Day: November 15, 2015

I’ll be  honest, I love training Fate to work with the sheep, but sheepherding is not the point for me. Ultimately, it’s not even that important. We have a small farm, the sheep pretty much do what they are told, they don’t need to be taken out far for pasture, and dog or not,  a cup of grain will get them moving as quickly as a border collie.

I don’t  have a ton of love for the many people who love to pretent that they have kick-ass herding dogs. There are precious few of those kinds of dogs.

I am much prouder when people tell me my dogs are loving and trustworthy and welcome anywhere. Herding dogs are often one of those obnoxious conceits that creep into our relationships with animals. Many of the border collie obsessives I meet give me a headache, and I’m sure I return the favor.

Instead of a bumper sticker reading “Caution: Working Dog On Board (does this mean we can be reckless with non-working dogs?),” I’d rather have one that says “It’s Not About Us.”

How the dog moves the sheep will never be half as important to me as what the dog is like, how it lives its life, how it lives with us in harmony and nourishment. I would get rid of Fate or Red in a heartbeat if they were aggressive to one another, the other animals, to human beings. Or if one of them tore a sheep up for sport.

And I will never be a natural herding trainer, or one of those herding trialers,  it is not an ambition of mine, it is not in my genetic make-up. I hated it when I did it. I do regret I haven’t done it with Red, we could have some fun.

Fate is doing well with her training, and I have obviously enjoyed it, we are not nearly done. But in a sense, now that she is growing up a bit, the real work begins, the real training. Fate is an explosive dog, full of instinct and energy, she practically flies across the ground, seeking out every bit of chicken shit or donkey droppings she can find.

It is time to work on the spiritual part, to show her how to be calm, to be still, to find and center herself without anyone shouting at her, without sheep or the crate. She has taken me to the wall more than once. I realized this week that I have dropped the ball on “stay,” one of the most important commands in the training lexicon.

I don’t believe in “push” dogs, dogs that rush out the door ahead of us. A bad thing to let the dog do, that is all about dominance, and if we don’t want to overly dominate them, we ought not let them dominate us. My dogs wait to go out the door, or through a gate, I am always right ahead of them, I always go first. This has been an issue with Fate, who explodes out of any door in her eagerness to get to work. I don’t let her do it, but it is not yet natural to her.

So I am focusing now on the “stay” command. If a dog won’t stay in a position for at least three minutes, they don’t know how to stay. Very few human beings have the patience to make their dogs wait for anything for three minutes. I’ve gotten Red to do it, I have barely tried with Fate. I’m doing it now.

I am making her “stay” in new positions, and I am close by to correct her when she doesn’t, her instincts sometimes overwhelm her. I say “stay,” and step back. The longest we have gotten is 1:30 seconds. That was today, and it was 30 seconds longer than any time before. By the end of the week, we will be doing three minutes. For Fate, this is not about obedience. This is helping her balance her instincts with the need to center and be still, to learn how to do nothing.

The sheep can wait a bit, it is time for the real training to start.

Envy is a deprivation, really, a wanting, an emptiness characterized, say the shrinks, by feelings of inferiority, longing, resentment, and disapproval of the emotion itself. When I was young, I was suffocating with envy, I wanted the lives of everyone but me, I wanted to be everywhere but where I was.

The irony is that today, I love my life, and never wish to be anyone else, not even the authors who sell millions of books and make millions of dollars. But it’s not so easy. Those old feelings of envy resentment are still there, I only recently began to understand the degree to which envy is embedded in my consciousness, I guess there were more urgent problems for me to see, face and deal with.

We come into the world pure, a blank slate, a blank canvas, our parents the world shapes our consciousness, or being, it is a wicked tricky thing to paint a different picture. It can be done.

Envy is an awful and painful thing. Envy, I should say, is different from jealousy. Envy happens when we lack, or think we lack, a desired gift or attribute that someone else has. Jealousy occurs when something we already have – usually a relationship – is threatened by another person. Jealousy is marked by fear of loss, distrust, anxiety, and anger.

I have rarely, if ever, felt jealousy. I came to see a few years ago that the envy tormented me as a child had been internalized, I was feeling it all of the time without knowing it, sometimes you are just too close to your own feelings to see them. That has often happened to me. This is why is it valuable to seek help from professional people, they can help you see yourself and help you listen.

I was utterly deprived as a child, in ways I don’t need to discuss or care to discuss. You can be too closed or too open. I was achingly envious of other people, from comic book heroes to the Hardy Boys to my cousins. I wanted to be them, live with them, crawl into their skin. I felt inferior to them, I longed for the lives of others, I resented them for having what I did not have, and of course, I hated myself for feeling that way.

My envy will still, even now, rise up when I see others taking advantage of people by being false or dramatic in manipulative ways. If people are praised for things I consider unworthy. If people lie to themselves or others. If people are over  praised for things I don’t consider praiseworthy.

Am I right about these things? I don’t know, it’s really not for me to judge people, it is not my nature, it was born out of rage and terror. Why me?

