June Newsletter: Big Dog Reveal

It’s Pride month again, and I’d like to tell you all about something which has been giving me some pleasure this year, an unexpected source of comfort: I got a new fursona. As fun as it has been suiting as Mortis, something about it has never quite clicked with me. He is a character I like, but a character that doesn’t feel exactly me. For years I had noodled quietly with the idea of a dog character, and with some help, a new fursona manifested itself on the screen. And this time, it clicked.

His name is Hamilton, and he’s a farm dog. He’s big, loveable, occasionally anxious, but willing to face his fears. He takes pleasure in getting the day’s work done, and his farm is big enough to welcome any visitors. At first, I’d intended this to be a bit of a secret identity, reserved for friends and furries only. The idea of showing him publically felt more vulnerable to me than showing Mortis, probably precisely because I was less attached to Mortis. Yet in the past week I’ve suddenly got the inkling that I should make him known. 

I guess I’ll talk more about the experience of having a fursona, since it probably seems to a lot of you like I’m talking in a foreign language. Hamilton helps me feel like myself - that inexpressible, inner self that is like a sunny front stoop, a safe and stable resting place. A lot of people have that sense of self intuitively; for me, a lot of my life has passed in a chaotic stream of dissonant energies, without a home base to latch onto (except music, which has always been my great saving grace). When I see a picture of Hamilton or think about him, often it’s as if someone is standing close by me, a warm and familiar presence. I catch a scent of him somewhere inside myself, and I feel more grounded. I feel a consistent thread of self, a daily life that seems doable. I give him values I want to mirror, and then look in his direction to mirror them. Hamilton doesn’t mind a busy day full of hard work, so why should I? Hamilton can do something outside of his comfort zone, make a fool of himself for the sake of learning something new, so why can’t I? 

Before bringing him into the sphere of my furry friends, I wondered if it might be too self-indulgent, that I might be encouraging myself to spend too much time inside my own head, on fictional characters. Instead, bringing him into the light has brought me out of my own head. Interacting with friends who knew Hamilton, I was suddenly dropped into a double-layered reality, where I lost nothing of my human self, but gained that vivifying thread of imagination, no longer trapped in fantasy, now a communally shared, life-giving vein. The art I’ve commissioned of him shares that communal quality. Each artist puts their own heart into him, and he becomes a bit of them as well.

Like everything else, a fursona is ultimately a temporary vessel. We make the best we can do out of our real bodies, and out of our social personas. There are days when I don’t connect with Hamilton, and I’m sure there always will be. But I find he’s easy to come back to. He’s helped me endure some hard seasons in my life, and I’m grateful for the help. Maybe I’m talking about him because I think it’s something he would do - risk a feeling of embarrassment for the sake of honoring something silly that has brought him great joy. 

I think often about the words of a Rabbi whose name I wish I could remember: "A young man should not be ashamed, but neither should he expect heaven-knows-what." Perhaps in my heart, I expect my own image of love to lead the parade, for it to be universally understood, intuited, accepted as valid currency by all people. I know that’s not true, and I don’t think it should be, either. It would be an exceedingly small love which was only as big as what I could come up with in my own mind. We all have limited tools to depict it, and we display the results in this great gallery of life we pass through. Not all paintings in a gallery should look the same, use the same style, feature the same subjects. Our own odd, personal experiences of love ought to butt up against each other in contrasting and unexpected ways, leaving each other at odds, giving no clear answers, but only questions to be worked out together. Maybe someday, there will be a universal language of love; if so, it will not be the natural, inborn language of any one human, but rather a pidgin we consciously practice, a mess of everyone’s love-languages, unintuitive and challenging and, once learned, beautiful and perfect. Maybe this is the practice of pride - pushing past shame to speak and listen in turn, as we slowly cobble together a common tongue, one we can all speak well enough to get what we need.

Art by: https://x.com/RABBITPATCHES

Will