28 February

Rocky: Waiting For Me

by Jon Katz
Rocky. Waiting for me

 

I stopped to see Rocky on the way to Vermont and give him his apple, but I couldn’t find him for the longest time. I thought he might be gone, and then I turned to see that he was standing close, waiting for me. He had heard the car, and my voice. He wants his apple. I learned this much from the donkeys. Give them an apple a day, and talk softly, and they will love you dearly.

28 February

My Story

by Jon Katz
Patti and Buddy: My Story

 

For much of my life, I’ve seen searching for my story. I know that we are our stories, but I could never figure out mine.  I’ve driven countless thousands of miles to therapists, spiritual counselors, old colleagues, mystics, siblings to find out who I am, what happened to me, what I might become.  My search has taken me to so many places, including the country and Bedlam Farm, but the visits that touch me, change me, that help me to put the pieces of my story together, that speak to me are all in strange towns, on second floors, in back rooms, unseen alleys or quiet streets.

I went on such a journey yesterday, to Brattleboro, Vt. to see Patti Newton, who runs a shop called Silver Moon Adornments, and who is many things spiritual, including a Tarot Card Reader. I know Patti and we have connected with one another. She has done two readings for Maria and me. We are friends.

Why have you come?, she asked. What are you looking for? I was at ease there, as if I belonged, and I was safe, and I said I wanted to find my story, and I sensed it might be in the cards, there in Brattleboro, at her shop. So we talked a long time, and she took the cards out and her dog Buddy lay on the floor, putting his head on my shoe from time to time.  Patti laid the cards on the table, and she said here is your story. The cards told the story of the “Lion and the Lamb”, sometimes called the Lion’s Dilemma. In the story, a flock of sheep find a lion cub and convince him that he is a lamb. To keep them safe from predators, they conspire to keep him forever, to tie him up, withhold his true identify, keep him from his own life. They teach him only how to be fearful and live a small life, a diminished existence.This is what he sees, what he knows, how they live. He is never comfortable, never at peace but is unaware that there is any other way to be. These were the awful boundaries of life for him, borders of fear and confusion.

One day a lion comes  and is shocked to see him and he tells him who he is, and challenges him to come away from the sheep and live like a lion. This opens up the Lion’s life and triggers a period of great, sometimes terrifying transition for him. He is very fearful – he knows no other way to live. The cards, said Patti,  say that the lion is not naturally fearful, that is not a part of who he really is. Natural fear is not in his cards. But he has learned that other life, the fear woven into his identity, living among the small and fearful creatures who used him selfishly for their own needs and never encouraged him to live his life and know his strength. He knows how to be a sheep, but he does not know how to be a lion. The lion has many choices to make in life. Will he change? Find his strength? Forgive the sheep or kill them? He decides to forego anger, go on a long journey to find himself and his  real strength. He returns to join the lions and to live out his life as a strong creature and slowly sheds his fearful identity.

The lion’s dilemma is that he must decide whether to be a lion or a lamb.

The lion does not seek vengeance, but rather chooses a different passion: to make certain his life is never made small and frightened again, his potential never squelched, his soul never stolen or diminished. Slowly, and over time, his natural self emerges and he lives his life. He finds a partner who was also raised as a sheep, but who is also a lion, and they give one another strength. It is, say the cards, an powerful partnership. Life for him is not perfect, but joyous and full because it is his authentic life.

I left Patti and called Maria. I told her that I thought I had found my story.

28 February

Magical Day Today: Card Reading. Open Up.

by Jon Katz
Magical Day

 

I’ve finished the first draft of my first E-book original, “The Story Of Rose,” and I’m waiting for my editor to pounce on it. I was pleased with it, and I hope she is also. Today, I’m going on a magical sort of journey, deep into Vermont to have a Tarot Card Reading with my friend Patti Newton. I was much affected by the readings she has done with me, and well aware that I would have jeered at this idea just a short while ago. We talked last week about the Lion and the Lamb. What happens when the fearful lamb recedes and the lion emerges, but he doesn’t really know how to be a lion.

