Every morning we have a new face waiting for us at the gate, Chloe the pony. She is a sweetheart, and willful and independent, just like her human. We got some very good fly stuff, some drops to put on her neck and body and legs, some spray to use when Maria rides her. Has already made a big difference.
I am proud and excited to have a dog who blows bubbles. Fate saw water for the first time today and seemed to think she was a duck or a frog. She kept sticking her head into the water up to her ears, and a stream of loud and gurgly bubbles would come up to the surface. Scott and I could hardly believe it. Maybe I should change her name to Bubbles. I hate to think what will happen when she learns to swim.
She was trying to herd the catfish, I think, he was as big as she is.
Fate hit Pompanuck Farm like a typhoon this afternoon on her first visit to my friend Scott Carrino. She has never seen water until today. The first thing she did was jump into a goldfish pond, was then shocked to find her feet were not on the ground. Scott had to pull her out. Undeterred, she headed for Scott’s prized vegetable garden and ate an onion – first time I’ve seen Scott terrified. Then she found the big goldfish and catfish pond and she tore around it a half dozen times, tried to eat the fish food, went nose to nose with a big catfish, blew bubbles (back to that in a minute) and then climbed out onto a plastic swimming board, which then sailed out into the pond.
Fate froze and had no idea what to do, I called for her to come and she jumped off of the board and made it to the shore.
But the most amazing thing she did was blow bubbles. She stuck her head into the water, and blew bubbles to the surface. I never saw a dog do that or head of a dog doing that. She had such a grand time racing around I put a leash on her and she fell over on my foot and went to sleep. Fate loves Pompanuck, if I can keep her out of the garden she will be welcome back.
We crossed paths with a deer yesterday, and the deer bled and died, as happens when they cross paths with human beings, w e escaped harm to ourselves but not to our car. Deers are simple and gentle things, but they can do fearful harm to people and cars, they seem to never really get used to living with us.
I wrote about the deer incident, but since then, I have been struck by the idea of wisdom: where we get it, who gives it to us, how much we need it, how little of it there is in our own culture.
Socrates said the only true wisdom is to understand that we know nothing. But Socrates is long gone, and the chowderheads raging at one another on cable news programs don’t really work for me. I am not a member of the left or the right. I could only imagine Socrates looking for wisdom on the smartphones and tablets of Americans.
By the time we got home, we already had a number of quite beautiful messages and texts from friends, and it wasn’t until later in the day that I realized every single one of them contained wisdom from Native or Asian peoples, none of it came from western culture, or from the culture we live in.
Three was a message from one friend sending us links to deer medicine – what it means when you cross paths with them, why they are so important, why it matters whether they come from the left or the right.
There were several on Facebook linking to Native People’s love of the deer and appreciation of their spirits. Two more quoting Native American medicine men talking of the spirits of animals. One from a Chinese poet, one from a Persian poet.
I got three messages from friends who live outside of those cultures, who live in contemporary American and Western culture, they were all about how to choose a good body shop, how to deal with insurance companies. The very nice state trooper came up to me and asked me if Maria and I were okay. His only advice was to remind me that the insurance companies were responsible for getting police reports, not me. “Be sure and make them get the reports,” he advised, and went back to his patrol car.
Before I left I asked him if he sees a lot of dead deer. “Oh, boy,” he said, “every day.”
These messages from other cultures gave us all kinds of ways to think about our deer encounter, to think of the deer as something other than roadkill or trash, to feel better about this disturbing thing that happened, to see it clearly and keep it in perspective. And to remember that a deer is a living thing, a spirit, and the death of one means something. Killing a deer is not a big deal in our world, deers are run over and hunted all of the time, yet it was a big deal to us, we needed some wisdom and guidance to help us think about it, feel about it, and move away from it.
It seems in our society we process little and respect little and have rituals for few things, we just rush to get back to worrying about money.
I saw by evening that we were still unsettled, troubled, still trying to sort the unexpected day out. Those Native messages helped us, there was nowhere in our world to look. In our world, the medicine men have been driven underground, marginalized, trivialized, pushed to the edges of life.
I wonder why we almost always seek our wisdom outside of our own world’s, why we always go outside of our own cultures for the guidance we need. Maria is deeply enmeshed in the wisdom of Native People’s, and in Eastern philosophy and healing as well. It has worked so well for her, and for me as well, although I am more restless about it. She rarely gets much guidance or wisdom from the West.
In part, I think this wisdom is important because other cultures – the Native People’s in particular – were always closer to nature than Westerners, they always thought about Mother Earth, protected it, revered it, sang about it., noticed every detail of it. We seem to care most about money and security and conquests of one kind or another. But the Indians thought deeply about their world, paid close attention to it, and did not live their lives in the new slavery, laboring in work we hate for people who care little for us or about us. Their medicine men, philosophers and thinkers and poets were important, they lived in the center of life, not on the fringes.
For all they suffered, the Native People’s never forgot Mother Earth, never abandoned their bonds with the animals. In our world, we have disconnected from both, we pay for it every day, body and soul.
In the world around me, there is no emotionalizing about deer, no wisdom to be passed along. This week, we had a snake killed by a lawn mower, we found a baby rabbit slaughtered by the barn cats, we killed a deer in our car. A lot of death. we thought. But there is almost nowhere in our culture to go to find wisdom about the meaning of life and the animals we think we share the world with, but really don’t. In New York, the developers can’t even stand to have carriage horses working happily in their park in New York, they want all the animals gone.
Within minutes of our accident, a family came by to take the deer home and use the meat for the winter. There was a wisdom in that, but it was very matter-of-fact, hurried, without any ritual or ceremony. We were glad the deer would have another life, but it was also apparent the deer mean nothing more than that, stood for nothing other than a meal.
We are a Corporate Nation now, our culture and media – and political system – have been taken over by profit making corporations that only care about money. Wisdom does not sell, it is hard to package and market. A country whose culture is up for sale is cold and empty at it’s heart. No wisdom to be found in a profit and loss statement.
All the messages we receive in our lives from the outside world are about money, security, conflict, weather, fear and violence. Those are things that do sell and can be marketed. The moment the deer died all of our focus was on money and companies – which auto body shop, how much would insurance pay, would I need a new car and how much of it would the insurance cover, how much would a rental cost, how much of it would be covered.
There was more to it than that, there is more to it than that.
In our culture, poets and medicine men would never make it to the evening news, never get on cable, would not sell enough books to interest a commercial publisher any longer, would never be on a TV show or movie. Some of them live on the outer realms of YouTube, you can find some if you look long enough. But the quiet seekers and thinkers and the philosophers of the world have been driven to the edge, to the margins in our world. There is no Plato or Socrates or wise medicine man in our culture, they just aren’t worth anything to us. We are too busy reading our text messages and amassing money for the great beyond.
The Corporate Nation found a way to make big money even off of the weather, perhaps they will soon find a way to market real wisdom. I was reminded yesterday that we need it, and we will go wherever we have to go to find it. And be grateful that it is there at all.
I see the colors of the garden as inner spirits, as radiant beings that reflect the things inside of us that want to come out, that want to be free. They are the beauty and magic of the world, the things that need to be set free.