Envy is a close cousin of jealousy, anger and resentment, they are in the same family of emotions. It is, I have learned, a sign of spiritual bankruptcy to covet  or judge the life of another person, a kind of thievery, a draining our own sense of self. I have learned to love my life, to never speak poorly of it, to accept its joys and travails. I am learning to accept the lives of others, even when they cause me to feel resentful, cynical, envious.

That is the antidote to envy, of course, and to so many other things: an honest and meaningful life.

I am learning to see envy as a symptom. In the way it is almost always a reflection of human imperfection when a dog misbehaves in a serious way, envy is a warning sign that I am failing myself,  that I need to fill up my cup, pay attention to me, appreciate my own spectacular nature. It is not about them, it is about me. Boundaries have become so important to me, it is not for me to save anyone, pity anyone, envy anyone.

Love is as much about acceptance as it is about anything else, and as I have come in recent years to find my life is envied and resented by many people, I am reminded again and again to never return the favor. And love has found me in many different ways.

When envy rears up, as it does from time to time, it is an awful feeling, a heavy weight. I feel shame and disgust for myself. I have only recently been giving it the attention and self-awareness it deserves. I mean to make it a ghost emotion, a flicker, not a feeling.  Self-awareness, I have come to learn, is the first  step to shedding  ways of thinking that are burrowed deeply into our consciousness. How can you grow as a human being if you don’t even know who you are? We can’t see ourselves, we have to look outwards to know who we are, to see our reflections in the many mirrors that are life.

These journeys into myself are healing, helpful, painful. They are a process. Like anger, you can’t just will envy out of your head, it is  a commitment, an undertaking.  You can’t just will yourself to forgive, it takes some time and effort, it is gradual. There are no miracles in the human consciousness. The path is not simple or clear, there are ups and downs, twists and turns, failures and setbacks. I didn’t used to know that I could do this, but I do know it now.

I have to see the envy, recognize it, take responsibility for it, began to think in a different way. I need to think about how and why it occurs, and reset myself  until it becomes an almost automatic thing. I know this can be done, I have done it before, particularly with fear and anger. It can take a long time, there are no easy steps. We can change the neural tracks in our mind.

I have lived with me for so long I can barely see me sometimes, but I intensely dislike the feeling of envy, I know it can never completely be erased or shed, it will always take some care and maintenance, but this is what self-awareness is. Summoning up the courage and the will to see myself honestly, to come out into the open and admit who I am, and to take full responsibility for being better.

We might be born perfect, but we don’t stay that way. All I can be is better.

We delude ourselves – and are deluded – into believing there are quick and magical epiphanies for important change. There are not. If I do the work, the rewards will be great. If I don’t, I will wallow in my own shortcomings, carry them with me to the end. I don’t want to end that way.

Every time I think I am nearing the end of this process, I learn that I am not near the end of this process, it will never be over, it cannot ever be over.

I see  now that this is not the curse of existence, but the joy and meaning of life.

 

Red and Scott Carrino (he runs the Round House Cafe in my town)  are close friends in the way that dogs and people can connect in a pure and nourishing way.  Scott and I are close friends also, but Scott doesn’t light up every time he sees me. These two love one another, for sure. Scott even lays down mats in the cafe when Red comes, Red is skittish about linoleum. Scott is pining for a dog, his ratty old dog Deo died last year, he was loved dearly.

But Scott is too busy running his cafe right now, he has no time for a dog. So whenever I go to the cafe I take Red along and keep him in the car, Scott comes out and Red comes out and the two bond with each other. I see you don’t have to own a dog to love one and know one. Scott brightens at the sight of read and Red is happy to be with him.

Friendship for sure. I read a Harvard Study once that found that men love dogs because they don’t speak, they make the perfect friends for me. There is something to that.

 

It is revealing and uplifting for me to see how the heart works, how life grows, how the spirits within us are radioactive seeds that radiate and spread. Maria has been working on her fiber chair for more than a year, it is her way of fusing her art with life. When she started it, I had no idea really, what it would be, but her threads and baling strings are becoming more complex and beautiful by the day.

Sun, rain, bitter cold, snow and ice are all the same to this work, she brings the baling wires and has created a work of art out of an old rotting rattan chair and the bales of string used to keep our hay together.

As the chair has evolved, it has drawn life and connection to it. First, Maria comes every day. Then Minnie has adopted it as her throne in the yard, she is always sitting on it. Then, Red has started hanging out there to keep Maria company, and in the last day or two, Fate has joined. The chickens march behind the chair in case anyone is leaving any crumbs behind.

So the chair becomes a locus, a focal point, a gathering of life, a place of connection. Something else, something different. This, I think, is  how creativity works. We write, we paint, we create, we sew, we sketch, and our work takes on a life of it’s own, enters the world, draws all kinds of energy towards itself. The old chair, disintegrating in the barn, a forgotten thing, ready for the dump, is not a loving thing, a sun around which moons revolved.

That the is the creative spirit, I think it’s how it works. I saw an old dusty chair with no seat, Maria saw something else, a piece of art, a continuing story of our lives, a mirror of us and where we are. I am learning to open my eyes, to see the world in a new way.