psychopomp summer
collage mind newsletter / vol. 55 / July 2026
Greetings from the dog days of summer, dear readers.
Early July to early August in the northern hemisphere, Sirius, the Dog Star shines the brightest in the night sky. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word seirios, meaning scorching. The Greeks associated the star with the relentless heat of the months when it shone so fiercely. The Romans linked the sweltering heat of July with madness and believed the star drove dogs rabid.
How have these past weeks been for you? Are you howling in the night, trying to process the heat of the air, the heat of the mind?
There are other associations. Sirius trails Orion in the skies, his eternal, astral hunting companion. In many mythologies, the dog is protector, boundary marker, and threshold guardian. The Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill has the dogs Bran and Sceólang. And then there is Hekate, Greek goddess of crossroads, with her spectral hounds. Her epithet, Skylakagetis, means leader of the dogs. Anubis in Egyptian mythology is a jackal-headed deity who shows the dead the path to the other side.
Dogs are psychopomps, guides to the underworld, but also, I think, guides to the subtle layers of time within present reality — for those of us still in the living.
Recently I spent an afternoon visiting a friend in Brooklyn, her sweet hound curled up between us on the couch. I was facilitating a reading group at the Center for Fiction that evening, and we talked books, and because we talked books, we talked dogs. She had just interviewed Paul Yoon about his forthcoming novel, Etna, written from the point of view of a war dog. I stroked the supple ears of my friend’s pet for a solid hour as we chatted, and left feeling grounded, soothed.
The next day I learned that a friend had lost his beloved bulldog in an accident while he was away on vacation. I wept on and off for the hour we spoke, feeling his pain and reliving my own from past pet deaths. The next day I talked with an artist and curator about his upcoming exhibition, a dog-themed one. He was fascinated with the ways the animal evokes concepts of community and fidelity through visual expression in a variety of forms, and his energy was contagious. A few days later I received a book in the mail I had ordered a while ago: Dog Days by Emily Labarge. And then, in an audio meditation session, the recording advised to treat the wandering mind as you would an excited puppy and notice what it runs off with, what that stick-in-the-mouth thought is.
By the end of the week, the air was nudging me like a wet nose, barking dogs, dogs, dogs. I don’t know what to make of these confluences, but I choose to pay attention. So much of creative process is noticing, gathering—and letting that all sit as long as it needs to.
Though sometimes the call to make is quicker.
July a few summers ago I picked up a book on poodle breeds at The Dumptique in Martha’s Vineyard. I was visiting one of my oldest friends, a friend who had once hired a pet psychic to help her understand why her dog was so unhappy. The psychic told her that the dog missed their morning walks, which my friend had recently cut down on—walks that the dog called “shining green goodness.”
That phrase always seemed so genuinely dog to me.
Maybe I was thinking about that story when I scanned the shelves, I can’t remember. But I brought the book home, and started to make collages with it. Doing so pulled forward childhood memories about my neighbor’s dog in Baltimore, a standard poodle called Candy. A story started to unfold that I had to write, there was no question. It would have been madness to ignore the need, even though I didn’t know what the writing was for.
There’s a much quoted E.L. Doctorow line that compares writing to driving at night in the fog. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” Doctorow counsels. Maybe a more fitting analogy for this particular writing would be to compare it to walking a dog in the dark, letting animal instinct determine the path ahead.
After a few months following this instinct, it was clear the collages and writing belonged together in an artist’s book. Of course this was nowhere in my thinking that July day, sorting through the shelves. It’s like my mind caught a scent, and had to follow.
It’s strange, I consider myself a cat person through and through, and yet so many foundational experiences are with dogs. Bawling my eyes out watching Old Yeller. Losing consciousness when a family friend’s dog knocked me over on a blacktop driveway. I know I live with the intergenerational trauma of my mom’s relationship to dogs, which is a complicated story for another time and place. Maybe that’s the call of the animal, this undeniably up and down tug of emotions, the tension between companionship, discipline, and the cycles of life, the need for a breathing body to be with us in the loneliest, hardest, and happiest shining green goodness times.
N O T E S + N E W S
— negotiation at AUTOMAT Collective in Philadelphia closes August 1. The opening earlier this month was electric, the curation by Jo Nakayama simply extraordinary in its thoughtfulness and detail. Jo is a sculptor, and their spatial sense really came through. They have put together some beautiful programming, including a performance of a piece called Dusk Dogs (!) and a somatic workshop, both by Eilish Henderson – both happening in the next few days. Click here if you are Philly local and interested in attending.
— I just returned from the Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, NY — my fifth year in a row. Per usual, my brain feels rearranged. I need a few weeks to process before I share with you all. On the long, long drive there and back I listened to the profound and unexpectedly funny Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. There was so much overlap between that book and the talks I attended. And with the books I came home with, including this one from the Further Reading Library:
More next month. Until then, may you find comfort in the bright heat of these days, and give a little extra love to the companions trotting beside you, seen and not.
Lesley