The temperate went well into the 90’s this afternoon, it was hot and humid. The heat wave is expected to last through Thursday evening. I got wise today, I went for a walk with Maria and Fate early this morning, then did some sheep-herding before it got too hot. Fate is doing very well, she is getting stronger and more assertive with the sheep, who continue to challenge her.
I turned on the air conditioner in my study, wrote up a storm. I worked on my book, “Talking To Animals,” and wrote on the blog. I kept looking for photos that reflected heat, and then, in the late afternoon, a daisy in a vase on my study windowsill caught the afternoon sun. I had my heat photo, the daisy fairly radiated it.
In his encyclical, Pope Francis calls upon the people who use air conditioners to think about turning them off. This is where the petal hits the metal, if I did not have an air conditioner in my bedroom, I would not be sleeping tonight. Can I make that sacrifice? Is this one we all will be making one day? I’ve used it once all summer, but I was planning on turning it on tonight and getting into bed.
I am not certain if I can do that. That is a spoiled American, I suppose.
Last night, and all day, I have been getting messages via e-mail about Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who admitted to killing Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. He has apologized and sent a letter to his patients, and to the public he said he believed the hunt was legal, and he deeply regretted participating in it. Many people do not believe he is sincere.
On Facebook, I was tagged in a score or more petitions denouncing Dr. Palmer, urging a ban on bow hunting in Africa, asking the federal government to ban the important of lion heads into America. Dr. Palmer was forced by an outpouring of threats and outrage on Facebook to take down his social media pages, he has closed his office for the past few days. Local police say he has received too many death threats to count. Many thousands of people, all of them safe behind their keyboards, have vowed to kill him, burn his offices, track down and threaten his patients, force him to leave his home.
For now, at least, Palmer’s life appears to have been ruined, but the digital mob swirling around the story wants much more blood than that.
I should be clear that people are, of course, free to express their outrage in any legal way they wish. I am not telling other people what to do, I am only writing about what I feel comfortable doing. I suspect it is not what many wish to hear. In our time, harming animals is an outrage, harming people in their name is a virtue. To me, both are an outrage.
Outrage is a very personal thing, and the story of Cecil is a horrible one. I cannot imagine anyone paying $55,000 for the privilege of killing a lion in such a cruel way and bringing home it’s head. Cecil was hit by a bow and arrow shot by Palmer and suffered for 40 hours before another killer shot him, skinned him, and cut his head off.
From the brief things I have read about Dr. Palmer, he has a controversial past, and he did a stupid and vicious thing. It is not for me to judge his character on Facebook. There are many volunteers for that, hundreds, if not thousands, of sites. It’s one of those stories that makes me sad to be a man.
I can’t imagine a woman doing what Palmer did. Animals pay every day for our ignorance and cruelty. I am sorry to see the tragic death of an animal used to rationalize and support so much hatred of a human being, this has become increasingly common.
The doctor has responded appropriately, I have no way of judging his truthfulness or sincerity. He has apologized, explained how it happened, promised not to do it again. He has no real excuse, but then, I am not God. In Zimbabwe, hunting is legal, I do not know what was in his head. I do not care to join the enraged and righteous throngs sitting at their computers and smartphones trashing him any further and seeking to threaten him and destroy his life. I do not grasp how this will help a single animal.
I hate very few things in this world, but mobs are one of them. I will never stand alongside any mob, no mob has ever served the interests of justice or humanity, mobs are the refuge of the coward, an awful side creation of the Internet that does vastly more harm than good. Mobs have no conscience or reason, they are like tornadoes, they simply destroy what is in front of them.
Dr. Palmer deserves a lot of condemnation, and if he broke the law, he deserves more than that. I hope the government does move to ban animal trophies imported by vain and macho American hunters, this incident seems a disgraceful violation of the ethical code of the hunters that I know. That was the one petition I was happy to sign. I think it is clear that what the doctor did was outrageous, he does not need any more enraged messages from me, and I was sorry to think that so many people assumed I would be eager grab a torch and march on his Facebook Page.
Twitter bravery is not real bravery, mobs are not about justice. Tweets are not acts of courage or mercy. Mobs, by definition, are incapable of rational or individual judgement or thought. They are mobs, collectives, inevitably beyond control. They de-humanize their targets, they turn people who do bad things into monsters, and once de-humanized, they exist outside of the moral community and any angry or cruel behavior towards them is justified. There is no due process or system of fairness in any mob.
