Day: September 23, 2013

A strong women on one of the Bedlam Farm Open Groups has breast cancer and is writing about it with great power, beauty and strength, and the other night, she had a bad night and descended to a dark place. She asked herself, “what is strength? How do I spin back up?,” in a time of personal worry and concern,  in a country where it is easier to buy a machine gun than to vote, and a world filled with fear and anger and brutal images of violence and suffering. How does one stay grounded when our daily bread is murder, assault and assault rifles, slaughter and the butchering of innocents?

I understood this post, I have not had cancer, but have asked myself that same question in the middle of many dark nights, I have asked “What Is Strength? How Do I Find It? How Do I Spin Back Up?”

I suppose we all find out own way up or out. Or not. I wanted to tell this woman, who I do not know,  that strength is honesty and acceptance. To write about one’s cancer is a brave thing in and of itself, a healing thing. It connects us to the world, helps us to face the reality of our lives, reminds us we are not one thing, but connected to many things.  We spin back up by understanding that we are never alone in fear and suffering, every person in the world knows loss and pain, sorrow and fear. It comes to us all in different ways, on different feet, at different times. We lose our dogs, cats, mothers, fathers, friends, we see suffering and feel suffering. It is never far away.  But it it is never ours alone, it is the human experience, like life, like death.

I tell myself that every single person in the world suffers more than I do, this is my mantra, it keeps me humble and close to empathy.

I spin back by counting the things I love, the things I’ve done, the things I want to do. I spin back up by walking dogs, writing on the blog, taking a photo, encouraging a striving soul. I spin back up by loving others and letting them love me, by opening those gates of feeling. By loving my wife, a friend, a donkey, a photo. Sometimes I do it by meditating, and being alone with my soul, sometimes by laughing, sometimes by sitting outside and crying.

I am grateful for my life, good and bad, joyous and sad. I have lost too many things in my life to count, gained more than I could list. This is the dance, we are all in it, our partners are calling to us to come out onto the shiny floor and live our lives, every single day. I spin back by seeking grace, accepting the life the fates and fairies and angels have in store for me, by surrendering the idea that the show is mine to run.

Life, life, life, is far too sacred to ever end. Good night to you, good friend, dear friends, you are strength, you are spinning back up even as another night rises up to wrap you in its arms and whisper exciting things to your heart.

Sheep have always hovered in the background of my life since I moved to Bedlam Farm in 2003. I have always had sheep, they were the first things I brought to the farm, and I have always had border collies to herd the sheep. I have written many books about the dogs, none about the sheep. They are somewhat like a garden to me, beautiful in the background, important for my work with dogs, but I have rarely named them or attached them. Since Maria came into my life, my relationship with sheep has evolved steadily. I still have a border collie, I still love to work with the dog and the sheep.

But now they are Maria’s sheep, she gives them names, visits them, watches over them, and they are moving more and more into the center of our lives. She has written about this on her blog, and today I spent some time alone with the sheep out at Lulu’s crossing. One of the thing that complicates my relationship with the sheep is Red, they rarely seem me without a border collie breathing down their necks, giving them the eye.

They tend to get wary when I’m around, looking for the inevitable dog. The sheep have calmed down quite a bit since we moved to the new farm, it is a smaller, more intimate space, they see us all the time, and we see them. Whenever Maria appears, the sheep gather around her. We are shearing twice a year now, it is healthy for the sheep, good for the wool, good for Maria’s yarn sales. Zelda has become more grounded, more settled, Socks and the smaller ewes are growing up, they are affable, gentle creatures.

We are now planning to lamb early next year, our friend Darryl Kuehne will bring a ram in later this Fall and we’ll have lambs in the Spring. Maria will keep a couple, Darryl will take the others to market. Better sheepherding, more photos, more yarn. That is how life goes on a farm like hours, one thing leads to another, something in the background moves to the fore, something unimportant becomes central. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a goat or two around in the outer pasture to help clean it up.

I am paying more attention to the sheep, getting to know them. As I’ve said, I do not love all animals equally, the sheep are just not as important or interesting to me as the dogs, cats or donkeys. But they are becoming more and more important to the farm, their purpose here becoming clearer, more  useful. That is part of the organic life on a farm, it is a living thing, always on the move.

The world is a strange and curious place, filled with close and serendipitous encounters. I had my first photo lesson with George Forss today – an amazing thing – and as I arrived at his Ginafor Gallery to meet him, he and Donna Wyndbrandt were waiting in the doorway, excited to whisper to me that there was a “very nice Canadian couple, readers of my blog,” who had come to George’s gallery out of curiosity. They were waiting inside to meet me.  The couple was staying in Cambridge, said George and although they didn’t want to intrude, they would love to meet me.

I came in and met Dan and Susan Dugard from the small town of Durham, Ontario, way up in the North. They were very courteous and considerate, they hadn’t meant to contact me or bother me, they were just so curious to see the places I wrote about and took photos of. That is pretty flattering to a writer and photographer.  Dan is a retired bush pilot and Susan is an oncology nurse, they are readers of the blog and my books and decided to spend a week here exploring Cambridge, Vermont and some of the places they have read about.  They live in the far, remote north, they understand the country. They are staying at an apartment in a farm just a mile or so from Bedlam Farm. One of their first stops was George’s gallery on Main Street, the four of them were having a whopping good time when I came in.

