I’ve seen the people at Blue Star work great magic on horses that are beaten, starved, tortured and abandoned (horses that are really abused, not like the New York Carriage Horses, who are not), but I’ve never seen a more dramatic example of horse magic than the work Pamela, her late husband Paul, and the workers at Blue Star Equiculture have done on Sarge.
Sarge is a 17-year-old blind trail horse who was taken to Blue Star from the Dorset, Vermont, Equine Rescue group. Paul came to Vermont to get him, and I saw him there a few days later, he was skittish, wary, uncertain. I didn’t recognize him at first, he is a pack leader now, he has a bunch of girl friends, he sat calmly while Pamela brushed and fed him and I came up and touched him on the head and nose, he barely moved. A new puppy skittered around his feet and the other big horses, tied up to for feeding, bumped into him and brushed up against him.
It was a very poignant thing to see how Sarge has adapted, how calm and affectionate he is, how much a part of the herd he is. Pamela says he has changed the dynamic of the big horses at Blue Star, they know him and welcome him and treat him well. And, she says, he is a big heartthrob, the girls love him.
He has no eyesight, but it is as if he can see.
He is a very content animal. He was minutes away from slaughter, Dorset Rescue saved him and Blue Star has given him a permanent home. Pamela told me it costs $700 or $800 a week to grain the big horses at Blue Star. You can help by joining their herd. It’s a good cause, we waste so much money fighting about the happy and safe horses pulling carriages in Central Park, there are so many Sarge’s out there, heading to slaughter auctions every day.
We can get our priorities right. Instead of giving money to organizations that do not help animals, we can support those that do.
Mithra’s garden is shockingly, almost magically, huge. I cannot believe how it has grown since I was last at Blue Star, just a week or so ago. The draft horses on the farm plow the fields, he pushes a water tank with a pump around the garden to water it, young volunteers help him plant and weed, but the garden is an amazing place, given that Mithra has only been there for a couple of months. I could hardly see the end of it is, it is nourishing and beautiful miracle, an affirmation of life.
This is Mithra’s tent, out by his garden. This is his sleeping place all summer. He is at peace there, he reads, sleeps, writes, he does not get lonely, friends and others come by to visit him. The tent usually, but not always, keeps the rain out.
This is the first of a series of posts I want to write about a young man I visited today at a remarkable place, Blue Star Equiculture. I believe his story is important, I think it speaks to way we treat one another, to the power of animals in our lives and the need to keep them among us. It speaks of a better way, the way the next generation might save the earth. I believe acceptance and a new consciousness of tolerance and harmony is emerging – in just a few weeks, Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the victory of the New York Carriage Horses over those who would banish them from the city, the removal of Confederate flags from government buildings, the ratification of personal freedom in marriage and commitment, the acceptance of good people like Caitlyn Jenner.
“When human beings fail to find their true place in this world,” wrote Pope Francis in Laudato Si, “they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.”
And this is what is special about Mithra. He has found his true place in this world, he says, in his garden. He believes the earth is a gift to man, who must use it with respect for the purpose for which it was given. He respects the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.
I believe Mithra, who celebrates humility and simplicity, is the future, the way forward. So is Blue Star.
Mithra Kulatunga is 24 years old, he was born in the United States. When he was two his father, a farm manager, moved his family back to Sri Lanki where he spent the next 18 years running a farm in the rural gown of Matara. Mithra came back to the United States a few years ago to attend the University of Massachusetts and earn a degree in sustainable farming.
Last year, Mithra took a Blue Star course in agriculture and draft horses, and was mesmerized by the Blue Star idea. He loves the United States, but not the stress of life here or the runaway consumerism and corporatism. He has no wish for a life behind a desk, worrying about money for his retirement. He wants to work outdoors, inventing a new kind of sustainable farming. He hopes to return to Blue Star every year to tend his garden.
Mithra says he felt a powerful call from the horses there. They changed him, he said. When Paul Moshimer, the co-director of the farm, died two months ago, Mithra came to the farm and asked Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach if she needed help running the farm’s composting system and helping to create and expand their new garden. He was hired. Pamela did not imagine or expect so beautiful and mystical a garden.
Mithra works and sleeps in the shadow of the beautiful 400-year-old tree where Paul Moshimer took his own life, Mithra loves it there, he is pleased to work and sleep alongside of it.
Since Mithra came to Blue Star, he has spent four or five days a week living and sleeping in the garden as he builds it. The garden is spectacular now, it has grown to several acres, including rows and rows of flowers and vegetables. Mithra sleeps in a tent by the garden shed, he eats what he grows in the garden, shale and cucumber and shard, and cooks his food on a portable stove. He works all day and into the night, planting, seeding, plowing, weeding, pulling. Once a day, he goes into the farmhouse to eat or wash up.
Every morning, he wants down to the river and sits by the Peace Pole, the spiritual heart of the farm. Sometimes he sits there, sometimes he swims.
In the evening, at dusk, he pulls out a plank of wood and sits in a small lawn chair and writes at his makeshift desk. He has a journal of planting, a record of what he plants, how it grows, how big it gets, how healthy it is. His father told him that a real farmer, one worthy of respect, writes down a record of his garden, simple laborers just work the soil. So he writes faithfully.
In the morning, the sun rises over his tent around 6:30, when he gets up, eats breakfast and goes to work, watering, digging, planting. When he got the job, he bought $32 worth of seeds, the rest have been donated by friends of Blue Star or people in the town of Palmer, Massachusetts. Every day, people come to walk along the river, run with their dogs, see his garden. Several of the volunteers at Blue Star come by to help him.
Raised a Buddhist, Mithra talks eloquently of his spiritual life. He talks of the “suffering of desire” caused by the perpetual wanting more and bigger things, and of the “suffering of life,” the Buddhist acceptance of death and suffering as a part of life, not as an unimaginable and unpredictable shock. Suffering, he says, is both inevitable and predictable, it is an elemental part of the human experience.
In his life, he seeks Nirvana, a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and where people may be released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. Nirvana represents the final goal of Buddhism.
Mithra is important. He will not devote his life to making money, he says, but to learning how to farm, to helping to heal the land, and learning at Blue Star how to love people, animals and the earth. He hates no one, his time is not spent in argument and acquisition. His father is a farm manager, and he hopes to succeed him on the farm in Sri Lanka. He says his ambition is to treat the workers on the farm in the same way Blue Star has treated him. “I am supported here, I am part of a community, everyone has my back. When Pamela hired me, she said it didn’t matter if all I grew all summer was a rotten tomato, that would be fine. She just wanted me to try.”
That he says, has liberated him from fear and caution and dedicated him to his already spectacular garden. “I don’t have to worry about being fired,” he said, “I just have to do my work.” That idea has worked, perhaps beyond anyone’s imagination. Support is a great motivator, an idea that perished in the corporate takeover of much of American business.
But support is Blue Star idea. It rises from the conflict and argument that has hovered over the animal world like a storm. It is a new awakening, a movement to love people and animals, and to heal Mother Earth, as we are all called to do. The time for argument and delay and greed, say all of the wise and spiritual people of the world, is past. It is not enough to make more money and build more buildings. It is not acceptable to drive the animals out of our everyday life, Mithra knows we need them, they are part of all of it. We will either live in harmony or perish together.
Mithra is not alone at Blue Star, there are many like him, attracted to this vision of a more meaningful world and life, a life in community and acceptance, a life with animals, a life of re-connection to the earth and the natural world. This is important, so I’ll be writing about Mithra and his very magical garden this week. Thanks for reading about it.
