Suicide is, in so many ways, a great excavator of the soul. If leaves so many dark and open holes. All day at the remembrance ceremony for Paul, I heard good and loving people try to figure out things that I tried to figure out, but were not explicable, that could never be known. Why did he kill himself? Why there? Did anyone know? Did he offer any reasons? Did he plan it? Was is a surprise? Wasn’t he happy and love, not only with his wife, but with life itself, with so many people, his friends who loved him, with the horses, with justice and the mind?
The wise men said Paul was still there, still around this beautiful tree where he took his own life, in sight of the farm and the farmhouse. The wise men and women said he needed to go, that the ceremony would release him, release his spirit from the life of the farm. Leaving the ceremony, I stopped with Maria and we turned to look at the tree, to say our final goodbye to Paul.
Knowing little of these things myself, I accept the words of the wise men, I opened my heart and mind, both seemed so meager and small against these big questions. Could I find my friend Paul in all of this? Could we ever say goodbye, really? How best to do the work of the day: to let go.
As I looked, I was rewarded for my patience. I saw all kinds of light streaming across the field where Paul died. I picked up the camera, it was dark. In my darkened study, tired from the sun and the drive, I turned out the lights and turned on the photo enhancement program I used once in awhile – it is called a detail extractor – and it finds and recovers the original image of the photograph as captured on my Lexar Professional 1066x 32 Gigabyte flash card.
My detail extractor does not lie, it gets to the truth of the photo, what the camera captured, the light and detail that was on the disc, then softened by digital software. In a way, the truth of the photo. Here, maybe was Paul moving on, telling all of us to let go. Sometimes there is truth in accepting what we can’t know, can’t see, can’t really understand. Sometimes true genius comes from understanding just how much we do not know and will never know.
Leave it there, I said a hundred times today. Leave it there. This is the best we can do, and sometimes that is very good.
“You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one”
John Lennon, Imagine.
Blue Star Equiculture’s memorial to Paul Moshimer, who tragically took his own life just six weeks ago, was one of the most moving and memorable experiences of my life. A five hour ceremony in the strong sunshine of a clear summer day in a working-class farm outside of Palmer, Massachusetts, it drew legions of very real and moving and stricken and loving people.
There were writers and poets, dog wardens and prison guards, teamsters New York carriage drivers, opera and folk singers, recovering addicts, teachers and nurses, truck drivers and firefighters, horse lovers, neighbors, emotionally disabled children, carpenters and housewives, secretaries and doctors, animal lovers and artists, it was an event framed by an astonishingly articulate, creative and compassionate young people, all of whom vowed to keep the faith at Blue Star, and work to the end to build and different and more loving world.
Paul had so many friends, so many hearts and souls that he touched.
I wish you could have been there, I wish everyone could have been there.
A grave event in many ways, it did nothing but lift up the people who came.
I saw the hope and the future, for Blue Star, and perhaps for the rest of us. Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach and her community, her very proud and beautiful face marked by grief and sorrow, managed to create an event that was heartbreaking but never maudlin, that was piercingly honest but always hopeful, that celebrated a life rather than mourn and lament a loss. It was sad, it was fun, it was life itself. Life, death, life. It was about life.
We all shared water from the river that flows through Blue Star, we walked in a line to the tree where he died. We all said goodbye in our own many diverse ways. The New York Carriage drivers – many of their horses retire to Blue Star – offered an especially wrenching tribute – a collage of Paul’s photographs, a hand carved sign from a homeless man in New York. “You are us, we are you,” said Stephen Malone, who has been one of the leaders of the long battle against the banning of the carriage trade in New York City.
Paul was so much loved, he meant so many things to so many different people, it was hard to believe he knew how important he was to so many others, it is difficult to imagine how he could have thought to leave all of us behind of his own hand.
The mother of an emotionally challenged child who volunteered at Blue Star came up to me in tears and asked me: “could he really have taken his own life if he knew how much my son loved him and needed him?” I said I couldn’t answer that, no one can, we will never really know, we are not medicine men. The art of saying goodbye, I suggested, was to let go of the idea that we would ever understand the full and awesome truth of it.
