The Journey To Dog
A Memior by Brent Kee
In the spring of 2010, on a half-frozen lake in British Columbia, I watched my dog Plato crash through the ice and vanish beneath it. He clawed his way back that day. Eight years later, on a beach in Santa Barbara, he took his final breath in my arms — and in the space between those two moments lies the strangest and truest thing that has ever happened to me.
The Journey to Dog is our fourteen-year story — a withdrawn, half-wild shelter mutt I adopted in Alabama who became my closest companion, my unlikeliest teacher, and, in the end, something I can only call an angel.
I love you, for I am just a reflection of you.
Our road ran from the red clay of Alabama to the glaciers of British Columbia, back to the Carolina low country, then westward — pulled by a Voice I couldn’t explain — through Montana and the Northern California redwoods to the beaches of Santa Barbara. The ice was not the only thing that nearly took him. There were rivers that swept him downstream and left me swimming after him. And there were grizzlies, one of which Plato treed after working out that if you make enough noise a bear will run: a guy chasing a fifty-pound dog chasing a five-hundred-pound bear through a British Columbia forest.
Along the way I sat in ceremony with plant medicines that cracked me open to the universe. One night, deep in an ayahuasca ceremony in the North Carolina mountains, I raised my hand in the dark and looked straight through my own palm — prismatic, luminescent, made of light. I am Divine, I understood, and so is every living thing. But each time I demanded to know my next step, the medicine gave me only three words: be here now. It was Plato, days later in a snowed-in cabin, who finally taught me what they meant.
Then I felt a mass grow in my left lung. I chose not to see a doctor — I had come to believe that the Source which made this body could heal it too — and I treated it the only way I knew, through daily meditation, with Plato at my side every morning. Over three months I felt it dissipate until it was gone. I believed I had healed myself.
A short time later, Plato began to cough.
He had taken it into his own body. And he carried it out of this world so that I could stay in it.
On its surface this is a love story between a man and his dog. Underneath, it is the story of a cross-country search for a place to call home — and the slow, humbling discovery that the home I was looking for had been inside me the whole time. What I had been calling home was the Divine itself: the part of me that had never once left.
He never left.
Brent Kee
Brent Kee is the founder of Chi BioEnergetic Healing in Santa Barbara — a teacher, lecturer, and intuitive energy healer with more than eighteen thousand hours of hands-on work guiding people back to themselves. He did not come to this work through a seminary or a graduate program. He came to it through his own collapse, and through the steady, wordless love of a half-wild shelter dog named Plato.