Day: August 10, 2015

Red and I go to the gym together several times a week. Red is nine now, I just turned 68.

I notice that both of us walk a bit stiffly after a round of sheepherding and hill-climbing. Or a workout at the gym. Red is the perfect aging companion for a man, he doesn’t talk about his health and loves to lie around. He also has made friends with the pharmacist, as I have.

When you are friends with the pharmacist,  you are beginning to be old.

When I go to the gym with Red, I sometimes think about getting old, and how I will die. I don’t expect to die anytime soon, but it doesn’t seem as remote as it used to.

My plan has always been to find a way to take my own life when I feel myself crossing a point in time that I will see and understand. I imagine lots of people have that idea, but they get too feeble and helpless to do it. Several good friends of mine have taken their own lives. One of them was Paul Moshimer, just a few months ago, he left a train of anger and sorrow in his wake.

I always thought I might do it in my late 70’s or early 80’s, but the arrival of Maria in my life has clouded that plan. She has some strong feelings about it, and  suggests it is a selfish thought, and it’s true, I might not be so willing to leave the world behind as long as she is around. I have suggested we go together, but that ticks her off even more.

When I was a mystery writer – the much praised and spectacularly unsuccessful Suburban Detective series –I had a good friend,  her name was Carolyn, she wrote very smart and successful mysteries, she and her character were both outspoken feminists. She was a good deal older than I was, but we often ran into each other on the mystery book circuit.

Back then, groups of mystery writers would travel  together, we’d do evening readings together all over the country in those wonderful dingy mystery bookstores that vanished in the Barnes & Noble, pre-Amazon era. There are still a few left, and not too many Barnes & Noble stores either, but they are hanging on by a thread. We had no money and neither did the bookstore owners, we writers would often sleep on cots in their book storage rooms. If we were lucky, and they were nice, we’d get pasta or pizza for dinner. Mostly, we ate at McDonald’s. If there were four or five  writers, we might drawn a dozen people, we always had time to talk.

My friend and I liked one another, we spent a lot of time talking about life on those long rides and in those often empty shops, she was very real and direct. I love that in friends, it is rare. She told me she planned to take her own life when she began to feel old, she would do it before she began to fail in a serious way. She was not surrendering herself to the American system of cruel death, by which she meant withering away and dying in a nursing home, or having some doctor pounding her chest or breaking her ribs in a failed effort to keep her alive for no other reason than that they could. She would not, she said, live a life of pills and visits to the pharmacy.

This was something her detective character might have said, both were feisty.

The American health care system, Carolyn said, is greedy and heartless, it does not allow people to die gracefully or gently, they just keep going and going. If you submit the process, she said, you will die a poor death. She wouldn’t, she said.

Her fears were justified then, it is even more true now, as new technology keeps people alive longer and longer without much consideration of quality of life. And even more greedy and heartless.

I knew that Carolyn was serious about her life, and honest about her plans, but she was full of life and energy,  I didn’t think much about her promise until I picked up the newspaper one day and read that she had gone to a cabin in the woods, swallowed some pills, and committed suicide. She was true to her word. Her husband knew what she was doing and supported her decision. She died at the top of her life, happily married, in good health, respected and successful. That, she always told me, was how she meant to go.

A few days later, I got a final letter from her, she wrote a personal message to some of us explaining her decision, wishing us good luck, telling us she loved each one of us. “I did not wish to grow old in that other way,” she said. “I wanted to take charge of it and leave the world in my way, with dignity and comfort.” It was a gracious goodbye.  She did not apologize, and I admired her for that. Most of her friends were furious at her, and some still are. She had no right to do that, they said. She was selfish and narrow-minded.

She had so much more life to live.

I didn’t feel that way. She had every right to do it, I thought, she owned her own life, it was for her to decide how to end it. She had thought about it carefully.

Recently, I lost another friend to suicide, Paul Moshimer. He died a very different death, no messages, discussions. He just went out and hung himself from a beautiful old tree. It seems he never discussed it with anyone, there were no letters or messages,  just a lot of people who loved him struggling to make sense of it, fending off anger and confusion and hurt.

I was one of them. I don’t know why, but I didn’t feel the same way about his death that I felt about my writer friend. I appreciated that she took the trouble to tell me what she was thinking and say goodbye. I didn’t have to wonder why. I don’t blame Paul for what he did, it was just more difficult for me to understand. That, I suppose, is selfish. He owed me nothing, he was in a lot of pain.

I don’t think much about growing older, the truth is I don’t feel very old. The gym is a place where I do think of being old, and where I do feel old. I love my gym, Red and I are often alone there. Sometimes, I feel some melancholy there, I get reflective.  I am almost always the oldest person there, and the kids on the machines next to me make me feel like Methusaleh, who lived to be nearly 1,000. I always seem to be standing still on my treadmill, the world seems to be running past me on all sides. I don’t even go near the weights.

The gym is good for me, but not for my big ego. I am never more aware of where I am than when I am on those machines, seeing everywhere what it means to be young.

And when my sneakers come untied, as they often do, some very sweet young man or woman always comes over to tie them for me, they do not want me tripping and falling. Why don’t their sneakers ever come untied, I wonder?

In the gym today, I thought of my friend Carolyn and I thought of my friend Paul. I honor them.

I will also decide how to leave the world, I won’t leave it to the doctors or bureaucrats or politicians. Or even to Maria.  It is, after all, my life.

I had nothing to say about how and where I was brought into the world, but I have everything to say about how I leave it.

And I would support you, said Maria,  after reading this piece. “As long as you’re not being a jerk about it.”

A couple of months ago, we took Red and Fate out on her first car ride. Fate is one of those dogs who is up for anything at anytime. She tried to emulate Red and jump up onto the seat, but her legs were too short and she kept bouncing off the car seat and onto the ground. Undeterred, she kept getting up and trying again.