But for me, a mob is worse than most, if not all of the crimes it seeks to punish. Condemnations are never enough for mobs, there is never enough blood to satisfy them. Digital outrage is cheap and anonymous, it means little and does little good. Dr. Palmer’s trip reminds me that we need a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals than this, animals do not exist for this purpose, this is one of the valid goals of the increasingly extremist animal rights movement, to protect animals from this kind of deprivation. Cecil had the right to be spared this awful fate.
As to Dr. Palmer, I draw the line here. Everyone has to do what seems right for them. Palmer seems genuinely sorry, stunned by what happened. He has apologized and says he has learned from his dreadful mistake. He has the right to live his life. If he has broken the law, he has to deal with the law. That’s enough for me.
Mobs murder persons in their own way, they kill personhood, as fragile a thing as the body sometimes. The history of mobs is as horrendous as the story of Cecil, it is one of the most awful legacies of the human experience. I am proud to have never joined one, and I will not join this one.
A moral law I have always followed: The mob is never the right place for me to be.
“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.” – Joseph Campbell, Reflections On The Art Of Living.
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One of my first jobs in journalism was as a police reporter – in Atlantic City, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. I had a big red press card I stuck in my car visor, and a police radio in my car, an incredible thrill for a kid the age of 21. There were no cell phones yet, I often beat the police to the scene of an accident. That was a horrifying thing, sometimes, but I got used to it. I was a strange sight, I imagine, an eager kid in my battered old VW bug, often the last human being the poor people saw. Sometimes there were bodies in the road, women, men, children, sometimes they were in their cars.
I have always appreciated the police and first responders for dealing with the horrible things they see, they are never appreciated enough. I had to give it up after five or six years, I was getting too comfortable with it. I was drinking too much after work.
It was not unusual for people to die in my arms – this was before high-tech trauma centers – or with me sitting beside them on the ground, getting their final statements before leaving the world or rushing to a hospital. I remember actually asking people if they had any final thoughts or last words, reporting is like that, even the ghoulish and unimaginable seems normal after awhile. I loved it, God help me.
I remember one elderly man in Philadelphia, his car had collided head-on with a truck. I knew he was dying, he was in terrible shape, he told me to tell his wife and daughter that he loved them both – I took notes, it was a good story, I wrote with one hand and held his bloody hand with the other. Then he told me, “hey, kid, do yourself a favor, don’t get old.” And he died.
That was my first experience with what I call “old talk”, now I hear it all the time. I heard it again in my hospice work. And after my open heart surgery. And on the street. Getting old is not for the faint of heart. At our age. Now that we are getting older. I have to spend the next years taking care of my parents, they’re getting older. We’re not as young as we used to be. How’s your health?
Old talk is not healthy talk, at least not for me. I do not talk about my health with people outside of my family, I don’t talk about my medications, or their side affects – except on the blog, sometimes. I don’t complain about aches and pains, I don’t complain about getting older, not out loud. It is just not how I define myself. I don’t take senior discounts for movies or cups of coffee, there are many younger people needier than me. Thomas Merton wrote about the stage of life where one is beginning to be old. That’s where I am.
Needless to say, I have very few friends my own age. I don’t have much to talk about with them.
Old talk nearly killed me last year, whenever I told anyone I was having trouble breathing while walking up even a slight incline, the response was always the same: of course you’re having trouble, you’re getting older. My nurse said you’re full of shit, you’re having a heart attack, you’re not too old to walk. And she sent me to the hospital.
The thing is I am getting older. I will be 68 years old in a couple of weeks. For most of my life, if I heard somebody say they were 68, I imagined they were two steps away from the grave. People that age were spent, in my mind, they were done. They were surely old to me. People tell me that the 60’s are the new 50’s, and the 70’s are the new 60’s. I am a bullshitter myself, don’t imagine I will be any younger dressing reality up like that. Getting old is getting old, there is no new or old way to do it, no matter how much the Boomers would like to change the nature of life.
So I’ve decided to write an occasional journal, I’m calling it Dancing To The Grave: A Journal Of Growing Old To The End. I’ll write it every now and then, like the Recovery Journal, when the mood strikes me. I do not dwell on getting older, but I do think it might be useful to share the experience. And I will share it right up to the end, or the end of my ability to think, type or write. I intend to be long gone before then, my final act of authenticity and identity.
How can I not write about it? It is a part of my life. I will share stories, anecdotes, observations. I will be honest.
What is getting older like for me? Well, it is true that I am not getting any younger, my body brings me the news regularly. Anyone can get sick, but health problems are the sport of the elderly, a major industry. Just look at the waiting rooms of doctors. Sometimes my feet hurt, other times my back. Gravity is the companion of the aging, Woody Allen was correct when he says the body begins to wear out. Just how fast depends on how well you take care of yourself before hand, and since the young understandably have no conception about getting old, very few people really do the advance work. I didn’t. I smoked until my mid-30’s, my cardiologist says that was perhaps the primary reason I needed heart surgery.
