Fate is still a puppy, she does not yet have the eye strength or presence to control the sheep, but I don’t think she knows that, and she never stops trying. In the morning, when Red has moved the sheep, I let him out of the pasture and let Fate work alone. She is very industrious, she runs around the flock, practices her eye, then lies and and takes up position on the top of the hill. At that moment, they are her sheep and she is utterly at peace with them.
When I find myself drifting towards arrogance and righteousness, all I have to do is look back to almost any point in my life to regain a sense of humility and perspective. I feel like I never got the memos about life that other people got, I had to figure it out for myself.
Just a few years ago, I wrote in this space that I would never join in the modern system of health care, I would not spend much of my life in pharmacies or talking about my health. I would avoid the system of pills, the fear-mongering, the agonies of our health care system, the sense of dependence and fear that comes with getting older in America.
In the corporate nation the elderly are seen as a vast profit center, manipulated and frightened into wanting and needing all kinds of care, and then blamed for costing so much. That is not my idea of a meaningful life.
Shortly after some of those declarations how I would live, I learned that I needed to treat my diabetes very differently, it was threatening to damage me quite severely. And then, I had open heart surgery. I don’t remember having a heart attack but my doctors, clutching their data and graphs, insist that I did.
So instead of writing pompous declarations of independence, I got to work taking care of myself. My heart is sound and my blood sugar very much under control. I do not talk about my health much, if at all, but I do spend some time navigating the health care system, going to see doctors, hanging out at the pharmacy, taking and remembering medications. Our medical system is good in emergencies, it is just kind of a mess the rest of the time.
So I did cross the bridge I swore I would not cross, the arrogant are always held to account, and I have learned not to make so many declarations about what I will or will not do in the future. The truth is, I have no idea.
I am learning the other lessons of getting older. Something hurts just about every day, often in different places, and I have learned to be nimble about responding to what I need to respond to, treating what it is treatable, accepting what is not. The health care system is a daunting thing to navigate, everyone agrees on that, and no one seems to have the will to even try to fix it or bring it under control. But it did save my life, and is keeping me healthier than I have been in many years. So I don’t care to speak poorly of it, I owe my life to it.
Next week, I will get my 10 minutes with my Nurse-Practitioner, and hopefully she will throw me out of her office with a Sponge Bob sticker and tell me to come back in three months. She sees more than 20 patients in a day. She and I love each other but I feel guilty taking the time to ask how she is, so I have learned to talk fast, like a 77 RPM record. I wouldn’t even think of having a long conversation with her about my health, she checks my heart, takes my pulse, looks me over and says goodbye.
I am not somber about getting older, I am much better at getting old than being young, which was a nightmare for me. I am finally learning a few things about life, I love my life (and my wife) very much. My editor told me last week that my writing has never been better. For once, I believed that, I am learning about life. People are even beginning to subscribe to my blog. I am just getting underway.
To some extent, aging in a healthy way is both challenging and exciting. My noble feet have kept me upright for years, but my arches have abandoned me, and my medications affect me and it began to hurt when I walked, which I love to do. I got some new fancy insoles, they adjusted my feet, the pain is fading away, I am walking all over the place again. I understand that one day I will not be able or willing to stay ahead of it, but I can do it for now.
It’s a kind of chess game, I think, the body makes a move, I make a move. Sometimes a doctor can help, sometimes not. Sometimes the chiropractor can do what the orthopedist won’t bother to do, sometimes the massage therapist can do what the chiropractor doesn’t do. Sometimes the pharmacist can do what none of the others can do. You have to keep your eyes and ears open, be curious, shop around.
Woody Allen said once that as you get older the body simply begins to fall apart. This is true. But the mind does not , contrary to popular opinion, nor does the spirit. I don’t do old talk, I don’t hang around with people to want to discuss their health or prescriptions. I do not look back with nostalgia, patronize the young, romanticize the past.
I am beginning to get older and feel older sometimes. Every day is a gift, a new beginning. I will not give up life, or live for the future. In 20 years, if I am alive, I won’t really care where I am. Hopefully Maria will have pushed my wheelchair to the Battenkill RIver in January and kissed me goodbye on the nose. Like the Pharoahs, I’d love to take my dog Red with me, but he will be long gone.
I expect to have love in my life to the end, my love for Maria only grows. I fear sometimes that she will tire of me when I falter, but I am neither blind nor interested in hiding. Our love cannot last forever, nothing does, and I am very like to die before her. I tell her that I know she will have a second chapter, as I did. She doesn’t care to talk about it but I definitely want to speak the idea out loud.