If Red did it, she wanted to do it. I helped her up, she hopped up onto the seat I loved the image of her cuddling up against Red for this strange new experience. She didn’t bat an eye, she loves the car, she loves going anywhere at any time. She is the navigator now, directing the ride. But I’m glad I came across this photo, taken when she was even younger, it shows the bond that has developed between these two remarkable animals.

And she can jump up all by herself now, she almost always makes it.

“You enter the forest

at the darkest point,

where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,

it is someone else’s path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way,

you are not going to realize

your potential.”

– Joseph Campbell, The Art Of Life

The war against the carriage horses in New York has faltered, for now, it is far from over.  Everywhere, the animals are under siege, they are trying to take them away from us, they are persecuting us for loving and working with them. We see in the long and brutal campaign to ban the horses that money does not innoculate anyone against ignorance and cruelty,  and that people who say they love animals can be inexcusably abusive to people.

The mayor of New York has not retracted his vow to banish the horses,  or his claim that the people who ride with them are immoral, nor have the real estate developers stopped drooling and plotting over their stables. The people in the carriage trade continue to live in fear and persecution, the horses remain in peril from the people who would destroy them to save them.

A compassionate and progressive city could easily find a way to keep them safe and healthy in New York – that would be a minor achieivement compared to the building of Central Park –   but the so-called progressives there have not yet figured out that preserving the horses and the environment in the city’s fabled park, it’s soul,  is, in fact, the most progressive thing they could possibly do.

Despite staggering odds, the horses triumphed, they triggered a great social awakening across the country: we see the need a new kind of animal rights movement, one that keeps animals among us and treats animals and people with love, respect and dignity.

One of the great ironies of this unnecessary controversy is that few places need the big horses more than New York City, a crowded, overwhelming, distracted, expensive and grinding universe. Nobody needs them more than the beleaguered residents of New York. The horses have a spiritual message of inner peace  to deliver – the Native Peoples have known it for centuries – that is spreading from this conflict and so many others like it all across the country.

Speaking for myself, I know I cannot maintain a peaceful and meaningful spiritual life without coming to peace with myself. Spirituality is not, in fact, a gift  that the outside world can bestow on me. In his writings, Pope Francis says an  adequate understanding of spirituality consists of thinking through what we mean by peace, which is much more than the absence of war. Inner peace, he says, is closely tied to the ecology of the world around us, to the animals that share the earth with us. It is reflected in a life in balance together with a capacity for wonder and compassion that takes us to a deeper consciousness and understanding of life, of nature, of animals.

Can New Yorkers live in balance with their ecology if the last domesticated animals in their city are taken a way to slaughterhouses and rescue farms, replaced with enormous expensive cars, and never again seen by the millions of adults and children who live there?

“Nature is filled with words of love,” Francis writes, “but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances?”

And what place, I wonder, is more affected by constant noise and nerve-wracking distractions than New York City? Our biggest stage has many lessons for us to learn.

Two months ago, Ariel Fitzi, a New York carriage driver, great animal lover, mystic,  and friend to the poor, the disabled and the homeless, took Maria and I on a magical midnight ride through Central Park. It was a profoundly spiritual experience, there, alone in the park, the spiritual message of the horses, of the animals, could be heard and felt in a clear and powerful way. I felt close to the ecology of the world, I had a great sense of inner peace, a sense of balance of life that is possible for me. The horses caressed us with their calm and dignity. How is it that so many people are blind and deaf to them? Perhaps it is because we have lost faith with Mother Earth, broken our bond with the animals.

There, in the achingly beautiful park of the night, without the crowds and noise and hawkers and literal and political distractions of the great city, I felt closer than ever to a spiritual life, to the beauty of Mother Earth, to the need for me to help her heal and recover from our deprivations.  And from my own.

We are so quick to judge and accuse others, to batter and criticize and resent, we are so slow to take responsibility for what we have done to the animals. We have destroyed their natural world and left them no refuge but to live and work with us. And here, in a place that so desperately needs them, the rich and the powerful spend millions of dollars to drive them away and replace them with more cars and condominiums. Here, in a place where hard-working people, often from other places, have found a way to keep the horses safe and loved and healthy, and to earn a living from working with them, we vilify and harass them and seek to take their freedom and property away.

That, in a microcosm, is what is killing our world, our own spirituality, our own sense of peace. We have lost touch with the animals, we have lost touch with the earth.

This is what the horses and the dogs and the ponies and the elephants can teach us, have taught us, if we stop taking them away. We are talking about an attitude of the heart, a way of approaching life with a sense of awakening and attentiveness, a way of being fully present to someone without looking over their shoulders, or at our smart phones, or to the news, or to our bills and alarms, which accepts each moment as a gift to be lived to the fullest.

In the park, riding with Ariel, watching the shadows dance across the empty paths and roads, over the gardens and walkways, I remembered the message of Jesus Christ, his beliefs forgotten and exploited by hollow and angry men and women. He urged us to contemplate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, and the horses in the field, and the animals in the forests. To not forget them.

So I see we must not forget the horses, or be deaf to their message. The beautiful horses in the park are present in the moment, there for everyone and everything, disinterested in the greed and fear and technology of the modern world, in the anxiety and worry that makes us superficial, aggressive and compulsive consumers of things we don’t need and buyers of things we and Mother Earth cannot afford.

You can see and feel this for yourself. The horses are there, standing by the carriages every day, not just in New York, but almost everywhere.

They can take us to that healing and magical place. They have taken me there.

Our Dahlia garden – Dahlia’s are late bloomers – came to life this week, spurred on by two-year old donkey manure, the colors are rich, the stems strong. It doesn’t seem quite as thick as last year, but it’s early, it is nice to see it.