I didn’t believe the talk about smoking when I was 30, I thought I was one of the Avengers.
Aging teaches me acceptance. I nap more frequently, I don’t get on ladders, or pick up too many bales of hay. I don’t want to ride a horse, it’s too big of a fall. People open doors for me, offer me seats on the subway, offer me discounts. Sometimes, bending over requires a strategy, so does kneeling down to take a photograph. It is easy enough to get down, not so easy to get up. Teenaged cashiers call me sir, they look right through me. Sometimes if I need something upstairs, I ask Maria to get it for me. My knees appreciate it.
My trips to the gym are humbling. I was proud of myself for doing 45 minutes on the treadmill until I watched the kids jogging in place at 30 miles an hour
The big lie about aging is that you have to stop living. Loving. Having sex. Having dreams. Changing your life. None of that is true, I can swear to it. My life began at age 61, it is changing and expanding and growing all of the time. To some extent, aging is a physical process beyond my individual control. That is the thing to accept. The fear culture in our society treats aging like a dread and mournful disease, it is easy enough to believe. It is not true, it is only a small part of the truth.
At some point, it is a mental and spiritual process very much under my control. That is my territory, my sweet zone, my discovery.
Old talk is poison, so is old thinking. At some point, as we get older, we become invisible, we vanish from the popular culture, we are not in movies, on TV, in books, except as dying or doddering and drooling and sexless old fools. Usually in these portrayals, we have lost our minds, we are sad and ridiculous caricatures, great burdens to everyone, including society. We are robbing the young with our many ailments, bankrupting the future. They want us to go away, but they don’t dare to kill us, so they warehouse in corporate aging facilities and make a lot of money off of our failing bodies and minds. We are valuable, but mostly for giving more money to pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
We can’t stop these characterizations of us, we can only live beyond them. The aging are the last free target for the insensitive and bigoted – we have little major buying power time left, the corporations can’t sell us anything but medicine and long-term health insurance, which most of us can’t afford – but nobody is going to define me that way either. It is true what prisoners of war say, the one thing nobody can take from you is your dignity.
Here’s the odd truth about my life as I approach my 68th birthday. I am healthier than ever. I am having sex more than ever. More people are reading my work than ever before, and in more mediums. I am writing better than ever, and more frequently. I am taking more good photos than ever. I am taking better care of myself than ever. I have more friends than ever. I am wiser than ever, some days I actually think I have learned some things worth knowing about myself and the world around me. I believe a lot of the bad genes, especially in men, die out when we get older.
People don’t generally listen to the wisdom of old people in our culture, we are not on any cable talk shows or magazine covers, but I have found a way around that: my blog. Hundreds of thousands of people read my blog every day, many of them have no idea how old I am or am not, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I have nearly as many young readers as old ones, a reality that would send the corporate marketers into shock.
So I will write about the process of growing older and try to bring some perspective to it. It is neither good nor bad, it is life. Joseph Campbell was correct, I think, the older I get the more I live in the moment. There is something wonderful about that.
Getting older is simply another chapter in life, one of the few places we shall all go. It is not one thing or another, it is many things. I still get to define myself. I know where I am, I know who I am, I have no need for denial. Getting older can be liberating, I am enjoying my life as much or more than ever. I found love at 61, no one can tell anybody else when they are done with love, and when I thought I was done with love, I was nearly dead. Love saved my life.
So I’m going to keep this journal going, hopefully to the very end. This blog is, after all, my living memoir, my great work. I don’t know of too many creative works that cover so much ground, and in real time. Kind of memoir, reality show, sitcom, I think. I don’t want to mislead you, my doctors tell me I should be around for a good long while.
I don’t want to raise false expectations.
Robert Frost wrote that the afternoon knows what the morning never suspected. It is a wonderful thing that the young do not know what we know, for which they must always be forgiven. If they did, they would be just as cautious and fearful and resigned as most of their elders are. If we often forget what it was like to be young, the young never get to learn what it is like to be old, not until they are not young any longer.
This is perhaps the real wisdom of Mother Nature. I plan to dance all the way to the grave, singing my song. Maria may have to help.
What kind of memoir leaves out the end of the story? Not mine.
The changing landscape of my life. This morning, as the heat approaches, two dogs, one of them a new image here, sit together waiting for the call to work. It seems so natural. Last year at this time, Lenore might have been in the photo, or Frieda, before that Rose or Izzy.
