Most of us project our most powerful emotions and thoughts onto the animals we know and love, and when I go and see Rocky, I sometimes have conversations with him after he gets his apple, which he relishes. I do not hear him calling for help or asking for mercy.
I think Rocky wishes to be treated with respect, and not patronized.
He wishes to stay on his farm as long as is possible, because this is what he knows and this is where he needs to be.
If he is lonely, he does not show it any way. Rather, what I sense is a great state of awareness. He knows she is gone, is not in the farmhouse from which she emerged several times a day for all of Rocky’s life. I am not a replacement in any way for him, but something else, something different. Something that brings apples and talks.
Rocky is aware of me. And of Maria. He has incorporated us into his routine, now and when he hears my car, my voice, Maria’s step, he comes over to the gate, and he finds her with his working senses, and he listens and looks. Maria communicates powerfully with animals, and as with the donkeys, you can see it, the camera goes to it.
Then, when he is done, he moves away, goes to the back of his barn, out of sight. He is a proud thing, I think. He teaches me something new every day.
We are preparing to move out of Bedlam Farm and into a New Bedlam Farm, a new chapter, once we tend to the minor business of selling the farm and buying the new place, which is not quite a farm but does have a barn and a fabulous studio for Maria. Details, details.
We are both into the idea of moving forward, and then turning it over to life, so we ordered a dumpster, now perhaps one of the more famous dumpsters around, and have begun tossing old junk and detritus into the dumpster and taking our clothes, books, and reusable things to libraries and charities. We will have another monster run at the Salvation Army Saturday, and the Cambridge, N.Y. Library is very happy and will be happier still.
I see my life passing before my eyes in many ways, the stuff going out testimony to the different phases of my past, and my life on the farm. Today, I washed out about a dozen old Scotch bottles from the days when I drank Glenlivet. I rarely drink anymore, and never scotch. We hauled out boxes of old bandages, syringes, calcified antibiotics and other dusty medical supplies from the days when lambs were born here, and when I had to administer lots of sheep first-aid in the middle of the night.
Memories of bloody tails, uterine infections, vitamin shoots, boosters, and bandages and medicines. Was that really me up there on that hill with Rose in sub-zero winters? There were a lot of extra boots, winter shirts and sweaters, gloves and hats. One of my many disorders is that if something isn’t in front of me, I lose any awareness that it exists. So I had a lot of duplicates of things. When Maria moved onto the farm, we got rid of a ton of stuff – she loves to get rid of stuff and give it to people, being cheap, generous, and conscious of the planet. She also created open shelves so I could see my shirts and clothes and socks and sweaters. Wow, what a difference.
I am tossing old manuscripts and editor’s notes – I don’t see any Jon Katz Library in my literary future or in the digital world – and dog bowls,brushes, tags and rancid treats. There are old signs, paintings, posters, photos to be sorted and dispersed. It is humbling, painful sometimes,sobering. I am grateful for my life now, and eager to have a life where I have very few things to throw out. Maria is a huge influence in this way – she is inspirationally simple and practical. It is catching. Still, tossing this stuff is emotional, it is, in some ways, like watching a movie of your own life, growth and change. I did not know who I was then. I did not like who I was then. So this is better. It’s a visualization in a way, the dumpster collecting remnants of the old life, as we begin the new one.
I’ve prayed in a number of different structures – Synagogues, Quaker Meetings, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, homes and living rooms, factory floors and fields – but I think the Meeting for Worship that has always worked best for me is the barn, cathedral like structures of peace, community, work and simplicity. There is something very honest about a barn, simple and unadorned. In a barn, there is no dogma thrust upon us, no single way we are required to think. I think it is so – from my readings of the Bible and the Kaballah – that Jesus loved barns and shelters also, because they were so simple and functional and nourishing.
I am not a Christian, but I love just about everything I have ever read and heard about Jesus, and my wish for him is that he not ever hear the hatred and anger and judgement and argument invoked in his name. How hurtful that would be to a spirit that understand that cruelty and self-righteousness is the true heresy. Jesus, I think, would love worshiping in a barn. I think of him sometimes when I am in one.