My choice was to accept Paul, I said, his friendship and all of his goodness and choices. And to leave it there. The rest is just not up to me, I am not any kind of God.
One person after another, young and old, stood up to testify that Paul gave them confidence, encouraged them, changed the course of their lives. It was as if he had a magic wand that could life the spirits and give hope to everyone but himself.
The word that keeps coming to my mind for the ceremony was real. Everybody was real. People spoke for more than four hours, at least half that time taken up by the young volunteers who have swarmed to Blue Star and their beloved horses. One after the other stood to thank Paul Moshimer – and Pamela, they said how much he had meant to them, how much he had taught and inspired them, what the horses had meant for them. It was all of the idealism and caring and passion we would hope for from our leaders, our teachers, ourselves, and so rarely see. In a ways, our world has failed this people, our future, but never diminished their hearts and faith. I think Paul and Pamela kept that alive.
And how could we forget that the context of this beautiful ceremony in the cruel and continuing persecution of the farmers, the carriage drivers, the horses and the working animals, the elephants and the ponies, the poor and the elderly, the people who live with animals, under siege and living in fear all over the country? This was Paul’s cause, as it has become mind, he was deeply concerned about it. It hovered over the ceremony, it contributed to his anxiety and depression.
There was no pretension, posturing, faux psychiatry, convention wisdom, moralizing or cant. There were no cliches or laments. Much eloquence out of the mouths of simple, very real people. The ceremony was very much faithful to traditions in the Quaker and Native People’s practice, it was a celebration of the real life of a very real human being.
But it was also wrapped in the future. a spiritual gift that took tragedy and spun it into color and light.
“We are not going to live the lives our parents have lived,” vowed Loretta, an artist living in Worcester and working regularly at the farm. “We are not surrendering our lives, we want to make something better.” Young workers and volunteers and students and friends of Blue Star stood up to speak about their love of the horses, their aching for a better, more just and compassionate world, for people and for the horses and for Mother Earth and the animals of the world.
Speaking for myself, these are the people I am happy to stand with and behind, to get out of the way and give them the reins not only of the horses, but the better way Paul dreamed of and he and Pamela have helped create at their small farm in Palmer, Mass., already a holy site to many people.
Pamela spoke poignantly and honestly about Paul, who hung himself in the big and beautiful pine tree that was a backdrop to the memorial. She said she had gone out West to talk to Native American counselors and healers and medicine men, and they told her that Paul had not left the farm, was still there. Pamela said the ceremony was inspired, in part, to release Paul. He was loved and mourned, but he had chosen his path, it was time for him to go, and for life to go on, she said. Pamela said he had been in great pain from spinal arthritis and was wrestling with ghosts and demons from his past.
I was deeply touched and surprised, as always, that so many people came up to me and Maria introduced themselves and said how much this blog means to them, how much our farm and work means to them. They said I sometimes spoke their hearts in words they did not have. I hope this is so, this is the dream of any writer, the point and the purpose of words. This was humbling, and I thank all of you who feel that way. I love my blog and am committed to it.
When it was over, I was surprised that more than four hours of remembrance, gratitude and celebration had gone by, I thought it was just a few minutes. That could not be said of too many lives. I could have withstood much more. I can’t say I know where Paul is, or where he wants to go, I just don’t know. The medicine men at the ceremony may know. I hope he is released from the pain and sorrows of real life, I hope he is free and without pain now. I hope the very beautiful ceremony brought release and healing to Pamela is well, she is very much loved and honored in her own right. Blue Star, in a very real sense, was resurrected in the days and weeks after Paul’s death, it is a light unto the world, a promise for a better tomorrow.
Blue Star is becoming a new kind of holy place, it calls us to honor our love of one another, of the animals of the world, of Mother earth itself. The young are the future of our world, their vision is powerful. There, they practice what they preach. I am committed to helping to tell the story of Blue Star and to using my words to help their cause. That is a perfect remembrance for Paul.