I do not mourn the past, I welcome the future, and celebrate every day I have been given to experience it.That is the nature of life, change, loss, gain, sorrow, joy, not different things but one thing.We are blessed with the opportunity to live.
I suppose it is the nature of my life, my story, in a way. Here, once more, approaching my 68th birthday on August 8, I am thinking about my life, about rebirth and change. I am beginning to be old. I have plenty of time to finish my work here, but not infinite time. My choices are important.
I am facing great change again in my life, as always, it is calling to me. I understand that at my age, change is the very opposite of what most people seek, I am used to being an anomaly, I am committed to becoming the human being I wish to be, I will work at it to my last breath. And I have a partner who is open to change and seeks a life of purpose. We will not live for money, we will live to keep our spirits alive.
And there is something new calling to me. It is impossible to sustain the current level of human consumption, wrote Pope Francis in his encyclical, “Laudato Si.” We share a common humanity, he wrote, we shall heal the world or perish together. I have been reading this extraordinary work ever since it was published last month, it comes at a time where great change and opportunity looms in my life, and with my life with Maria. I want to answer this call.
“Laudato Si” speaks to how I wish to live, it addresses some of the major goals remaining to me as approach my seventh decade of life. My life is still marked by clutter and waste, the life I wish to lives requires commitment and rebirth..
Like many people in this world, I am just beginning to fully grasp the schism that exists between what I want, and have had, and what I need, and will have. At certain times in my life, I have been confronted with choices – change my life or keep it as it is. Sometimes I have chosen stasis, sometimes change. I am with Maria now, and the construct of my life is different. We make these choices together, or not at all.
I reject the notion that change belongs only to the young. My greatest change in life came in my sixth decade, it is underway still.
It is difficult to change one’s life, I have experienced that and I appreciate it. I appreciate that most people cannot and will not change.
Having a partner who shares this passion for a meaningful life is new to me. Thank God for Maria. I cannot do this alone, not any more, not at my age. We both fear the enslavement of the modern world, living our lives for the illusion of security and safety. Hospice work has taught me not to live my life for the end of it. We week a creative life, a life with community, we wish to help heal the earth that we and our fellow human beings are damaging.
It is exciting and frightening now for us. Circumstance has brought us to the brink of great change, and we are talking day and night about what we believe, how we wish to live, how we need to change, preserve our creative life. To that I add my own personal goals – I want to live more simply, to live in accordance with what I need, not what I want. I want a spiritual life, a life of self-awareness, authenticity, connection.
Maria and I both are committed to our lives with animals, our dogs, donkeys, our pony and cats and chickens, we are committed to share our lives on our blogs, in our work, in my books and photos. I want to come to peace with the meaning of money in my life. I want to grasp that we live in a world of diminishing resources, and that I live in a greedy and arrogant country that takes more than it’s share, and hurts the poor people of the world, and the world itself. It is a country I love, and we all serve it in our own way.
My way is to practice honesty and compassion and to explore the light and color of the world for others. And to share the lessons of my life with people who wish to learn with me.
We spent four years working to keep the first Bedlam Farm from being foreclosed, and we succeeded, although it was a pyrrhic victory at best.Our sacrifice has forced us to consider our lives, and that is so often how change comes. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we are now asking ourselves some of the most important questions we have ever asked ourselves in our time together:
– What do we really need to live our lives?
– What do we really want our lives to be?
– How do we wish to age, and in particular, how do I wish to age. I am older than Maria.
– Do we really need to own a home with upkeep and taxes and mortgages? How can we best preserve our commitment to a creative life? How can we change in a healthy and meaningful way? Help the earth, help the poor, keep our animals and care for them. Be creative, every day.
The world around us is changing, I wish to acknowledge this in a positive way, even as the world around me seems to slide ever deeper into denial. And my own world has changed. I no longer have the luxury of being oblivious, not in my own life, not in my life with Mother Earth. I am at a crossroads. Again.
And what does this mean? I will share the journey, as always.
Wrote Francis in Laudato Si: “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades, this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.”
I did not come to this point heroically, or even selflessly, I was dragged there, kicking and screaming and clawing my sorry way. But I am there, nonetheless, and I want to heed the call. Perhaps that is the final gift of my wonderful first Bedlam Farm. It made me see myself anew.
Some of my reasons are selfish, of course, and personal, some, I hope are about being human. I am no saint, I am slow to see the tracks of my own life. But is time for to recognize the need for changes in my lifestyle, production and consumption. I see that this is the choice every one of us will soon be called upon to make, one way or the other. One day at a time, one thing at a time. Crisis and mystery, always around the corner.