The cards, in Patti’s capable hands, have spoken to me, and Patti, I see, is another of the magical helpers on the hero’s journey. The work is never done and there are messages worth listening to everywhere, if you open yourself up to them. I am going alone – Maria is busy cranking out her beautiful art pieces – and I feel there is something there for me, something that is exciting and important. In a way, many of my ideas about wisdom – health also – have been reversed. I look for wisdom in places I never saw, from people I never heard. And I am learning more all the time. I have a lot of driving to you, and I am pulled very much to go. I will share it all with you.

Look around for magical helpers, they are everywhere, in all the places most of us never look, making sounds that most of us never hear.

28 February

Rocky: Is Worry Love?

by Jon Katz
Rocky: Is Worry Love?

My mother worried about me all of the time. If I didn’t call every few days, she would call in a panic, saying “why didn’t you call me? I was worried sick something that happened to you.” This always made me uncomfortable. It left me feeling disturbed, not loved. It was invasive. It didn’t seem like love, but something else. It didn’t seem that she was worried about me, but something else.

When Maria moved into the farmhouse, there was a series of awful blizzards on the days she went out to work. She had a tiny car with no four-wheel drive and no snow tire. I would stand at the window and watch her drive off in a storm with two or three feet of snow on the ground and feel the same thing my mother must have felt, watching this person I loved so much sail off into the dark and cold. Except one day, starting at her lights receding into the snow, I awakened. This isn’t love, I thought. Love is letting her make her own decisions, her own choices, letting her know that I trust her to live her life. What she needed from me wasn’t worry but trust.  Love wasn’t worrying about her, it is not worrying about her and putting my own fears onto her. I never mentioned driving off in the snow again, and she made it home every time. Now, she knows she can take care of herself, and if I helped in any way, what is more loving than that?

Recently, a friend, a young woman told me she doesn’t travel because her mother worries too much. Her mother likes her close.  Do I worry when my daughter travels, she asked? No, I said, I love it when my daughter travels. I would hate to think she wouldn’t go places because I was worried about her. Love would be letting her go.

Is worry love? Is it loving? This comes up for me all of the time when it comes to animals, and it is a powerful element for me in the Rocky story, which has take so many twists and turns for me, and for others. Our relationship with animals seems especially focused now on worry, rescue, notions of nurturing, comfort and security. Worry about them is almost an ideology.  I felt this with Simon, who was, in fact, sorely in need of a new home. Sometimes, we do need to help them, tend to them, yes, rescue them.  I feel this pull  often with Rocky, seeing him alone in his big pasture by an empty farmhouse. I do understand that this is an emotional thing, a thing that touches deep chords within us.

But among other things Rocky reminds me – teaches me yet again – that worry is not love. For me, loving Rocky means leaving him in peace, to live his life where he is comfortable and things are familiar. It means respecting his life. I cannot guarantee his safety or his health. Animals do not live in paradise anymore than we do, and we cannot worry them into a perfect, pain-free, no-kill world. Life is more powerful than I am, than we are. Every day, I learn more and more about love, and I am grateful for that. And what I have learned is this. It is natural to worry about the things I love, but worry is not love. Worry is not about them. It is about me. It is not for them. It is for me.

28 February

Start Your Day. Jump In

by Jon Katz
Start The Day

 

Meg begins her day the same way. She carefully inspects the hay feeder for bugs or seeds, and when she is done, she climbs up on the edge of the feeder and vaults onto the back of a donkey, or to the ground. This inspires me to begin my day the same way, not by focusing on what I fear, don’t have, or would like, but what I love, have, and am passionate about.  The blog is a passion for me, and I cannot wait to share my thoughts and experiences with the world beyond. Like a hive, ideas go out, and live or die, and ideas come back, and stick or don’t.

Jump in.

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