George had his broken ankle in a boot, and was, as usual, indestructible and full of creative ideas about the universe and me.

George is a funny and gracious host, he is lots of fun,  and he only unveiled his theories of life force and the universe once or twice. I used to be wary of these encounters with strangers, I am not any longer. It took me a long time to realize it is a great compliment when people want to see the things a writer describes.

Sometimes, things are meant to happen. The Dugard’s are lovely and interesting people, I am happy our paths crossed in this way. Dan said he didn’t mention aliens, I told him it was fine to mention them, he just had to plan on spending some time there.

I have learned to accept serendipitous encounters, they are always good, larger forces than me run the universe. The Dugard’s are coming over to the farm later this week to meet Simon and they were quite excited at the idea of seeing Red work and visit Maria’s Schoolhouse Studio. Oh yes, and me too. When they call I will invite them to lunch at the Round House Cafe to meet Scott Carrino and have some good and fresh food. I’ll get Maria to come too. Then we’ll visit the farm. Dugards, if you are reading this, let’s shoot for Wednesday or Thursday. You have my number.

Oh, and then George and I had a great lesson, more about that later.

Reflect on the noble, the good, the beautiful.

In recent years, the very new idea that animals are superior to people has been growing and deepening. Many people tell me they love animals more than people – this is much in vogue these days – and they believe that animals possess an innate kindness and generosity of spirit that is lacking in many human beings. I have come to believe that the worship of animals in America is growing more rapidly than the worship of any God. I posted this question on my Facebook Page today – are animals superior to people? – and was mesmerized by the intelligence, passion and depth of responses. Many people – about a third – said they did love animals more than people, and many thought that animals are superior to humans. I have to be honest, it seems to me to be a politically correct idea more than a well thought out one.

Others repeated one of the mantras of contemporary animal love – “I love all animals.” I wonder if anyone would say they love all people, or if such a thing were even remotely possible.I, for one, do not love all animals, I do not love rats and fishers the way I love dogs, I do not love them at all.

If you study the history of the human/companion animal bond, as I have, it seems that the worship of animals has grown in direct proportion to the growing disenchantment with humans. At the dawn of the enlightenment, the great philosophers worshipped the human soul, striving to create a better world.

There is a very understandable feeling that humans are ruining and ravaging the world, and anyone who loves our country must be heartsick at the degrading spectacle unfolding daily in Washington.  The news offers us an unrelentingly grim and dispiriting view of the world, and our political leaders seem to have degenerated into  middle-school bullies, taunters and dividers, speaking to the angry, the ignorant and the isolated. Small wonder the idea that animals are somehow more pure and worthy than people has wrong.

This idea – that all animals can be loved equally, and that they are somehow superior to people – has never been an idea I could accept or believe. For me, it is an idea that doesn’t serve animals or people. I have lived with a lot of animals for nearly two decades and I have not found that animals are more generous and kind than humans. I think of Simon driving Rocky into a fencepost, of Frieda pouncing on baby rabbits and tearing them to pieces, of chickens pecking out the eyes of their dying brothers and sisters, of the barn cats torturing and dismembering anything small enough to catch, of ewes trampling lambs in their rush to grain, hawks shrieking down on rabbits and chickens, of donkeys kicking each other in the head in their rush to eat fallen apples. The real world of animals is not generous or kind, it is brutal, ruthless and cruel. We build no-kill shelters, but no animal lives in a no-kill world.

This does not mean animals are inherently cruel, neither are they good. Animals do not possess conscience, they are not moral, they do not make moral decisions. They life by the instincts and needs, they are neither good nor bad, they simple react to life as it presents itself to them. Their faith is acceptance, not morality or kindness. There is no such thing as a good dog or a bad dog, as much as we love the terms, they simply do what they need to do to survive, as all animals do. This does not make them in any way superior to us, it just makes them different and in many ways, less destructive.

The emotionalizing of pets has caused so many of us to lose perspective and idealize animals as somehow free of the many flaws and shortcomings of humans. The more ignoble and flawed we see humans, the more noble and perfect are animals.  When someone tells me they love all animals, I shake my head in wonder. Most of us can’t even know more than a fraction of all the animals, how could we love them all indiscriminately? Why would we?

There is no way I can see clear to he idea that animals are superior to humans, as much as I love them. And as much as I love people, I am acutely aware, as so many animal lovers are, of their murderous and greedy deprivations on one another and on Mother Earth. Of wars, shootings, arguments and conflicts. I love the human soul, the human conscience, the human desire to be happy or sad, to create, to philosophize and strive and yearn to be better. We used to worship that in people, not in animals, and I think the growing tendency to worship and romanticize animals is especially sad, not only because it distorts the true nature of animals, but because it grows mostly out of growing dissatisfaction and disappointment in our own species.

For me, the choice is not to replace my love of humans with an unconditional love of animals, I do not wish to give up on my own kind. For me, the answer is to keep on trying to be a better human being, not matter what my fellow humans are doing. And to love animals for what they are, not for what we are not.