This, a time when the people of Blue could have been broken, their dreams shattered, when they could have turned away or fled, is instead a time when they are standing fast and could really use all of the help and support they can get. I am happy to stand with them.
“A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare
to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.” – Aberjihani, Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry.
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Pamela graciously asked me to speak and Paul’s remembrance, and this is what I said there, my goodbye to my friend Paul:
I called Paul “Lord Moshimer.” He was a big man, he seemed sometimes to be larger than life. In his former life he was a fire chief and First Responder, he knew how to rescue people and things. It was perhaps natural that he and Pamela became a larger than life couple, found one another and devoted themselves to the redemption and nurture of horses and a better way of living in the world.
When I first met Paul, I could hardly believe his presence and charisma. Some days he looked like Moses coming down from the mount, on others he reminded me of Lord Nelson standing on the deck of his flagship, white hair streaming in the wind, sailing off to challenge the Spanish Armada.
Sometimes he seemed otherworldly to me. I did not know him as long as many of you here, or as well, but in the time we knew one another, he became my brother. He was a part of my family, I became a part of his.
Paul sent me a message one day, he said he was excited to be my friend, he knew that we would do great things together. I loved him for saying that.
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I am so sorry Paul did not get to read Pope Francis’s very powerful encyclical on the future of the earth, the first thing I thought when I read it was that I wished he had seen it, it would have given him hope for his own dreams, for the future of the horses and all of the animals, for his beloved Mother Earth, for Pamela, for his daughters, for the young people of Blue Star, for whom he lived and worked day and night.
We are all connected to each other, Paul told me again and again. He would have loved the vision of Pope Francis, he spoke Paul’s heart.
“Everything is related,” wrote Francis in “Laudato Si,”and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.”
Paul was a spiritual man, I believe, not a religious man, he worshiped the idea of the better man, the peaceful man, the loving man, the kind and gentle man. He heard the call of the horses for harmony and to heed the wounded cries of our Mother, the earth.
Thomas Paine might been writing about Paul when he wrote “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”
Paul suffered greatly, that was also evident in his face and bearing. As much as he wanted peace for the world, he could not find found peace in his restless soul. He was never satisfied with himself, as much as he never judged others. If we own nothing else, we own our lives. Paul leaves us in his own time and in his own way, and there is something as fitting about that as it is awful. He pursued his principles unto death.
Paul and I had bonded in many ways, one of the most enduring connections was our mutual anguish over the cruelty and rage he witnessed, over the abandonment of the horses, the persecution of farmers, the poor, people who lived with working animals, people who struggle to care for them.
Paul saw that we needed a better understanding of animals than this, a better love of human beings than this. He believed that we had to be better than this: in the name of animals, in the name of people, in the name of the earth.
That was the Next Step, The Third Way, the idea behind Blue Star that he and Pamela shared so passionately. This was the great work he imagined for us. We live, he believed, in fond affection for brother sun, sister moon, brother river, mother earth. And for our brothers and sisters.
So this is a man worth considering and remembering, an idea that deserves to live. It is not for me to judge or even comprehend how he chose to say goodbye, but goodbyes always have two sides to them, and I have the right to mine. Go in peace and compassion Paul, I pray that you find what you want and need in whatever world and space you have chosen to occupy. I know that some day, in a time and place of your own choosing, when we meet once again, it will be in that better place, the world of your dreams and passions, a world of your visions and firm heart.
There, the better man and woman will live and prosper, not in dominance and conquest, not in a patriarchy any longer but in the community of men and women and the brotherhood of humans and animals and in devotion to Mother Earth, whose broken heart calls out to us all.
Paul, you and Pamela planted some powerful seeds, they will grow and grow and grow. Just look around here today, they already are.
There, in that world, you will find a way to say goodbye, to me, to the legions of people who loved you and needed you, to Pamela, the powerful army of the young that you nurtured and guided here, to the horses you came to love so much.
I will try and live up to your hopes for me. There is great work to do, I can hardly think of a better way to remember you.
Thank you all, for your presence here. There is no better way to honor Paul and to remember him than to help Blue Star fulfill it’s promise and his dream.
