I love the new path, I mean to go there every day. A woodsman tends the woods and it is perhaps the most beautiful path I’ve ever walked on, sloping hills, ponds, swamps, a tall cover of trees casting shadows and playing with light. A place of worship.
Walking on our new path in the late afternoon, it seemed to me we were in a cathedral, Mother Earth’s Church, a place of worship without priests or rabbis, it’s own stained glass, walls reaching up to the sky, a place of silence and awe, of worship. Mother Earth calls out to us to heal her, care for her and love her. In the Kabbalah, God warns human beings that if they don’t care for Mother Earth, he will send a horde of angels and cherubs to sting their cheeks and dry their creeks and set their woods on fire. He asked Shekinah the powerful priestess, a woman who challenged God to care for the world, to scour the earth for people who despoil Mother Earth and strike them down. And she did.
I’m writing a book about Simon, Rocky and Red. I call the three of them my Triad, all of them spirit animals coming together at the same time. In a way, bringing the three of them together in our new home seemed to me to be the high point of my life with animals. I imagined the most remarkable peaceable kingdom, the donkey who came back from the abyss, the two donkey sisters, five sheep saved from New York City restaurants, the aging and blind old pony who led us to our new home. It didn’t work out as I planned, most things do not but the book focuses on the idea of mercy and compassion and how animals cause us to think and rethink notions of mercy.
When Simon was taken off the farm by the State Police, I wondered why no one had expressed any concern about the farmer and his family. When Simon attacked Rocky, I realized I needed to be compassionate to him, he was just doing his donkey work in driving off a weak member of the herd. When the vet told me Rocky would suffer in another winter and live in fear on this farm , I saw that for him, compassion was not about keeping him alive, but letting him go. When I came to Bedlam Farm, a vet told me to be compassionate and shoot a dying ewe during a blizzard which cut off the roads. When the old sheep left, I was certain that their deaths would be farm more compassionate than keeping them alive to face predators and certain debilitating illness. We all have different notions of compassion, I do not war on death or see it as always cruel.
Someone asked me recently on Facebook why I didn’t purchase Wellington boots so I could keep Strut alive, and I wondered what boot would cover the back of an adult or the face of a visiting child who got clawed in the face, as my neighbor’s child did. Would that be compassionate of me? In the animal world many people equate warring on death as a measure of compassion. We consider ourselves merciful if we simply keep all animals alive by any means at all costs, the way we keep so many people alive. Is that compassion? I think not, not for me. The standard for many often seems to be that it is always compassionate to to keep an animal alive, even if means their living in crates for the rest of their lives. Or living unnaturally or in pain. Compassion is more complex for me. It evolves grows, takes different shape and form.
Animals respect and accept death, they live with all of the time. Humans avoid it, it is their greatest fear and they are the only species to know they will die. What a profound difference in consciousness between us and the animals if you think about it. They have no notion that their lives with ever end, even if they often do, abruptly and sometimes violently. They simply don’t experience it the way we might.
I am grateful to Simon, he opened the door for me to view mercy and compassion in many different ways, it is a difficult and challenging thing to practice. I am beginning to see that true compassion is for what we don’t like, not for what we do.
The relationship between Frieda and Maria is one of the most powerful in my own annals of the human-animal bond, and I have lived and seen quite a few. There is something wonderful, stirring, bounded and powerful about it. Two strong independent woman, powerfully attached to one another, they always make me think of “Thelma And Louise.” Maria took Frieda, a dog nobody wanted, out of an ASPCA shelter because she wanted a brown and black dog (she is an artist) and because she thought she was cute. I nicknamed Frieda “The Dog Who Kept Men Away,” neither of them liked men much or trusted them. Frieda and I have come a long way since she tried repeatedly to eat me, she is a great and affectionate dog.
But she will always be Maria’s dog, the sun rises and sets on Maria for her, she is always watching her, protecting her and loving her. Frieda is most loyal dog I have ever known, she would put her life down for Maria in a minute. She is a guardian of the farm, and I am touched whenever I look up and see these two proud and loving women talking to one another, a conversation beyond words. Frieda sits quietly by Maria whenever she is making her art, she never gets restless or interferes. Yet Maria and Frieda have healthy boundaries. Frieda is not a soulmate, a therapist, a best bud for Maria. She looks to humans for that, and to one another, as I do. Frieda has a powerful place in Maria’s life, but it is a proper place, a healthy place. They are inseparable these two. Every night in the winter Maria puts a small blanket over Frieda in case she is warm.
She always watches out for Frieda, Frieda always watches out for her. Frieda often will sleep downstairs, to keep an eye on things, and loves to sun herself out in the yard. But theirs is a very powerful relation, two strong women taking on life, walking together through the world.
