Day: September 5, 2011

Okay, okay. I’m not going to shoot Winston. Can you imagine? My wife would beat me to a pulp and toss me out, my readers would rise up in horror and outrage and the armies of the righteous would pursue me with torches and angry e-mails the way they chased Frankenstein into the tower.

Still, for a moment, listening to this pompous puffin crowing under the bedroom window at 4:30, I swear Maria mumbled, “I’ll shoot him if you won’t.” You can’t shoot a rooster for crowing, that’s for sure. Winston the III ought to be in Congress. He loves to puff himself up and make a lot of incomprehensible noise at odd times about nothing for no discernible reason. As I write this, he has lodged himself on the stone wall outside of the barn and making self-important noise as if he were Paul Revere on the ride or a presidential candidate on the stump. God help us. God help me. I have been trying to write for two hours with this strutting creature blowing my ears of at short distance. He seems to be crowing at me, commenting on my work, startling and unnerving me. I’m rattled. I keep jumping up in my chair. I have to admit that I was yelling back at him this morning: “Hey, Shut Up! Quiet Down! Give it a rest.” He loves to hear himself crow, and the more I yell at him, the more he crows back at me. Lord.

I know some farmers out there will understand. I wonder if  Winston would like to spend some quality time with Frieda in the back yard.

I have to admit to being fond of Winston III as Maria keeps pointing out. I love his call to life, his insistence on having something to say, even though nobody – not even the hens – seems to want to hear it. This is a good temperament for modern-day publishing. I will not shoot him. Maybe spray him with a hose once in awhile.

Most people fear death, but I believe one of the universal realizations of the truly spiritual is that death is a reason to shed fear, not suffer from it. In a famous speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs, who has pancreatic cancer, cautioned the students listening not to waste their lives in fear:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

These are my feelings. We live in a fearful country. We are told we are lucky to have miserable jobs in places we don’t want to be so that we can have all of the things we are increasingly afraid of not having – expensive health care, retirement funds, mortgages, all kinds of technology, from computers to cell phones to big screen TV’s.  If we don’t go along, see what we have to lose.

I don’t want to be able to afford their version of security, their tests, pills, joint replacements and long life in the twilight state of dependency and impairment. Perhaps if I can’t afford it, I will have no choice but to live well, age well and die well. Thoreau’s ghost will be right there with me.

But Jobs is right. Losing these things is nothing when confronted with death. Or a wasted life, just another kind of death.

I do not fear death nearly so much as I fear living poorly, or, for that matter, dying poorly in the way our health care and social system would have me die.

Jobs was talking about perspective, and when we are bombarded all day by the self-interested rantings, alarms and predictions of politicians, business people, so-called health care practioners, pharmaceutical companies, and fear-peddling journalists and forecasters, it is easy to lose perspective and sink into a life whose choices are bounded by fear. Steve Jobs was as good as his word about not living that way. I’m in.

Looks like lots more rain and thunder and lightning this week so last night we put the donkeys up in the Pole Barn and when the booming started, I went out to check on the chickens and barn cats and to make sure the donkeys were all right. The sheep are leaving in a couple of weeks, but we opened up the barn so they could take shelter if they wished. They didn’t until much later. Come along and check on the barn with me.