Day: September 26, 2013

In November I’ve been invited to give a Ted Talk and the topic I chose is Creative Aging, something I’ve been writing about for the past few years.  I decided some time ago that the only way to age sanely in America and have a meaningful life is to disregard almost everything anyone in our world tells you about getting older, especially from 50 years on.

The elderly have vanished almost entirely from our popular culture – from movies, TV shows, magazines and most novels, except when they are portrayed as drooling, doddering, decaying old fools. The only national magazine older people have is the hoary AARP magazine, which puts movie stars on its cover at every opportunity, sells all kinds of insurance and runs stories about putting a GPS on grandma so she doesn’t get lost. It was such a pleasure to cancel the subscription I never asked for.

When you do read about older people, it is mostly in terms of illness, health care and the skyrocketing costs of taking care of elderly people who are kept alive for years beyond reason so they can take tests, get on 20 kinds of pills and get blamed for the national deficit. Long term health insurance is the one thing I have been told I need since I was 40 years old, and every single thing I’ve read about it says it is pointless, because costs rise so rapidly no policy will cover the costs of aging in just a few years.

Fortunately for me, I couldn’t grow older that way. I got divorced, the recession hit, publishing was forever altered and I found myself with two farms to maintain in a real estate market that had collapsed. I don’t have to worry about long term health insurance, money in the bank,  IRA’s or a comfortable pension. I’m not getting any of those things, and my life has never been happier, healthier or more full of meaning. When things get really bad, I told Maria to push me into the Battenkill in my wheelchair. If she won’t, I roll there myself.

I am not downsizing my life or shrinking it to meet the small expectations our society has of older people. I bought Bedlam Farm when I was in my 50s, (five years later I found love and started taking photos) and I bought Bedlam Farm 2.0 when I was sixty-five. My body is changing, I am dealing with diabetes, I sometimes need a strategy to stand up if I’ve been on the ground awhile. I know where I am, I know where I am going.

But I understand that I will have to age creatively. I have to say no to doctors because I don’t want health to be the only thing on my mind or in my life,  there is no media for me, no role models to inspire me or give me direction. I have learned that one can find love and meaning at any age, and there is no more important long term life insurance than that, a meaningful life is the healthiest life anyone can possibly live.

Like most realities in the Corporate Nation aging is always presented in terms of money, by pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, lobbied politicians. They need us to be fearful and take our pills, there is a lot of money in America in aging fearfully and poorly, in vanishing from public view into nursing and retirement and memory care facilities, that is their fate for us, it works for them. It doesn’t work for me, is is neither creative nor meaningful, I will not get angry about it, I will get creative about it.

We live in a wonderful country that is often cruel and corrupted by money, so creative aging comes from within, not from without. It is often lonely and self-directed, I have learned to trust my instincts and emotions, not the messages of other people, not the TV screen’s in doctor’s waiting rooms warning me of my declining body, not the stream of warnings on social media. My creative spark has never burned more brightly than when I decided life was not ending for me, but was in so many ways just beginning.

So I make decisions every day that I am told are short-sighted, reckless, foolhardy. The more of them I make, the happier I am, the better my life. Decisions made in the fearful shadows of other people are never good, at least for me.

I am finding people who seek a real life, not a smaller one, who define health more broadly than medications and procedures, they are refugees, freaks, members of a small and secret tribe. You will never see us on TV, in movies or books but we find one another, remind each other than full loves are possible, that we can tell our own stories about life and it’s many riches, at any age, even without big fat IRA’s and long-term insurance policies.

They take their fire hydrant’s seriously in Cambridge, New York, I wanted to step outside of myself today, outside of my own life and beauty is where you find it. I found it on a back street.

I was feeling drained by the fear and anger swirling around in the world, and I walked to a cornfield down the road and climbed the hill as the sun began to set, and I was in an autumn reverie, a beautiful space of color and light and the natural world, and I heard mice skittering in the grass and hawks crying mournfully overhead and saw all of the colors of fall, even in this drying cornfield, stalks sticking up like skeletons into the sky, and I was grateful for every second I have in this world, not matter how discouraging it can sometimes feel.

