Day: December 21, 2012

A shaman invited us to her Vermont house last night to celebrate the winter solstice. I’ve learned in my spiritual life that the more things I am open to, the better I do, the more understanding I find, the more peaceful I can become. Two years ago, Maria pointed out, I would not have gone to a winter solstice celebration with shamans. Now, I was curious and eager to go. The shaman had a beautiful house on a hilltop and she made a point of letting me know dogs were welcome – spirit dogs and power animals are a big part of shamonic healing. So I brought my spirit dog Red.

The setting was enhanced by a windstorm that had knocked out her power earlier in the day, so I had to use my Iphone flashlight just to find the steps, get past her ancient Bernese Mountain Dog and get inside, where the house was lit with candles. I found the evening fascinating. The Winter Solstice comes on the darkest day of the year – yesterday – and celebrates the coming of more light, and in this case a new era. This is an ancient rite that has gone on for thousands of years. Such old rituals have been pushed to the corners of our consciousness. We light a Christmas tree on the White House lawn but one of the oldest healing and spiritual rituals of the earth is relegated to the edge of our lives. A bunch of shamans came to join Carol and stay over and after eating some wholesome food, we got down to business.

We marked the darkest day, welcomed light. There was a healing ceremony for those who wished to get up and stand in the circle – I did – and I was surrounded by dancing shamans beating drums, changing and shaking bells around my body. I felt a strong sensation around my heart – this is where my fear has always lived – and we wrote down on paper things we wished to leave behind in the new year and then we tossed them into the fire.

Red was great, he greeted people but got anxious when the drums got loud, so I brought him out to the car. Before that, he was a gentle and loving spirit in this circle of people.

There was drumming, chanting singing. Imagining our dreams and the lives we wanted. Homage paid to animals, Mother Earth and the better side of our nature. Then Carol, my shaman, sang “Imagine” by John Lennon (in the dark we had to look up the lyrics on our Iphones). I felt these shamans very much for real. They were all women, and they were direct-speaking, even on the tough and blunt side. The ceremony was marked by the presence of spirit dogs who wandered around the circle to be petted and comforted in the midst of so much noise.

I was touched by it.

I loved the way this ancient ceremony helped me see the powerful transition of darkness to light, and the hope and opportunity there is in that. What hope do our rituals – Black Friday, the news from Washington, Christmas shopping – give us, what challenge to think about the coming time and what we have to dream of and heal from?

I have learned that for me, openness is always rewarded and progress is not made in dramatic and revelatory steps, as in the movies, but in small bits and pieces, the calcified and frightened and angry parts of ourselves chipped away. I wasn’t comfortable enough to speak, but in my head, I wished for the angry and fearful men of the world to be healed, so that we could begin healing our world and ourselves. I was grateful for the solstice ceremony. The country would be a better place if this were the ceremony on the White House lawn each year.

In 1940, the essayist and dog lover E.B.White wrote that the problems of caring for dogs had become unnecessary complicated.  He focused specifically on housebreaking puppies. In the suburbia of which he wrote, he said the question of housebreaking a dog was meet with the simple bold courage characteristic of our forefathers. You simply kept the house away from the puppy. This was not only the simplest way, he wrote, but the most practical. Our parents and grandparents, he added, were in possession of a vital secret that has been lost in time in the animal-loving world.

This secret was the knowledge that a puppy will live and thrive without ever crossing the threshold of a human home, at least until he’s big enough so that he doesn’t wet the carpet. What simple and wise words a half-century ago. White could not possibly have imagined how complex, emotional,  expensive and time-consuming training and living with a dog has become. Dogs are a multi-billion dollar industry and a good chunk of the profits come from expensive training books.  Even back on the cusp of World War II, Write observed that dog trainers, like the writers of all dog books almost universally assume that the owner of a puppy has little else to do in life than own the puppy. Maybe some of you have time to follow those puppy-training procedures. I do not.

I was reading through the puppy section of one of America’s most popular dog training books – it is as thick as a phone book – it has 10 pages on introducing the puppy to the backyard of your house before he even gets inside. And then whole chapters on looking at the puppy, voice inflections, appropriate treats, confinement and body language (the human’s).

