By the time I reached the gate of our home, the stray dog had already been following me for three kilometers. I stopped. This was a major decision. If I allowed her into our yard and offered her food, she would never leave. She sat and stared at me with the most expressive eyes I had ever seen. I melted. And then entered the gate with the dog tagging along.

In the many years that Jane and I have been living in the countryside outside the town of Nafplio in Greece, this was the first time that a stray dog had followed me for so long during my morning walk. Greece has almost as many stray dogs as Mexico, and they often approach you begging for attention and, of course, food. But one cannot possibly adopt every dog in the area, and if you don’t give them any attention, they go away after a minute or two.

But not this one. This one was special.

First of all, she kept following me despite the lack of attention. But then again, I did send more than a few furtive glances her way because she was very beautiful. She seemed like a cross between a Greek shepherd and a Labrador. With a very rich white-beige coat, a royal long snout, an impressive fluffy tail standing up, perfect proportions, and above all, the most expressive eyes in the animal kingdom, she looked like the Miss Greece of the dog beauty pageant! Furthermore, she was kind, considerate, and apparently very intelligent: She first followed me by walking a few meters behind, and when I did not tell her to go away, she started walking next to me. When I stopped, she also stopped and stared at me, but never tried to come nearer. When I invited her to approach so that I would pet her, she came, and when I stopped petting her, she left, respecting my walk. The first time she tried to lick me, I discouraged her, and she never again tried to do so, as if she had already learned I disliked it.

Therefore, when this special dog went through our gate, both she and I knew that she was in for good. Even during that first day of our first encounter, I knew this was no ordinary animal.

We were about to move out of our cottage in Greece after having lived there for eight years. A few days earlier, Jane had seen a beautiful snake in our garden (a rare sighting); a week earlier, two cats started visiting us regularly; and the clay nest on the ceiling of our garage, which had been empty for years, had acquired a new resident – a migratory swallow that I would see every morning flying away as I entered its space. As for the July cicadas, they appeared earlier this year. The fact that so many different creatures all of a sudden started visiting us so close to our departure suggested a deeper narrative. These were meaningful signs: Nature was aware of our plans and wanted not only to bid us farewell via its various emissaries but also to counterbalance our occasional sorrowful mood by bringing unexpected joys into our lives.

But this was not all. For the appearance of the rare and beautiful dog who followed me all the way to my doorstep seemed to transcend even my tendency to read an overarching unity into my life’s events. Something beyond our visible life seemed to be at work. I suddenly saw in the appearance of the stray dog an even more extraordinary event: the dog was the ultimate theophany. 

“Theophany,” from the Greek word “θεοφάνεια,” is a composite word meaning “the appearance of a deity (to a human).” I soon realized that this amazing and rare “animal,” who was soon to become the third member of our family, was god-sent. Or rather, she herself was a god, in the Ancient Greek sense of the term: a deity in a world replete with divine beings in all shapes and forms. Well, “dog” also happens to be the shortest of all heteropalindrome words, so I could now clearly proclaim with certainty: The Dog was a God! Furthermore, since she was by far the most exceptional of all the visiting creatures who came to tell us goodbye, I also felt that she was sent by the supreme god of the Olympians, Zeus himself.

At the time of her appearance, I happened to be reading some of Plato’s dialogues – a last nostalgic reconnecting to the soul of Ancient Greece just before our departure. In the Symposium, Plato has Socrates telling the story of how Diotima taught him everything he knew about Love (Eros). I had forgotten that Socrates had a female teacher. When I read about Diotima anddiscovered that she had actually lived in the town of Mantineia (the ruins of which were only fifty minutes from where we lived!) and that she was a seer and a sage who was almost revered as a goddess in the ancient world, I realized that these meaningful coincidences were pointing to something: I decided to name the dog Diotima – a name that is also related to Zeus: Diotima comes from Δίας (Zeus) and τιμώ (honor), which literally means “honoring Zeus.”