More than anything else, I was drawn to writing about animals because of my fascination with the people who own them, and their attitudes and values towards them. That has always been my turf as a writer living with animals. I love animals more and more all the time, but I have come to see that I love them in a very different way than many other people. I do not see them as pure and innocent, I do not see them as noble or superior to us, I do not love them more than people, I love what they have taught me about loving people and connecting to them.

Almost every day of my life, I read, hear or see someone say they love animals more than people, have come to believe animals are superior to people, and find animals innocent of cruelty, guile or violence. Animals, I am told, have no agenda, they are sweet and pure, unless their scheming, nasty, disappointing human counterparts. I find that these particular comments most often come from women, not men, and I have also found that many of these women are disappointed with the human beings in their lives, often but not always, men.

I share a lot of these sentiments. It is hard to love human beings, all the more important for me to try.  I live with a wonderful human, but also with donkeys, sheep, cats, chickens, dogs and perhaps one day soon, goats and lambs. They are my work, my passion, my interest and the longer I have lived with them – going on two decades now – the more I love them. Yet my life and work with animals has taken me in a different direction from many of the people I am quoting above. I do not find them pure or innocent or without agendas, I do not find them generous and benign. I have witnessed among my animals an unspeakable amount of mayhem, sexual assault and domination,  cruelty, murder, greed, competition and ruthlessness. I have seen shocking amounts of filth and narrow agendas that focus on food, survival, sex and preservation. I have never seen an animal give up food to another animal willingly, I have rarely seen an animal pine away in mourning for a dead mate, I have never seen an animal strive to learn more, be better, change or decide to go raise money to help the poor animals of the world.

I have seen some very beautiful things from animals –  the old sheep keeping one another warm,  Red guiding Rocky through the pasture, Minnie sitting with a dying rooster, the donkeys huddling together protectively when the vet comes. I have seen these same animals do chilling things to one another – chickens pecking out the eyes of their siblings when they are sick, Simon driving poor old Rocky through a fencepost, the old sheep knocking one another over to get to grain, Red running right over another dog and knocking them over to get to the pasture fence, cats torturing every manner of small and helpless creature mostly for fun.

I find the real world of real animals – when it is not romanticized to make us feel better – is very much like the real world of humans, there is good and bad, kindness and cruelty, affection and hostility. In fact this is something of a revelation to me, I always loved animals because they are not like us – and in most ways they are not – but I have come to see in recent years that there are many ways in which we are similar to them. It is quite true that animals are not destroying the environment the way human beings are, but mostly, I think, it is because they don’t yet have the tools or engineering know-how. Donkeys will destroy any living thing to eat it, their pastures are barren of anything but grass. Goats are environmental marauders, any landscape around them soon bar. Cats slaughter countless numbers of innocent birds and rodents even when they are not hungry. It is just not true that all animals are environmental purists who love Mother Earth, in fact they will do almost anything to feed and shelter themselves, just as we do.

They are not acting out of evil intent, they are driven by instinct, not noble aspiration. Red does not do good therapy work because he loves and supports veterans, it is because it has become another form of work for him, like herding sheep.

So why do I love animals? I do not love all animals or all dogs. I love many animals.  I love their sense of acceptance, I love the donkeys’ empathy, I love the dog’s love and companionship, I love the independence and intelligence of my barn cats, I am quite fond of the chicken’s and their great industriousness. Simon and I have become the stuff of literature – the crazy man and the donkey setting off to understand the world together, partners in the game of chance. Red and I are intensely connected in many ways. None of them close to replicating Maria’s generosity, love, spirituality of spirit and great creativity. As many animals as I have and as many as I love, my life would be close to barren without the things she brings to my life.

This does not mean that these other people are wrong, and that I am correct, only that we have very different ways of perceiving animals. There is an almost politically correct mantra, a dogma these days that says we must love all animals, they are better than we are and our goal is to keep all of them alive at all costs and by any means. It is a powerful idea, one no animal is capable of conceiving.

I suppose my mantra is I love many animals, they are so different from us, they are so much alike. And I love what I am learning about their real lives, not my own romantic ideals of their lives.