My father brought our dog King home from the shelter and put him in the basement with a newspaper-lined cardboard box. He kept him there until he went outside regularly, which took about a week and a half. After that, he got to sleep in the basement on a sheet instead of newspaper. This would be considered cold-blooded, even abusive today (also, there was nothing buy), and King would be considered a good candidate for rescue. We had a lot of dogs when I was a kid, and none of them ever had an accident in the house or had their elimination patterns considered for a milli-second.

There is something to White’s observation. This is why I am writing a book (an e-book)  about the dilemma of dog training in America, because it seems to me the whole idea of training has grown unbelievably complex, detailed, fraught-written, and disempowering. We all think that only the gurus know how to housebreak a dog but people did it for thousands of years without having to buy expensive books and manuals. White’s observation about puppies is a wonderful metaphor for what I think is the upside-down ethos of dog training in America. First we buy the big book or watch the TV and try to do what the gurus and entertainers do. When we can’t, we conclude that we are dumb and we give up. Or that dog training, like book writing, is some complex and agonizing secret process.  For me, it works the other way. I get to know the dog and conjure up my own training ideas and methods, and if I get stuck, then I will take a look at the training books.

But to be honest, I haven’t had to do that in years. I’ve just read a few as research for my training e-book, out in a couple of months. I am not much impressed. Most of what I read I can’t do for various reasons – time, patience, money, focus.  I am grateful, as always, to E.B. White, for his wit and grace at saying important things so simply and with such good humor.

I believe the best trainer of any dog is the human that owns him or her. Instead of smothering dog lovers in elaborate books and methods – I do not make a good pack leader – it seems to me that training ought to empower them to learn the joy of training their dogs themselves.

I got a Weather Channel app for my new Iphone5 because anybody with a farm needs to know what the weather is, but I thought of scrapping it, as I have already deleted Twitter and CNN because they send me alerts all the time about things I don’t want to know about. That’ s my smartphone rule – anything that bongs or sends me alerts gets deleted. It’s invasive and annoying for me. I got a weather alert this morning warming me of “severe wind alerts,” downed trees, interrupted power, danger to people and animals, be prepared.

I got another message from a shaman inviting me to a solstice party, telling me her power was out and urging me to look out for r rainbows. Global warming has created some very serious weather, and I respect the need to pay attention to storms like Hurricane Sandy. But the weather channel is now naming winter storms to make them more frightening and to make it easier to market them. I will continue to look out for rainbows when the wind comes. And I just deleted the Weather Channel.

I’m not a party person, I much prefer small gatherings where people can talk, and I can’t say I’m crazy about them either. But I am going to a party tonight, a shaman who I saw a couple of weeks ago in Vermont is having a Winter Solstice party at her home. Potluck dinner followed by a celebration of the Winter Solstice, the end of the darkest day of the year, darkness to light. On the way home from our inn in Vermont, we had a spectacular round of weather – snow, rain, sun, rainbows everywhere. Global warming is frightening sometimes, wild and exciting sometimes. I caught this rainbow outside of Arlington, Vt. So Maria and I are going to this solstice party, a gathering of shamans and non-party people, I imagine, and I will report back tomorrow.

My life and work are increasingly about light, I am a warrior for light, a worshiper of light, a pilgrim of many journeys from darkness to light, every day. So this could end up being my holiday. I’m bringing the camera. Maybe Red too, if spirit dogs are allowed.

I can’t think of a more fun place to Christmas shop than Brattleboro, a funky, friendly, easy to navigate place, a cafe town. I went into this Vintage clothing shop and while Maria was in the dressing room trying something on I scrambled around to get her some good stuff to put under our feisty little tree. The women in the store joined in, distracting her, hiding my presents, helping me and the shop owner stuff them into a bag.

Like the cafe photo below, this store was all about women. And I realize lately that I have always loved women. This sometimes drives Maria a little crazy – she thinks I sometimes love women too much. But I tell her that I love women in the way that Gabriel Garcia Marquez loves women. I see them as warm, funny, open, emotional, sensuous. I idealize them, admire them from afar, see them as mysterious, fertile, inaccessible. For most of my life, that was true. Maria suspects me of continuous flirtations, but this is not true. I just love women.  I will always love women, I can’t  help it, but that does not mean I don’t love one woman more than all of the others.

Men don’t have shops like this devoted to them.