Christian Wiman is an American poet and Yale professor and author. He was diagnosed with incurable cancer more than seven years ago and wrote a powerful book, My Bright Abyss, Meditations Of A Modern Believer about the intersection of pain and suffering and spirituality. St. Benedict cautioned us to keep death daily before our eyes, and My Bright Abysswill touch your soul and twist your heart, and ask you what it is you really believe.
Wiman does not write about cancer, but about belief.
My friend Eve Marko, who I wrote about yesterday, gave me this book at lunch as a gift.
We are undertaking a collaboration, a dialogue, she is struggling to understand how to live and care for her husband Bernie, who suffered a stroke some weeks ago. This book, I think, is the beginning of our dialogue, it is an extraordinary exploration of spirituality from a gifted writer and poet and believer.
I have long been fascinated by the collision between spirituality and real life, how suffering and loss affects our faith and spiritual understanding of the world. Wiman’s book is one of the best I’ve read on that subject. I’ve been poring through it for hours, I keep returning to it. I love the idea of the “bright abyss,” that is the space that occurs between love and belief and the sometimes harsh realities of being alive and staying grounded.
The book is all the more compelling because Eve, a Zen teacher, underline passages she found especially meaningful to her, and that is a way of our speaking, I think. And after reading some of it, I understand why she brought it to me.
On page 29, Wiman writes that what we must realize, what we must even come to praise, is that fact that there is no “right way” that is going to be come apparent to us in life once and for all.
“The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the the truth of this.
Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.”
Wiman is defining grace in his own words, but I have always believed that grace does not come from living a life without suffering, but comes from the manner in which we deal with it. At lunch, Eve told me she was stunned when I wrote that Maria and I had filed for bankruptcy last year, and for some months feared losing our home. Like many others, she saw me as being much bigger than I am.
When I wrote about the bankruptcy filing, many of my readers were shocked, many wrote and told me they thought I was successful, as if successful people are immune to recessions, divorce, real estate crises, a mental breakdown and bad fortune. The experience brought home to me that success is not about the books I sold or the money I once had, but about how I faced the sometimes hard complacencies and troubles of the world, owned up to them, and sought to take full responsibility for my life without blame or rage or self-pity. Maria shared this view with me.
As Wimans learned, no one is immune to life, or death, it binds all of us together. My struggle over these difficulties were very real, and very frightening. But courage is not defined by the absence of life, but persisting in the face of it. I never felt stronger than when we sat holding hands in bankruptcy court, or more filled with faith and purpose than when we began our long recovery.
And then again, more perspective. Bankruptcy is not inoperable and incurable cancer.
There is no simple or single right way to live, wisdom does not come with blinding illumination and revelation, we swim in a river of questioning, uncertainty and indecision. We hang onto what remains, what stays with us in the face of so much confusion.
Love and faith do not die without our consent and complicity, and I do not agree to let either die within me, surely not because I was hit by too many storms at once. And they have not died within me. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. And faith is finding myself, in the deepest part of my soul, in the very heart of who I am.
Our lives are more complex, our communities more crowded, our laws and regulations more numerous. our people more fearful, the lives of our dogs more constricted. More than 90 per cent of us live along one or the other coasts of the country, dogs have fewer places to roam, inside or out of the law.
I am grateful to live where I live, people still drive their dogs around with them, take them into nature, into the meadows and forests that surround us. It is a joy to give a dog the life they were meant to live, and I think Fate is freest and most in her element out in the meadow, where she can roam and hide and and chase and learn and inquire. I never quite know when and where she will emerge,but sometimes she obliges me and my camera by popping out near where we both are.
The new gate to the pasture is under construction, Ed Watkins and his crew are digging a post to bracket the new four foot aluminum gate, he’s setting the post in concrete so it won’t shift. This will make life smother and easier on Bedlam Farm. Some delays with the drill and his bit, but we hope to have the new gate by mid- afternoon.
A well-known writer and behaviorist seeking a blurb send me a galley of his book to be published next year, it is a powerful, meticulously researched study of the intelligence of dogs (I am not permitted to quote from it or identify the author until it is published), and like almost every behaviorist, trainer and biologist, he has found that dogs are getting dumber all the time.
