Red and I went to Hubbard Hall, our town’s beautiful arts and education center today to meet with David Snider, the director of the center. We met for a couple of hours and talked about a lot of things, including the importance of the beautiful old vaudeville hall and the adjoining arts center to our small town, Cambridge.
David is thinking of staging a play or theater production to coincide with our October Open House, on Columbus Day Weekend. Maria and I think it’s a great idea, we think the visitors to the Open House, which coincides with foliage season, would love having a special event to go see on Saturday night.
We are getting focused on our two open houses, the first on June 25, and 26th. Maria is gathering artists for her art show, Fate and Red will be doing herding demos, the donkeys and the pony will be on hand for visitors, and we are planning on having the shearer and the farrier, and perhaps a cow milking demonstration as well from Ed Gulley.
Plus talks and poetry readings, food at the Round House Cafe, some music and some big horses from Blue Star Equiculture. We’ll do many of these things at both Open Houses, details to come on Maria’s Events Page.
David Snider came to Cambridge from the Arena Stage Company in Washington, he has taken up the cause of figuring out the future of this remarkable old building and arts center. He is pulling in lots of kids and students from the area, and plotting some innovative and exciting new theater productions.
Since the recession, financing for the arts has changed and David has all kinds of ideas for expanding the role of Hubbard Hall in the community for for bringing new productions to the town. The setting is a fabulous place for theater, I did one of my first book readings there.
I asked David to come upstairs with Red so I could take his photo. In the 1800’s, many small towns in upstate New York built vaudeville and opera houses, they were a seminal part of rural culture. Hubbard Hall has been preserved by the heroic efforts of some local families, and it’s time for it to get to the next level of security and creativity.
Places like Hubbard Hall are critical for rural areas, many of which are ignored by funding organizations in favor of big cities. Economists and bureaucrats have largely abandoned rural areas as being inefficient and too small to pay much attention to in the new global economy.
David and I talked about a lot of things, one being some crowd sourcing campaigns to help bring writing and music and arts classes to rural children, others to help the hall build up its finances for new productions and staff. It is a worthy cause, arts programs and creativity have saved and revived a lot of communities.
Hubbard Hall is, in many ways, the heartbeat of our town. We need it and love it, so much of the town’s cultural life revolves around it. David is a hard worker, he has taken on a big task. It was great to meet with him and visit with him and toss ideas back and forth. It’s a great idea to fuse a production with our October Open House, our town is committed to keeping community alive, and David believes a creative center can nourish the town, even save it from the struggles of many other upstate towns.
He is right. This is place that needs to work, rural communities everywhere are fighting to save their cultural identities, and Hubbard Hall is a great treasure.
This stage and this room has so much magic, it wants to thrive. It will.
Before social media and the animal rights and rescue movements, there was this idea that people should mind our own business. I knew little about the interior lives of other people’s dogs and they knew little about mine.
My grandmother taught me that if I stuck my nose in other people’s business, the fairies would bite it off. I got it. We live in a different world now, anyone who writes about dogs or animals online is familiar with the new ethics and boundaries of the new technology: everyone you do is everyone’s business.
Of course my grandmother would have cut her arm off rather than share her life on Facebook. I know that. But she wasn’t a writer.
If you share your life, you are asking for it in some ways, which compounds the problem. Every time I have ever mentioned a dog on my blog or Facebook, I have received cautions, alarms, warnings and horror stories. Dogs should not ride in cars, walk off leash, be out in the cold, or the heat, or in the woods, or running in a meadow, or in dirt, or near manure, or around ponies or donkeys, eat commercial foods. My dogs are analyzed for their weight, their coats, their gait, their interactions with one another.
I hear scores of horror stories and cautions every day – dogs suffocated in cars, run down on country roads, eaten by coyotes, lost in the woods, stolen out of back yards, brought down by infections, choked to death by bad collars, strangled in dangerous crates poisoned by bad food.
There is this idea in the animal world that we can guarantee animals the perfect lives we shall never have, and we never seem to grasp that it is not possible.
People tell me – as if I didn’t know – that heat is dangerous in cars, rabid animals are in meadows, dogs get lost in the woods, or bitten by rabid skunks and raccoons, or hit by lightning, or stolen if they are outside. Or run over.
I am used to this now, although I periodically raise the issue of boundaries when it reaches a certain point. I can tell you with pride that I have never messaged any person with a dog and warned them about the things they have decided to do. I hope I never will.