And what a prescient choice this turned out to be! For the last month and a half of our stay in Greece, Zeus’s divine gift, the bearer of the name of the teacher of Socrates, Diotima the dog, became my teacher. I decided to stop reading Plato and all the other books on my to-finish-before-leaving list in order to observe her closely and spend more time with her. Every single day of her stay with us, she taught me something new. Apart from her being a gift herself, Diotima’s gifts were never-ending. And this was her first lesson. [Life’s gifts are endless.]

Diotima, first of all, carried within her an even greater surprise: As it soon turned out, she was over a month pregnant! She gave birth in our garage late one morning and we witnessed the special event from start to finish. I couldn’t believe how she alone masterfully performed the roles of the birthing mother, the midwife, the nurse, the feeder, the cleaner, and the protector, often effortlessly interchanging one role with another. Every hour or so, she would stand up, give a circle, and out of her vagina one puppy would come amid membranes, blood, and green juices. She knew exactly what to do and when. She would instantly eat and drink everything that came out of her body and would then lick for ages the newborn until its coat became completely clean and shiny. While she was tending to the latest offspring, she would also keep an eye on the ones that had been born earlier, licking each one in a different way, but also grabbing them by the neck with her mouth to set each one in the optimal place. When they started pooing, she also ate their poop to keep the “den” clean. When she finally cleaned the sixth and last puppy, she pulled out the final placentas on her own and ate them, before finally falling asleep completely exhausted. [Nothing in nature is wasted.] Throughout the process she was calm, fully focused on each successive task, mindful of both her own needs and those of the newborns, but also constantly monitoring her environment lest a predator should grab her offspring or attack her unawares in her most vulnerable moment. All of her monumental simultaneous tasks were accomplished with grace and ease. [There is no complex work that cannot be completed with absolute mindfulness.]

Although at first she would allow us to approach her, by the end of her birth she started growling, her beautiful loving look morphing into the stare of a fierce protector ready to cut us to pieces. Diotima suddenly forgot who I was. Anybody could be a threat, and she made sure we knew we were not welcome near her. Diotima was a wild animal, after all. [All pets are wild animals, but we forget it, because their wildness kicks in so rarely.] 

I was a bit hurt when she first barked at me. But after I studied the subject, I discovered that there was nothing personal in her behavior: newly secreted hormones in her system made her, as they do all mammals, protective to the point of aggression. But once their levels fell in the next few days, she became normal again. [Aggression is often due to hormones. Don’t take people’s aggression personally.]

After a few days, Diotima started to leave her puppies alone for gradually longer periods. A week or so after her birth, seeing that her offspring were safe, she started walking with me again all the way to the nearby village. At this point, I noticed that she managed to move harmoniously between the two worlds of her life: the animal and the human. She spent about half the day with her puppies – nursing them, licking their poop, guiding them to become dogs – and the other half she was with us, playing, accompanying us for our walks, being pet and mildly trained. She navigated the challenges of both worlds like a true master. [We all live in two worlds simultaneously and must continuously strive to harmoniously balance them.]

A month and a half or so since she had come to our house, and a couple of weeks after giving birth, the bond between Diotima and myself reached its peak. You see, I always considered myself to be a cat person, or even a parrot person,  because these were the only two types of pets I had owned in my life. So I knew very little about dogs. Actually, I was a bit apprehensive around dogs (usually in friends’ houses) who jumped all over me, trying to pull my trousers and lick me. I also disliked their constant neediness and their apparent complete dependence on their human masters. But now I saw that Diotima was not like those dogs. For without ever deliberately training her to behave in ways that I liked, I realized that she had gradually picked up from my reactions what I liked and what I did not and had modified her behavior accordingly. So, she became my cat-dog: never needy, never jumping all over me or our guests, never licking other humans, never barking. But she was also my parrot-dog: independent, content to be left alone, respecting my wish that she live outside our house – even if at times she would try to sneak in. I soon realized that the needy dogs I had been encountering all my life behaved that way because their owners had either trained them to behave like that or, more probably, they had not trained them at all – in which case the dogs picked up their behavior by modeling it to reflect that of their masters. By themselves being needy and demanding continuous love and devotion from their dogs, by constantly petting them and encouraging dog-human interaction, those human owners had turned their pets into those utterly dependent and overwhelming creatures. Because many dog owners “want love” and much more from their dogs, i.e., because they themselves are needy, their dogs end up satisfying that neediness. [It is not true that dogs look like their masters – Diotima is definitely more beautiful than I am. But it is true that they behave like them!]