So that’s what I am learning about getting older. Face it, admit it, don’t let people tell you that you are not old when you are. But accepting it doesn’t meant being subsumed by it. It is a part of who I am, it is not who I am. It is not the whole story. Recently, my daughter started asking me how I was feeling – she has done this ever since the open heart surgery which, I imagine, was upsetting for her. I said thanks, but I am not sick. If I am not feeling well, I will let you know.
Once in a while, I will look in a mirror or in glass store window and wonder who that old man is looking back at me, it can’t be me. But it is. Age has given me a great gift, it has given me what I have always wanted. It has given me myself. I have failed enough and succeeded enough and messed up enough and triumphed enough and loved and hated enough that I know who I am, I see how it all works.
It has not been a perfect life, or even the life I always imagined for myself. But no matter, it is my life, and I love it and am proud of me for living it. It was, when all is said and done, quite an accomplishment. Against all odds, life can triumph.
In my head, I am not the face in the mirror. That it isn’t me, it couldn’t be. I am quite young and full of ideas and energy. I am just starting to live.
Pamela Rickenbach’s life is compelling, to say the least. I hope she will begin sharing it on her new blog beginning on Saturday. Her life is an exotic life of mystery, love, spirituality, abuse, pain, redemption and, of course, the horses, always the horses. Her story is a testament to the joys and pitfalls of a life with animals, she has given herself selflessly to the horses and has given herself nothing.
She possesses very few of the things most people own – her own house, a car, money in the bank. Or a blog. She lives out of her passion and her beliefs.
Pamela will tell you she is rich beyond measure, and has everything she needs. Like the mystics before her, some might say she has little. Pamela is a hot and shining star, she burns very brightly in her passion, I have always felt I might burn or melt if I stayed too close, and as much as I love her, I am mindful of the need to sometimes project myself from such intensity, I have often suffered from it in my life.
In so doing, I have preserved our special and nourishing friendship. She and Maria are sisters in some ways, I can see it, but don’t always understand it, and I like to understand things that most people are happy to simply accept. On the surface, Maria and Pamela might seem to be different, at the core they are very alike. You can see it very clearly when they are together, the ease and comfort are striking. I think Pamela sometimes looks at me in the same wary way that I sometimes look at her, yet there it is, we end up loving and trusting one another, a gift, I think, to both.
Pamela is deeply immersed in the history and culture and mysticism of the horses, she can talk about them forever, she tells so many spell-binding tales of their myths and meaning.
She is extraordinarily open, trusting and sensitive. This has hurt her again and again in her life. For some very sad reason, some elements of the animal rights movement have targeted for her because she supports the idea of working horses (they consider it abuse), and she is attacked relentlessly and cruelly. Paul was deeply upset by these attacks, I believe it contributed to his depression.
Pamela preaches a very different philosophy about animals, we share this view: animals ought never to be used to harm people, animals the people who live, love and work with them also needs rights, love and supporst.
Some people brush off the hateful side to being public in America, I usually do. Pamela struggles with it, it goes through her skin, anger and hatred are simply alien to her. She grew up in the jungles and villages of South America, saved by medicine men, adopted by Native-American leaders, abused by other men. Her love of horses brought her to the carriage trade in Philadelphia, then to Blue Star.
This year, a great tragedy befell her. Her friend, partner, lover and husband, Paul Moshimer took his own life, he hung himself from a tree on the farm. Pamela is strong and brave, she held herself together in so many ways, fell apart in others. It was an incomprehensible thing, they had only been married a few months. Pamela also suffers from a brain injury that sometimes makes emotions more intense.
But she is working bravely to come back from that awful blow. Blue Star has a powerhouse new board of directors, an exciting plan for the future, a great commitment to the big horses that have shaped and helped build our world.
When Pamela came to the Open House in October with her two big and beautiful draft horses, Merlin and Foxy, it seemed a turning point. I did not think she would be able to come.
Perhaps she needed to get away. Perhaps there is magic at Bedlam Farm, I’m too close to see it, but I sometimes feel it. There is surely magic at Blue Star Equiculture, Pamela is the spirit of the place.
I scrapped the Blogging Workshop I was planning for this weekend at Pompanuck. Farm and Maria and I decided to turn it into a Blog For Pamela workshop, eight or nine creative people are coming in support of Pamela and to learn about blogging.
My friend Rachel Barlow, an artist and tech support whiz, is coming to the farm early in the morning, we will build Pamela a blog and then we’ll head to Pompanuck, we will sit in the big and beautiful Round House and we will learn about blogs. Pamela and I will write about it over the weekend. We’ll go back and forth between the farm, Pompanuck and the Round House Cafe where Scott Carrino is going to set aside a table for us. We will do more teaching and learning at the cafe.