Fate being on the ice has drawn the concern of a number of people who are cautioning me that I am flirting with tragedy. It just took a while longer than usual.
On this pond, which is about six inches deep, and quite small, I do not believe I am taking any risks with her, nor do I really believe – I’m being honest here – that it is anyone’s business but mine. Independence is my natural gear, I do not care to share too many of my decisions with other people or justify them. I don’t wish to worry about them all either. And even the Dalai Lama would struggle with being second-guessed as often as I am. And I, sir, am no Dalai Lama.
I love my blog, but I do sometimes remember the days when I would write in peace without confronting the fears and alarms of strangers.
I agree with my grandmother.Absent evidence of extreme cruelty and abuse, I believe as she did, that it is rude to mind the business of other people without invitation. I love my dogs and worry plenty about them, I have never lost one to an accident or the woods or to a pond. Why, I wonder, do I have to keep repeating that?
“I worry about Fate,” Jeannie messaged me, “I don’t want to see a tragedy.” I told Jeannie that it is my job to worry about Fate, she can worry about her own dogs and cats. She needs to take care of herself, not me. People don’t like it when I say that, they think I am being sarcastic or superior.
I don’t ask anyone to worry about my dogs, and I’m glad they are loved and followed, but boundaries are not simply an idea for Dr. Phil, they are important to health and well-being, a real challenge when it comes to identity in the age of social media. A threat to identity. It is absolutely my responsibility to worry about the animals in my care, and I take it very seriously. It is a violation both of space for boundary for anyone to presume to take that from me, to steal from me my obligation to care for my animals well. It is not theirs to take.
This is what the shrinks call co-dependence, the taking on of other people’s problems. Facebook is a giant incubator of co-dependence.
It is also a creative challenge. No writer or artist wants to live or think or create with a thousand voices in his or her head shouting warnings and alarms.
If I can’t take care of my animals well, and believe me, I do, I am not worth reading or following or paying attention to. A good and thoughtful man (I’ll call him Jack) was upset with me for writing on Facebook that he needn’t worry about Fate and the ice, that was my job. He was also, he said, wanting to avert tragedy. I said, being flip (I get a lot of messages) that he needn’t worry about Fate. He was unhappy with me.
“I actually no longer have my Brittany’s Jon,” he wrote back. “I lost my two in a horrible accident not long ago. I also have a good friend who lost a beautiful German Shorthair in an ice break accident. He almost drowned trying to save her. I love reading your stories here and have several of your books. Your response makes it sound like I was questioning how you take care of your dogs. That’s the last thing I was doing. I just don’t want to see any harm come to you or Fate. I’m surprised that you would be defensive and sarcastic towards someone showing sincere concern”
I know the script calls for me to feel badly and apologize, and I was tempted. I am sorry about Jack’s Brittany’s. But I felt that was a manipulation. I have lost many dogs in different ways, it is not Jack’s problem, I would not suggest to him that he feel bad because Lenore and Fried and Simon died around the same time.
And he was, of course, was questioning how I take care of my dogs. What else would be be doing?
An honest and pained note from a very nice and thoughtful man.
I was actually just being my harassed and abrupt online self. But he perhaps can’t know that I can’t be defending my animal decisions to thousands of people every day from all over the world for everything I do or say or write. There are many Jacks out there worrying about my dogs.
And the sad truth is that his painful loss had nothing to do with me or my dogs, or what Fate does or doesn’t do.
I imagine everyone reading this has lost a dog or two. I have not lost any dogs to any kind of accident, and I will work hard to prevent that.
This is the new and virulent form of digital co-dependence write large, my grandmother’s unimaginable nightmare.
I can’t accept this idea that I should take in the tragedies and losses of other people, and they should take from me my worry and concern. His tragedy is not mine, and my dangers are not his. That is the boundary.
Tens of thousands of animals die in sad ways every day, I cannot take all of them in, that would be my ruin. So Jack is raising important questions about the the boundary that needs to be built and maintained if any kind of individualism and privacy is to survive in this new world of communal concern.
I have a good friend who walked his dogs in the same woods I walk with Red and Fate, and both were attacked by a rabid fox, one died from infections and the other was nearly blinded and had to be put down. Was my friend reckless or uncaring by taking the dogs there? Should he never have walked his dogs out there? Should I never walk in those beautiful woods?