Like me, he believes that the emotionalizing of dogs – the curse of the Rainbow Bridge – I call it, is dumbing them down, allowing their instincts to dull and want. This is the inevitable consequence of dogs them more and more as helpless and dependent and abused and piteous, over-regulated and over-protected to the point that they can’t learn or grow or develop their own great survival skills and intellects.
This, I suppose, is why I am so drawn to the working breeds of dogs, I love seeing them with work to do, tasks to perform, judgments and decisions to make. Dogs are increasingly seen as helpless and abused creatures in need of constant vigilance and protection. Increasingly, they never walk off-leash, run in the woods, use any of their hunting or predatory instincts.
This troubled way of looking at animals nearly cost the New York Carriage Horses their good and active and healthy lives in New York, they were nearly condemned to slaughter or something almost as work, stupefying existences with nothing to do.
Our concern for animals like horses and elephants and dogs has become a hysteria, not an animal welfare movement.
It is considered dangerous now to leave dogs unsupervised – they might get stolen; to take them with you in cars – they might obstruct your view or suffocate in the sun; to go anywhere ponds with ice – they might fall in; to explore meadows and woods – they might get ticks or run into rabid skunks and raccoons; they must never be left in the rain or the cold – they might freeze and suffer; they should not work in warm or cold weather.
Any kind of work for animals or the use of them to entertain or uplift humans is increasingly considered exploitive, cruel or abusive.
Many people in the dog world have been driven nearly mad on social media with paranoid fantasies about evil dog food and Darth Vader vets seeking to harm their dogs and steal their money. The best-selling dog book in the world by far is the Rainbow Bridge a sappy story which posits that all of our dogs will be waiting for us in heaven when we die, and will spend all of eternity chasing balls and frisbees with us. I am happy to see I’d rather skip heaven and hang myself than spend eternity throwing balls for my border collies, perhaps the most selfish animal fantasy in the history of the world.
I hear people call their dogs “furbabies,” people often tell me their dogs and cats are just like children. It is a wonderful thing to love a dog, I have been doing it my whole. Emotionalizing them, or seeing them only through the prism of rescue and abuse and adorableness is something else.
How do dogs learn?
Mostly by doing. Dogs used to roam free much of the time, they learned to navigate weather, search for food. They also fought, got lost, got run over. They learned how to understand other dogs. When they lived on the periphery of lives rather than in the emotional center they had the opportunity grow and make decisions. They became one of the smartest animal species on the earth, smart enough to worm their way into the lives of humans and their families.
Very few animals are smart enough to live well with us. We can barely live with ourselves. The smartest dog I know is a border collie who lives on a nearby farm. He sleeps under a tractor in one of the barns, he runs alongside the farmer’s truck and tractor all day, he herds cows and goats when necessary, he is tossed a can of kibble or human leftovers once a day, he finds warm and dry places for himself, when he gets old and lame the farmer will shoot him rather than have him die on a strange linoleum floor.
He has never been in the farmhouse, and in warm weather, sleeps on a mat on the porch, where he can keep an eye on things. He is free much of the day to live the life of a dog, explore, hunt and oversee. He drinks water from a stream, sometimes laps up some warm cows milk left for him in a bowl.
Many people reading this would consider his life a horror, he is a happy dog, living his life, smart as most of the people I know.
The world of the modern dog has shrunk. Their work is most often to tend to the emotional needs of humans, they rarely get to use their extraordinary instincts and develop their instincts and intelligence. The conclusion of the book I have just read and will happily blurb is that dogs are being dumbed down all the time. The more we ban and limit their activities, more we worry about them and protect them, the less work they have to do (think of the New York Carriage Horses), the fewer opportunities they have to think and grow their intellects.
Every other dog owner I meet tells me their dog has been abused (and how can they know, really, since dogs don’t speak and humans rarely admit to abusing them), often as an excuse for inappropriate or obnoxious behaviors. When you pity an animal, it is very difficult to train him or her. I told Frieda from the first I would never patronize her by assuming she was too fragile to behave. You are not made of crystal, I used to tell her.
