have trouble breathing and as I held her, the disease hit her brain stem and she died peacefully in my arms. I had prayed for an ending like this one yet I was of course devastated even though I had been preparing for this day for 2 years. The fact is that THERE IS NO PREPARING TO LOSE THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE!
My friends were so wonderful. They knew how hard this was going to be for me and some of them just moved into my house for a few days to feed me while I grieved and grieved. I didn’t bury her immediately but rather spent an hour or so laying with her one more time holding her looking into her beautiful brown eyes. I found that I couldn’t go to Luna’s grave much at all without getting so depressed and I recognized that I didn’t want to remember her the way she was when I buried her so I ceased that traumatic journey and let my grief settle into the warm feelings and memories of this exceptional being that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
I could feel Luna in the backseat of my car for months after she passed and for a long time she would appear as a warm feeling at my knees just when I most needed a friend.
Everyone wanted to get me a new dog ASAP to help me get through this but I had spent at least one solid year with such intense and constant responsibility that I knew for my sanity that I would have to go it alone for awhile. It was an excrutiatingly painful time to have no solace from a furry friend or a lover but I knew that I had best just take care of me. I had yet to put together the understanding that our animal friends like us, reincarnated again and again and most often wanted to return to us.
One year later, an amazing 2 year old black female cat named Pearl Bailey needed a home and I was ready for my heart to open once more to a special familiar.

Ps Luna reincarnated again as my German Shepherd named Moonshadow and is now sharing my life again as my beautiful Appaloosa Mare, Chinamoon…Love never dies!