Animals, like people, are subject to dangers and accidents if they are to live in this world beyond basements and back yards. A neighbor had a tree fall on her while she was walking her dogs on her own property.
I am not looking to offend or insult anyone when I write of this joyous puppy and her explorations of the small pond in the woods. Animals who live in the wild take these risks every day, and no one objects to their being there. No deer should ever live near any road. The irony is that no one in the world could worry about my dogs more than I do, my heart and my livelihood depends upon it.
If Fate were to go through this ice, she would go in up to her knees and I would be three seconds away to pull her out.
I’d prefer to work it out this way, writing about it, as I will continue to try to do. I will share my life with you openly and honestly and take a lot of photos to go with it. I hope my readers find my writing entertaining and informative.
It is not my job to worry about you, it is not your job to worry about me. It is my job to take care of myself and the living things I am responsible for. When this happens, I always think of poor Thoreau, out on Walden Pond in his cabin, if he had brought Facebook he would have thrown himself into Walden Pond and drowned in worry.
I welcome your comments and thoughts and stories, they inform and enlighten and sustain me, but there is a difference between sharing a life and giving it away.
I have fought very hard for my identity and my truth, it is not, in this new world, a struggle that is ever over and is ever won or resolved. I will bear with you as we try to work it out, I hope you will bear with me.
Farms have a special alchemy to them, real farms are never like those Vermont calendars people love to buy, those clean and well ordered sylvan settings. Barns were almost always built by poor farmers in the cheapest possible way, they almost always are crumbling, rotting, decaying or falling down.
Farms are all junk heaps, farmers never throw anything they might use away, there is never anything new on a farm. We saved this old tire so the donkeys might nose it around, I doubt they ever even notice it, but it has become another one of those things that clutter the ground on a farm and give it character.
It just looks like it grew up out of the ground. I love trying to photograph the alchemy of the farm, it challenges me to pay attention to the obvious, the things I always overlook.
The pirate dog goes to the ice pond and skates every day. Sometimes she just skates out into the middle and stops and stares at me, as if to say “see, this is safe!” Some days are warm this winter and the ice starts to melt, and when she feels the softness or hears a crackle, she just skates back to the firm ground.
Fate knows what she is doing, and pirates, of course, know how to navigate. On our walks now, she skates out onto the ice every single time, at least once. I guess she does it just because she can, and she does not accept the boundaries of ordinary creatures.
I wrote the other day about a revelation I had. Living in our new and impersonal and sometimes disconnected world is in itself a spiritual experience, it challenges us to be grounded, patient and compassionate.
I sometimes fail at this, but more and more, am learning how to succeed. In the most selfish of terms, it has been very good for me. And good, I think, for others.
Yesterday, after sitting up for hours with my head spinning, I took my revelation to the next level.
I went to the Cambridge Garden Florist Shop and asked Linda to make me two baskets of flowers. I brought one to the health center where I had a routine check-up scheduled, I have often seen these staffers and nurses struggle with angry and frustrated people, arrogant and greedy insurance companies, government bureaucrats and mountains of red tape, paperwork and insane regulations.
“Who else can I yell at?,” I once heard a frustrated father say to a nurse after he couldn’t get insurance approval for his son’s medicine, “I can’t reach anyone else but you.” I am not surprised by the anger bubbling up in the political system, it was like a dam ready to burst.
After my visit to the doctor, I was scheduled to go to the pharmacy, where the techs and pharmacists had been working for weeks to straighten out a health system morass that was keeping me from some medicine I was supposed to have. I got some flowers for them as well. I imagined the fear and fury I would feel if I were seriously or terminally ill and had to wait this long. And it happens all the time.
I brought the first batch of flowers to the health center. I handed them to the receptionists. She was stunned, slack-jawed. “What are these?,” she asked. “Did someone die?”
No, I said, I just wanted to acknowledge in some way that you all are in the middle of a system that is difficult and frustrating, and you are the cannon fodder, the people in the middle that they put out there to take the heat and the blame.”
She teared up a bit, and seemed in shock. She really wasn’t sure what to say. I think she wanted to make sure I didn’t want something.
“I’ve been here a long time,” she said, “and nobody has ever done this.” It’s about time, I said.
