Day: January 10, 2011

I have read that every artist, painter or photographer returns again and again to the same place to gain perspective, and to respond to what touches him or her about it.  Kinney Road is more dramatic. Callaway Road is more classically beautiful. The Rouse Farm is more evocative. My many collapsing barns and skanky farms are more atmospheric. But Sheldon Road is simple, and as it winds between my town and Vermont, it captures the setting sun in a very particular way. I have it timed right now. If I get to Sheldon Road by 4:15, I can catch the sun setting on the hills beyond, and it shoots right through those trees and onto the snowy and icy road, and bounces off the treet trunks. It suggests the passage of time, and its fragility.

I had a wonderful lunch with a friend today. We talked about fear. I said I had shivers when I remember how much fear I was in, but am not in so much anymore. You can put it aside, see beyond it  and into your life. It is a space to cross, just like Sheldon Road. It is amazing, I told my friend, how sweet and rich life can be when you choose not to live in fear.  Nothing much is harder than living in fear.

There is no such thing as a perfect life, surely not mine. I remember standing in a field with my camera a few years ago and saying to myself over and over again, I will not live like this, I will not spend the rest of my life like this. That is not my story anymore and I don’t know how it works, but I saw this clearly as I stood in the road (Maria was not with me) and pointed the camera and saw, through my iced up and fingerprint smeared viewfinder, the setting sun on Kinney Road.

Stopped by the Rouse farm today, but nobody was home, so I walked in one of the cornfields and came across this hay wagon, casting a deep shadow in the snow, and it seemed dramatic to me, it whispered to me that life is dramatic and emotional and filled with ups and downs, and I have to be able to be still because the world never is. Was interviewed by the Boston Globe today in preparation for the library tour, which goes many places, including to Scituate, Osterville (Cape Cod) and Martha’s Vineyard (Edgartown) at the end of January. Random House is helping out with publicity and backing me up, which I appreciate. Thinking about creativity and change. Changing the narrative. The world has dwindling resources to support artists and writers.

And new tools for them to support themselves. In difficult times, creative people get creative.

Loving dogs. The best in us.

More than anything in else in recent years, I’ve researched and written about why we love dogs the way we do. Many people like to focus motives on the dogs and cats: they choose us, love us, care for us, want us to do this or that. I’m more interested in why we love them. Few animals are treated this way by humans. Just ask the mouse I trapped and killed last night after he was coming into the bedroom and feasting on the corn bag I use for sore muscles. My dogs sleep on sofas, eat bones and rawhide and gourmet food, get four walks a day.

I am loving researching the Frieda book, finding out fascinating details about her life, where she came from, what she did before she was abandoned in the Adirondacks and lived in the wild. I’m making good headway. Frieda’s favorite spot in the world on cold days is by wood stoves – either dozing by the wood stove in Maria’s Studio Barn or the one above in the living room. She is becoming the Queen of Bedlam, regal and at ease.

I believe we get the dogs we need. Like many good works, dog-loving is an inherently selfish thing. We do it for us, and even though we like to see dogs as piteous and abused, the much more interesting question to me isn’t why we treat them poorly but why we love them so much, adopt and rescue them, coddle and adore them. I spent some amazing time at the University of Kentucky talking to my friend Dr. Debra Katz (she has a chapter in my forthcoming book on animal grieving) and others about attachment theory. It was there I began to explore the notion that our love of dogs and cats comes from our own emotional pasts, lives and histories, even though some people don’t like to acknowledge that or explore it too deeply. Frieda comes right out of my past and Maria’s. Our identification with lost outsiders, with lonely and loveless lives, with fear and isolation. We both love caring for Frieda, training her, seeing her move into the warm and loving embrace of the other animals on the farm.

But I like being honest and self-aware about my life with dogs. We get the dogs we need. We shape and reinforce them in ways that heal and nurture us as well as them.

This is good for Frieda. But it is good for us, too. It makes us feel good. I do not believe that by helping to rescue and rehabilitate Frieda I am a better human than anybody else. I dislike self-righteousness – epidemic in the animal world – and work hard to shed it. My love of Frieda is an integral part of who I am and where I came from, and what I need, and I think attachment theory holds a lot of answers for people curious about their love of dogs and cats. The key is in us, not them. They are the dogs we need. They heal us, offer a window into our lives and consciousness, are mirrors of our world, ghosts of our emotional lives and evolution. Every time I see Frieda lying by the fire, my heart softens and lifts. Frieda knows what it’s like to be warm, I think. And what it’s like to be cold. Good for her. Good for me.