18 February

Frieda’s New Job: Magical Helper, Moving Chronicles

by Jon Katz
Frieda's Appointment

 

I’ve come to take Joseph Campbell’s idea about animals very seriously in recent years – often they come to us as magical helpers, guiding us out of the darkness or simply to the next place in our lives. Today, I realized that Frieda is our Magical Helper when it comes to selling our farm, finding a New Bedlam Farm and moving there. Frieda symbolizes the drama of change. She was a junkyard guard dog in South Glens Falls, was abandoned in the Adirondacks, lived in the wild, was adopted by Maria and  moved with her several times, and then came to Bedlam Farm. She has survived great adversity. She understands the spirit and challenge of moving from one place to another and is an almost mythically adaptable creature. She is my writing dog, and she guards me when I work. And I feel safe.

She is a Magical Helper for sure. Orson inspired me to find Bedlam Farm, Rose helped me to live here, Lenore opened my heart and Izzy reconnected me to people with his Hospice work (p.s. The Hospice Journal is going back up on the blog soon, and will appear on the “Blogs I Love” page). Maria loves the idea of Frieda as our moving spirit. She will help us get where we need to go.

Frieda loves taking care of us, and I am in awe of the power of animals to transform the lives of humans and lead them where they need to go. I have seen it, time and again.

 

18 February

Soul-Selling

by Jon Katz
Soul-Selling

 

I’ve come across the notion of “Soul-Selling” twice recently. Thoreau used the term in his writings to warn other people against giving away pieces of their souls bit by bit until their lives were drained of meaning and purpose. Last week, Patty Newton, a Tarot Card Reader in Brattleboro, Vt., used it as a warming to me in a similiar way: one of the cards warned of Soul-Selling, which can drained a person of spirituality, well-being and meaning in life.

I knew what both of them meant right away. I am asked to sell pieces of my soul often, as is almost everyone every day. This can happen in relationships, at work, in health care decisions, in messages, work requests, and I am quite capable of doing it to myself. I know now when I am being asked to sell some of my soul. It does not feel good, and I take a deep breath, make sure I am not angry of fearful, and then I say no. I see that this is a literal form of strength. I see that this dilutes and weakens fear.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write something I didn’t want to write and I could almost literally feel a piece of my soul on the block. I said no. I feel this when someone expresses themselves in anger. When people offer me struggle and pity stories but have done little to change their lives. I came to see that fear is a soul-seller. The more fear I felt, the less soul was left, and fear itself shatters the soul and leaves it spent and weak and sickly.

Conventional wisdom steals my soul. So does the news. Or telling other people what to do. Listening to the stories and scripts of other people. A doctor recently suggested a bunch of tests I did not want to take, and I thanked him for his concern and said I felt well and did not care to have any tests. My soul felt strong. I could not have done that before.  I think in our culture we are asked to sell our souls every day. Sell it for health insurance, for money, to ideas that our now ours, to success,  job security, for a pension or an IRA. When asked to pay attention to a political process gone mad with rage and greed.  My soul is the heart of me, and if I sell it, I am ill.  My soul is not for sale any more, and it centers and grounds me, more each passing day.

18 February

Rocky’s Story

by Jon Katz
Rocky's Story

 

Animals are important. They mirror our lives, touch buried parts of us, and if we are receptive to it, and can open us up to new and profoundly spiritual experience. Rocky has been in my life and viewfinder and imagination for more than and a year, and he speaks to so much of life I’m not sure I can really keep up. He is an Appaloosa, more than 30 years old, and has spent virtually all of his life on this farm and in this pasture. His owner, a farm widow told me last Fall that she and Rocky had entered into a contract to see one another through to the end of life. She was deaf and didn’t see well – neither does Rocky – and she knew the end was near.  She died recently.

This woman had the practicality of the farmer – she was puzzled  by my interest in photographing Rocky – and she told me “he doesn’t look like much now, but he was a beaut when he was younger.” Rocky hovers in the pasture like a spirit. He has shelter, food and fresh water. He uses his ears like eyes. He drifts back and forth and now, he knows my voice and Maria’s and comes unsteadily to see us and get an apple. Rocky speaks to love, and aging, and it is so tempting to see him as needy and piteous and want to bring him home. That is not what I want, and not what is good for him either. He will stay on his farm for now, and there are places for him to go if and when the farm is sold.

Rocky is one of those animal spirits, I think. He comes when he is ready and leaves when he is done. I hope to age as well as he has.

18 February

Greetings from Brattleboro

by Jon Katz
Greetings from Brattleboro, Vt.

Greetings from Brattleboro, Vt., where I was Thursday morning, and where  people still clutch newspapers and read them with their coffee, and free spirits and oddballs share the turf with suits, and parking lots are adorned with painted greetings and pay machines that are not comprehensible.

Today going to see “The Artist.” Going to see “Rocky.” Going to take my girl out to dinner.

18 February

The Last Gift Of Time. Feminism. Ideas That Glow

by Jon Katz
The Last Gift Of Time

 

I don’t know why, but I’ve never written about my late friend Carolyn Heilbrun much. She was a Columbia professor, a feminist and a mystery writer who encouraged my book writing, and inspired me in many different ways. She taught me what my politics really are – feminism – and helped me understand the struggle of women to find their identify in a world whose beautiful promise is relentlessly destroyed by male greed, anger and cruelty. I have long believed that women’s empathy, sense of community and instincts for nurture are the best hope for our world  – just look at any newscast or political debate – and these are traits I have sought to develop in my own life. Beyond that, Professor Heilbrun wrote powerfully about aging.

Her book “The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty,” opened my eyes to the pain and joy, the loss and promise of aging. “The major danger in one’s sixties — so I came to feel – is to be trapped in one’s body and one’s habits, not to recognize those supposedly sedate years as the time to discover new choices and to act up on them.” My motto.

Heilbrun also shared – and influenced – some of my ideas about health and aging. She believed modern ideas of “health” and medicine stole quality of life from the aging, and turned them into dependent prisoners with little purpose to their lives.  Loss, pain and sadness are inevitable as one ages, Heilbrun wrote, but they are not only sad. They  are the price for bountiful living.

My own life is very relevant in this way and I wish Professor Heilbrun were around for me to talk to. In my sixties, I have found purpose, creativity, love and the beginnings of a spiritual life. I have found bounty beyond imagination. I also have experienced loss and sadness. I am having to pay more attention to my body, accept the loss of friends and loved ones. Heilbrun loved her life in her 60’s, but she always warned her friends that she would not contribute to the corporate/technological/medical aging machine. In her 70’s, healthy and productive and creative, she took her own life, just as she said she would and wrote farewell letters to her friends. I will not share that letter, but I am grateful to have gotten it.

I expect to see the true revolution in feminist consciousness in my lifetime, not the bra-burning protests used by so many to trivialize the women’s movement, but the values that underscore true feminism for me – love, change, compassion, creativity and an end to the human capacity for cruelty, war and environmental destruction. I imagine women working in government working together to solve problems, not exploit and profit from them. I imagine an end to war. I imagine prisons emptying out and shutting down. I imaging jobs becoming nourishing and secure again and communities rising once more to support one another. And of course, everywhere, a love of nature and animals. Carolyn Heilbrun taught me to dream of these things, and helped me see that they are possible. I see these qualities in my wife, my friends, many of my readers, so I know they exist.

And thanks to you, Carolyn, for sending your wonderful ideas out into the world, where they sparkle like embers, and live in my heart. You are all about hope.

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