I have had working dogs my whole life.
Work is so important to animals (think of elephants as well as horses.).
The well-meaning rescuers of the animal world have come to accept the idea that work for animals is cruel, and that the best life for a working, domesticated animal is to stand around and eat and eliminate all day. That is not so, it is the worst kind of life for a working animal, it is cruel and abusive in and of itself.
Animals need to work, whether it be going on hikes, riding in cars, doing agility, show, herding, rescue, show, or therapy work. Or just coming along as we love, We can, and we are, protecting them to death and lives of lethargy and boredom. An animal cannot develop skills they can’t use. People breaking the windows of dog owner cars in malls and parking lots are not doing the dogs any favors, they are just condemning countless animals to lives in basements and backyards. There are not many decisions to make there.
It is a tragedy for dogs when people tell me they are afraid to take their dogs along with them when they do chores in warm weather, another new kind of social abuse in the guide of animal welfare. Dogs have accompanied us on our rounds for centuries, very few have died for it.
Our fear for them has lost perspective, or worry has become a bubble from which they can never retreat or escape.
Like us, some have been mistreated and some suffer at human hands. Welcome to the theater of life. And most of the time, mind your own business.
When we forget that these remarkable creatures are animals, we reject their identities and their very souls. I am committed to giving my dogs the opportunity to use their great gifts, to grow and learn Watching Fate explore the meadow, learn about the pasture, run in the deep woods, I have literally seen her intellect and judgment grow, I have watched her change and become more intelligent.
I have seen this with Red, with Lenore, with Izzy and Rose and every dog I have had.
The dog doesn’t have to come from a purebred working line to be intelligent, mixed breeds can be just as smart or smarter,
They just need to be seen and treated as a dog, not solely as an emotional tool to exploit so that we can feel better about our fragmented and disconnected lives.
I wrote on my blog recently that the horses and the donkeys ate part of the pasture gate during last year’s awful winter. Immediately, there were two messages. One said horses should have hay available to them at all times, and another “wondered” if the animals should not have been kept in warm and enclosed spaces.
I replied to the first, and said she should try banning “should” from her vocabulary, especially in messages to other people, it might change her life. I don’t use it myself when talking to others. I told the other that working ponies and donkeys are desert and mountain animals, it is not healthy for them to be in enclosed and heated spaces in the winter, nor is it natural in any way. These messages of alarm are not unusual, everyone who writes about animals online is familiar with the fearful ones.
Like our dogs, the donkeys and our pony cope with all kinds of weather, and know when to use our ample and dry shelter, always available to them. Using it is their choice, not ours, and we are pleased to let them make it. And no, I cannot afford to give our equines hay 24 hours a day. Neither can anyone else I know.
One day during a snow and ice storm, Fate wanted to go outside, and I let her.
From time to time, I watched through the window to see if she wanted to come in. She did not. She sat in the snow peacefully, then went and dug out a warm spot under a bush. When it rained, she went into the dog house and peered out, eventually napping. I opened the door and called to her, she did not wish to leave the dog house, and I let her stay for a while. She loved being out there.
I was much more troubled than she was, but I was glad I let her life a bit in the very constrained dog universe we have created for them. Safety and comfort matters, all love our dogs, but it is certainly true that love and worry need to be managed, just like cruelty and abuse. When we lose perspective, it is always the animals who pay – I often think of what the carriage horses in New York were spared by not being taken away.
And it is the animals who grow dumber and less resourceful, in almost direct proportion to our growing love for them. We are loving them into dumbness.
Barn cats – all cats, I guess – are elusive and mystical. There is a mystery about them. I’ve always called this chair the Fiber Chair, Maria refers to it as the Rapunzel Chair, and she is the artist, so it is the Rapunzel Chair from now on for me as well. Something about this chair attracts the barn cats, they love it. they are always sitting on it or near it or staring at it, as if it will suddenly turn into juicy mouse.
I will never know what draws the cats to this artistic creation, the dogs never pay the slightest attention to it. Flo supervises the work and checks it out every morning.