Then, after my appointment – a half-dozen people came up to me in shock to thank me for the flowers. I could see what it meant to them – I went to my Rite-Aid and gave the second vase to the techs and the pharmacist there, the ones who had been on the phone for hours trying to figure out why the insurance wasn’t working or recognizing me. They even called the government and reached them, a heroic act.
So my revelation continued. We live in an increasingly corporate system, as you know, where the people in the middle help bureaucrats and CEO’s and bankers and giant corporations who increasingly control our lives and profit from us, but hide from the very obvious fact that they care little for us and want nothing to do with us face to face. They do seek our money and our votes.
And the put the people in the middle out front to take the heat for what they do. It is easy enough to get angry about it. It is wrong to abuse the people in the middle, it just another way of abusing ourselves.
I have great empathy for the people in the middle, I see people screaming at them every time I go to the health center or the pharmacy. Why is my co-pay higher? Why do I have to pay twice as much for the same medicine I got the last month for so much less? Why can’t I get the medicine my doctor says I want to have? Why does it take three days to re-fill a prescription? Why doesn’t my insurance card work? Why can’t my mother get her medicine?
“Sometimes,” one of the techs told me once, “I feel like everybody’s toilet bowl. I don’t make these decisions, I have no more power than they do. But nobody cares.” I’ve heard the nurses say the same thing many times. At the pharmacy, I saw a man scream at a young and very sweet tech because the cost of his medicine had gone up. I saw him in the parking lot.
As politely as I could, I asked him why he was yelling at her, surely he knew it wasn’t her fault. “Yeah, I do know,” he said, somewhat ruefully. “But I can’t afford to pay for the medicine my wife needs now and they cant even tell me why. if I don’t scream at somebody I’ll go hang myself. I couldn’t get close to the people running the pharmaceutical company.”
But I see there is another way.
Another chance to find community in a fragmented world, to re-affirm our connection to one another in the Corporate Nation, where the Great Lie is this: everyone claims to care about us but nobody really does. We can try to care about each other. I’m not looking for sainthood, I relish the right to challenge people who hurt or betray me or lie to me. But the people in the middle are innocents, refugees floating in a sea of greed and cowardice.
Corporations are impersonal, they do not have consciences or compassion. Only people have those things.
I think I will make it a point to frequently visit with Linda when I enter these new and complex systems of the world, and see a human way to navigate through them. I can’t express the joy and pleasure I felt in the faces of the people getting this small, inexpensive and simple gift. It cost me pennies, it was a large gift.
I ought to say this:
People love getting flowers, but I also do realize – I admit that I was slow to grasp this – that flowers and recognition are not only good for the recipients but for the givers. For me. Selfishly, I see that this connection will help me as well as comfort them. Of course it helps to know the people you are dealing with. It helps when we get in trouble or are lost in red tape and confusion. It helps to be known. I see that. I suppose in many ways many good deeds are selfish, according to the Dalai Lama. We do it for us as well as them.
Imagine a world in which this became common, if the people in the middle got flowers every day, not once every decade. I think the world could change.
But it also feels good – healthy – to do good, it feels much better than being angry or resentful. Neurologists and cardiologists say it is health for the brain and the heart to be calm and show compassion, it prolongs the life of the body and the mind. This understanding has helped me profoundly to find love, be more creative, open up to friendship and intimacy.
Flowers are one good and safe way to help us navigate the new world.But there are many ways.
So are cookies and chocolate, note cards or even an affirmation of patience. Small gifts like cards or potholders, sketches and notes.
I have learned to say this often in my life, it always feels good, it is something of a mantra for me in our world: I know this isn’t your fault, I know this is what our world is like right now. Thanks for trying to help me, I appreciate it. It is powerful medicine, and spiritually powerful.
I have learned the hard way that succumbing to rage and frustration has harmed me more than anyone else. It has harmed a lot of other people as well. I can barely look at the raging politicians on the screens, they reflect the worst parts of me, of us.
In a polarized and exploited world, we have in our own heads and hearts the most powerful tools imaginable to keep our humanity and sense of community. Each other. Compassion and empathy are revolutionary in their own way.
I am learning to value that. It is the spiritual path, right in front of us, every day.
The people in the middle are us, our daughters, sons, mothers and sisters and brothers. If we are often separated from one another by technology and the greed and inhumanity of big corporations and the smothering bureaucracy of government, we can find our spiritual and human footing simply by remembering what it means to be a human being.
