Day: December 7, 2011

 

The First Storm of the season is coming tonight – has already begun, in fact – and we are expecting four to eight inches, no catastrophe but enough to be taken seriously. On a farm, a storm sets a number of things into motion. The animals, first. Donkeys into the barn, hay brought into the barn,  extra feed for the chickens, food in the barn for the barn cats, heated water buckets filled and plugged in. A storm challenges a farm, and exposes any weaknesses. If there is  no panic, there is an anxious focus.

The first storm of my life here came in October of 2003, several weeks after I moved in with a donkey, 26 sheep, and Orson and Rose. I was completely unprepared for the blizzard that howled onto the farm and blew drifts over the fences, and sent the animals panicking right through the gates and into the meadow across the street. I had never seen such a storm, or been out in one, or been less prepared for one. I took Rosie, then a puppy who could fit into my hand out in the howling wind and was astonished at how quickly the snow was piling up and how thick it was, as the animals vanished into the woods below the farmhouse.

Rose looked at me eagerly. Send me in coach, but I hesitated. She was too little. I had no choice. I told her to go get ’em, and then she vanished into the swirling mist. I was horrified that I had let a puppy out into that storm. A few minutes later I heard yipping and barking off in the woods and I put on my new boots and staggered down there, the ice and snow covering my glasses and blinding me. After about a quarter of a mile, I found Rose in a meadow on the woods, all of the animals bunched together in a circle by a culvert as she barked, nipped and circled them. Slack-jawed, I watched as she marched them all the way back through the woods and back into the pasture. I called a friend and we put the gate up and secured it. Rose stood guard over the animals, in her steely-eyed, no-nonsense, bring-it-on crouch and gaze. That was more or less the way things stayed. I welcome the first storm, and bless it, and remember how far I have come, how much things have changed, how powerful a storm of its own time is, the Mother Blizzard of them all.

 

As a writer, my study of animals began with a book called “Pets And Human Development,” written by a psychologist from New York named Boris Levinson. The book lit me up.

Levinson, James Serpell of the University of Pennsylvania (“Domestic Dogs”) and the British Psychoanalyst Dorothy Burlingham (“Twins”) have been the most influential scholars of the human-companion animal relationship for me.  From his photographs, Levinson seemed an odd man, with his goatee, bow tie and poodle. But his little book, published in 1963 to little or no attention, was prescient, the only one that I know of that foresaw the extraordinary changes in humans’ relationship with many animals.

Levinson foresaw a culture where people  were increasingly moving  into urban and suburban environments, cut off from the natural world and the real world of animals. Animals are integral to human development and well-being he said, and moving away from them would have profound social and cultural consequences.  Animals no longer played an integral or organic part of most people’s lives, relegated instead mostly to the role of pets whose lives were radically altered to fit into people’s lifestyles, rather than their own. Levinson predicted that people removed from nature and from animals would be broken in some ways, damaged, and as they struggled with the disconnecting effects of technology, politics, the new economy and the challenges of the urban world, they would seek to heal, turning to their pets for love and support. If you read Levinson, Serpell and Burlingham, you see the foreshadowings of the companion animal explosion, the  emotionalizing of animals, the near worship of animals by some,  the rise of the pet culture as a multi-billion industry, and the stirrings of what would become the rescue movement.

Animals got tangled up in human issues of need, rescue, connection and affection, and species like dogs and cats are, in fact,  redefining their relationships with another species, humans. I grew up in Providence, and lived most of my life in urban areas – Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas, Baltimore, New York City, Northern New Jersey and I have lived on both ends of Levinson’s predictions. In my other life, I became disconnected from the natural and animal world, and for that and other reasons, I became broken. I live in the natural world now, surrounded by animals, and I know I cannot go back. These creatures have helped me to heal, shaped my work, connected me to love, human beings, my own mortality, challenged the limits of what I believed I could do, laid the foundation for a spiritual life. I have been drawn into different kinds of animals, working with animals that are pets, into livestock and animal husbandry, animal rescue, been challenged to grow and mature, learned patience and self-awareness. Some people get nervous when asked to talk about the reasons for their attachments to animals or their desire to rescue them and give them perfect lives. For me, the subject is endlessly fascinating. It is neither good nor bad, in my mind, surely sometimes both.

I am grateful to Levinson for challenging me to be self-aware of my involvement with animals, reminding me to look into my own psyche and motives. Every day they teach me something about myself.

It is in this way, I think, that animals can teach us what we need to learn, and help us heal from the traumas of the modern world.

 

I found this workshop on an old farm we were visiting. I love workshops, I see them as male sanctuaries, and they remind me that I’ve never really figured out how to be a man in the conventional sense. I like talking about emotions, relate very easily to many women, dislike football, cannot bear to talk about politics and most sports and cannot imagine sitting out in the woods for 12 hours with a rifle waiting for a deer to shoot. I don’t disapprove of these things, they work for a lot of people, but not for me.

My neighbor told me that he loves hunting season because he gets to bond with his Dad.

Nice, I said, where do the two of you hunt?

Oh, my Dad hunts in Vermont, he said, but I hunt in New York State. But we do it on the same day, so we can do it together. And then we meet with the family at night for dinner.

Oh, I said, thinking that that this says a lot about men. And women. I think most women would rather be together, if they hunted on the same day.

I’ve never had a workshop, but they all seem love evocative peaceful retreats to me, a place where a man can be off by himself, enter his own private space, navigate a world people like me can never begin to grasp. Men with workshops like this understand how the world works in a way that I cannot. I spoke at a book club last week, and I was shocked to see the group split evenly between men and women. They were hopelessly deadlocked on which book to read and they named themselves the Transgender Book Club. That says a lot, too. I have rarely seem a man at a book club.

I admit to being envious of men who have quiet and remote sanctuaries. There is a private quality to them, a sense that visitors are not welcome and intruders ought to stay out. I will never have a workshop and if I did, I would have no idea what tools to buy or what to do with them. My workshop has an IMac and a printer and a satellite modem.

I told Maria I doubted that many women have workshops. I think they don’t really want or need to escape their lives and go off into private and silent spaces. I think women sew or make things in the house, she said.

In the rain, took a video in the barn. Come and see.

 

 

Let the donkeys out of the rain, into the barn. Video coming. Free video of “Going Home” and signed Bedlam Farm notecards are available from Battenkill Books 518 677-2515, shipped anywhere quickly. E-mail (Paypal) is available at www.battenkillbooks.com. People are giving signed books to their local vets, animal shelter and rescue group as well as friends and family. That is nice. Two weeks left to order.

 

I think we all want to Cross To Safety, even if we are not always sure what the means or what it is. I think every day of crossing to safety, and I see where I want to go – a simpler place, a meaningful place, a calm place of challenge and creativity and ease. Is there such a place for humans in an evolving world?

I think there is, I think there is for me.That is the spiritual choice, the Leap of Faith, the belief. For me the frightening part is crossing over, it’s the river, the paths, the darkness on the way. But I know where I want to go, and I believe it is, in one form or another,a universal desire, the thing all of us want, the thing that unites us. I have this strange sense that it is the place where animals come from, the place where animals go. They are not needy to me, not piteous, they are strong and powerful and can sometimes show us the way.