Day: October 12, 2013

I am fortunate to witness the great healing love between Minnie and Maria, Maria has taken up a lot of the care of Minnie, and is pouring love and attention on her as she heals from the attack on her which cost her a leg. Maria looks for every chance to take Minnie outside, sit with her on the couch, and this afternoon, Maria took Minnie out on the front porch to sit with her while she read. Minnie is getting louder and stronger by the day, she is learning to move on her three legs, she seems to be coming out of her shock and trauma. Minnie is also getting more verbal by the  day, I think she loves being inside, loves being with Maria and me and the dogs, loves getting the attention she seems to drink up.

Love is healing, I can see it every day,  Maria has a healing heart. We are both glad we decided to keep Minnie alive and are grateful for the experience of helping her heal. Now, onto the stool-softening medication.

Today was supposed to be the last meeting of the Art of The Blog class I’m teaching at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, N.Y., but we are extending the class a bit. The Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop that I taught went on for two years, it was a great experience for me. This one can’t go that long, but the group is off to a great start. Every Saturday morning, it has become a ritual for me to photograph the connection between Lisa Dingle, one of the students, and Red, who is the workshop dog. The light finds these two and shines on their connection.

Lisa is a gifted writer, her blog is already come to life and is capturing wonderful slices of the human experience. In the coming weeks, I’ll post some of the blogs of the other students in the group, they are really coming along well. I believe blogs are giving voice go a whole new generation of writers who are bypassing the constipated and restricted old system of commercial publishing. Their work is increasingly vibrant and different and exciting. Lisa drives four hours each way to the class from Massachusetts and she has become a friend, she is focused and determined and open, she will accomplish what she sets out to do.

I learned long ago that these connections between people and my animals have meaning, I am not ever really sure what it is.

The old farmers here call these days, these last days of leaves the “Days Of Grace,” the peaceful time of transition between summer and color and light and sunshine and the hard winters. The Farmer’s Almanac says this will be a hard winter, and I have not found the Farmer’s Almanac to be especially accurate in it’s predictions, but lots of people  hold to it and swear by it. I like the idea of “Days Of Grace”, I realized today I don’t have too much more time left to try and capture it.

Each morning, just before breakfast, we take Minnie’s hood off, open the crate, she hobbles and hops around the sofa and lies down on the dog bed where Frieda lies. This morning, I decided it was time Frieda dealt with Minnie’s presence in the house, Frieda has enormous prey drive and often tries to chase the cats if she can. I have little doubt that she would kill them if she caught them. Frieda needs to know when something is part of the household, then she evolves and protects it rather than hunts it.

I let Frieda in and she came to Maria and I saw her trembling – she was aroused and excited at the presence of Minnie on her bed. She leaned up against Maria and instead of tension and pursuit, I saw a tableau of love. Frieda was seeking Maria’s reassurance, Minnie was calm and resting, Maria was signaling to both of them that this was all right, it was part of life now. We will do this once or twice a day under supervision until Minnie has healed and is back outside resuming her life as a barn cat.

Dogs evolve, dogs adapt, dogs permit us to guide them. We have to give Frieda a chance to succeed as well as fail, and she invariably does. In dog training, trainers learn quickly that most people give their dogs many chances to fail, few to succeed.

There is beauty everywhere if I open my eyes to it, even a fall morning with the dew on the window filtering out the colors of the barn and rising sun.