This experience with Pamela is helping me focus my teaching. Instead of holding big workshops to talk about blogs and writing, I want to plan some small ones, to focus on individual people, their lives and how creativity and technology can work together to give them voice and alter their lives. Blogs, after all, are intensely personal. So should teaching about them.
“Blog,” is a clunky word for so graceful, creative and important a creative evolution and outlet. As the corporate grip has tightened it’s grip on media, theater, publishing, work, film and journalism, the blog has risen to give voice to creativity and voice and to save individual expression. Blogs are about identity as much as anything else.
The creative artist and individual has been driven to the margins by the corporate invasion of ideas, the margins are where so many talented people now live and work. Creatives always find a space to live. There are millions of bloggers, they are keeping ideas and creativity alive.
Pamela is unique in the world. There is no label or category that fits her. Like me, she does not fit comfortably or easily into any group or organization, certainly not into any corporate structure, and this is, after all, becoming a Corporate Nation. She and I are both lovers of Thomas Paine, the idiosyncratic prophet and rabble-rouser who preached revolution. It is perhaps already too late to ever get the country completely back, they seem to have bought the political system too.
So a blog for Pamela is important, it has meaning beyond her. It has meaning for the future of animals, for the very idea of individuality and voice, and also for the way in which we treat one another. Pamela does not ever use her love of animals to promote the hatred of human beings.
Pamela stands for something, and hopefully, her new blog will help her give voice to her important beliefs, wherever she is, whatever she does. People can follow her anywhere.
This work with the horses is, in a way, her ministry. Pamela speaks to an attitude of the heart, which approaches life with a loving and open attentiveness, which is capable of being passionately present with no thought of what comes next, which accepts each moment as a gift from the horses to be lived to the fullest. Which treats all living things with dignity and respect.
Pamela invites us to practice the little ways of love, a kind word, a smile, any gesture that promotes love and friendship.
For her, this is the message of the horses, the story they have to tell us, the story she has been called to tell, and to which she has devoted her life. She believes the horses must remain among us, that we will either learn to live in harmony or perish together. It should be an amazing blog, filled with heart and myth and insight. I can’t wait to read it.
(We will both be writing about this experience as it occurs this weekend. I mean, what else would one expect from bloggers?)
In the morning, Maria is working with the equines on “touch” training, getting the pony and donkeys to touch certain objects with their noses in return for a treat. Maria is uncertain about dog training, she is worried about being too tough or about messing it up. She has no such anxieties or hesitations with Chloe or with the donkeys, she is confident, upbeat, positive and clear. Her timing is perfect Maria explained to me this morning that this kind of training and communication – labeled by some as “tricks,” is the gateway to building a trusting relationship with a horse. It leads to other things – obedience, communication, even the retrieval of certain objects.
All of these things are relationship-building, they build a partnership between the animal and the human, they ask us to be disciplined, consistent, patient and loving. I see it every morning. Maria is thinking of doing an Intuition Workshop with the animals, I hope she does. You can read more about Maria’s touch training here.
I asked Maria this morning if she knew how happy she was around Chloe, how much joy this pony has brought into her lives (and how much Joy Fate has brought into ours.) Once again, I am reminded of the power of animals to reach into our hearts, life our spirits, burnish our souls. Perhaps they are, in fact, angels that do not fly, they find forms in which to enter our lives and challenge us and teach.
Every animal driven from people is a loss for humanity, and a bleeding of Mother Earth. In the morning, Maria and Chloe meet the gate, where Red and Fate are waiting. So are the donkeys and the sheep. We all gather here, to begin our days with love and nourishment.
Some people can learn from this, but many people do not. Disconnected from the natural world and the world of animals, they turn to greed, hatred, conflict and righteousness, they put foolish labels on themselves and on others. Maria works every day to train Chloe, and I work every day to train Fate, but it is important to step back and consider who the real teachers are.
Chloe is teaching Maria to understand herself, to confront her impatience, to release her anger and wariness, to open up to trust and new experience. Fate is doing much the same for me, she reminds me every day how flawed I am, how impatient, frustrated, distracted and angry I can be. Every day, she challenges me to be better, sometimes I am better.
The horses have touched something deep inside of me and Maria, her as a spiritual human being and artist, me as a writer and animal lover. I am grateful to be a witness every day to such love and joy and meaning. We need animals in our every day lives, they can, in fact, show us how to live together in harmony and perhaps to save one another and our world.