But what was my bonding with Diotima like? Well, as many dog owners already know, it was like that of two people who had just fallen in love! We never tired of being near one another. I gradually came to see Diotima as both my canine “beloved” and my wise teacher. Her love (just as the love of every dog for his master) was unconditional. Unlike the love of a cat or a parrot, or any other animal, a dog’s love of humans is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. A week or so after she had given birth, I noticed that Diotima preferred to be with me than with her puppies. Although she did her parental duties with diligence and love, still, I was the center of her life, not her puppies. I found this very mystifying. How can the love of a mother for her offspring not be the strongest love there is? But after researching the matter, my observations and initial suspicions were proven correct: Dogs love humans more than other dogs – more than even their offspring! This is so because over the last 15,000 years (since their domestication), we have been selecting and modifying dog breeds in order to achieve exactly that. So we have, in effect, created the first and only animal who loves us (or, if you prefer, “bonds with us”) more than the members of its own species. [No other animal loves humans more than a dog does – not even the human animal!]

The unique dog-human bond has been celebrated throughout the ages in the art and literature of all nations. But the most moving instance is still probably the first to be mentioned in history: In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s dog, Argos, who was in advanced old age, managed to stay alive in order to see his master for one last time after a twenty-year absence. Upon seeing Odysseus, Argos “thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped, though he had no strength to drag himself toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side and flicked away a tear … diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way.” Odysseus had to tragically betray Argos by not reciprocating his expressions of love, because he would have given away his own identity to his enemies. The old dog fell dead after the incident.[The dog never betrays man. But man often betrays the dog.] 

Just when I thought that Diotima had nothing more to teach me, something extraordinary happened three weeks into her breastfeeding: Diotima, the loving and caring mother, would abruptly run away from her puppies as they fed on her breasts. Sometimes she would even push them away with her nose and growl. At first I thought it was because of the heat, or because she felt their meal was over. But soon I realized that she was doing it often and deliberately. Yet again, I had to investigate her strange behavior by researching the matter, and I discovered that Diotima had begun weaning her puppies and teaching them how to stop being completely dependent on her. She had basically started preparing them, so early in their life, for survival in the outside world. Diotima was raising her puppies to become tough, independent, and self-reliant. These were no mama’s boys! What a great lesson to all human parents: true parental love means training your children to be without you. Love is not synonymous with an overbearing parental presence. [The most important job of a mother is to make herself dispensable!] 

But that was not all. While Diotima was raising her puppies, her whole life did not revolve around them. She still had her own life. Apart from loving and playing with her human master, she would also leave the house for many hours. True to her stray-dog upbringing, but also because of her nature as a shepherd dog, she would walk for kilometers eating dried dead reptiles and shed snakes’ skins, and even hunting down locusts! She never sacrificed a bit of her own needs on the altar of raising her offspring. She did not abandon her personal life – what she loved to do, what she needed to do. One thing was certain: Diotima’s life would be lived to the fullest. [The best mother is the one whose main job is not being a mother.]

Parting with Diotima was painful. Jane and I were sadder for leaving behind this dog than we were for leaving our friends and the house and country in which we had lived for so long. We finally found a great new home for her and for her puppies, and we know that all seven of them have a long and good life ahead of them – Diotima, our veterinarian said, was only a year and a half old. Just as we had to let go of our life and home, we had to let go of Diotima. After all, theophanies have historically always been very brief. The god appears bearing a message or a gift and soon after vanishes. [Letting go is the power that renews our life.]

Now I realize that I can bond deeply with every member of the animal kingdom if I let go of my defenses and distorted preconceptions. I am not only a cat and parrot person, but also a dog person. Like all of us – even if some are not aware of it yet.  This was Diotima’s final lesson.