Cows are intensely curious creatures and if you pull up to a fence near them,they will inevitably come up to stare at you, try and figure out what you are doing. I love their peacefulness and simplicity. These are from the Black Creek Valley Farm, just down the road.
I am touched by this decaying old Well House, down below my farm. Bedlam Farm is up the hill on the left. You can see the Carriage Barn, and the Studio Barn and the farmhouse fence up behind it. These collapsing structures dot the countryside totems. In rural America, you see much that is beautiful, but little that is now. And so many old buildings are collapsing.
We were pleased to finally get our first egg. Great pleasure in winter to have two fresh eggs daily, which we expect to get from Alice and Meg, under the watchful supervision of Winston III. I brought the video camera along once I figured out what was happening. Come and see.
Some of the nastiest and angriest messages and thoughts I ever see come from people who say they love animals and people who say they love God and religion. On Sundays, I take time to read from the Zohar and other books of the Kabbalah, and from the journals of Thomas Merton, and I am always reminded that the people who grasp the nature of love, and who created the idea of religion are never angry or cruel, from Jesus to the mystics who created Western religion.
Today, I was reading in the Zohar how God came down to earth to check on the poor, those “broken vessels of his,” and found that noone was helping them, despite his frequent injunctions to “gladden the poor as best they can.”
Seeing that the poor had been abandoned, and have nothing to celebrate, God weeps over them, and then ascends to destroy the world. The prophets and angels gather and and beg compassion for his children, plead for him to be compassionate and gracious. He answers them: “Don’t the inhabitants of the world realize that I based the world solely on love? As is written: I said, “The World shall be built on love (Psalms 89.3) By this the world endures.”
I thought several things reading this. If God comes to see his poor these days, we could really be in trouble. The very idea of helping the poor is so unpopular, it is almost blasphemy.
And I thought this: animals challenge us to be merciful and compassionate, patient and gracious. For me, it is not possible to really love an animal and hate people, or use the love of animals to batter human beings. One simply is not compatible with the other. I do not know how to be compassionate and gracious to one species, but not to others.
In our time, people exploit animals and the very notion of God to separate, attack and isolate people from one another. This is not anything I ever read in the teachings of Jesus, in the journals of Thomas Merton or St. Augustine, or in the beautiful and mosaic writings of the Kabbalah. And then I think of people who attack each other, write cruel e-mails, preach anger and hatred on TV, often in the name of religion or the love of animals. Be careful.
The chickens make a careful patrol around the farmhouse, usually twice a day, staying close to the shadow to keep out of sight of hawks, I notice. Winston likes to sit on the log pile near the doghouse and puff himself up. Animals are amazing, and it is a joy to watch them.
