Kelly Nolan plays the women’s card all the time at the Bog, a bar and restaurant where she works several nights a week. She is a bartender, waitress, busperson, greeter, sometimes for 100 people at once, and another bunch out back throwing horseshoes. She serves drinks at the bar, comes out to wait on tables, take orders, set the tables, clear the tables, ferry food from the kitchen, ask everyone every few minutes if they have everything they need or are okay.
We sit in amazement at her poise and charm and good cheer. If she is ever exhausted or annoyed or overworked, she doe snot show it. She is hard-working gracious and empathetic to everyone, asking how everyone is, how they like their food. No matter how crowded the bar/restaurant is, she always appears in short order, takes everyone’s orders, brings the check when people are done.
I like the woman’s card idea, it works for me. I see women as being strong, competent and more compassionate than men. They seem more include to notice and fix problems rather than lament them, complain about them, or look to fight.
They juggle so many things at once, and are expected to do so much more than men. In the excitement, chaos , noise and hub-bub of a bar (with a big long bar and a pool table in the back), Kelly is a sea of calm and strength, a whirling dervish with a smile, that smile simply keeps this small and potentially turbulent warm and bright.
Zelda is six or seven years old by now, she is one tough and determined ewe. At the first Bedlam Farm, she climbed over and under fences, broke through them, knocked me and Red over a half dozen times. At our new farm, she led a breakout through the new fences and up busy Route 22, Red in hot pursuit up a busy two-lane highway with racing trucks and cars.
Red got her back, and the others as well. She has settled down. She and Red have a peaceful working arrangement, she mostly ignores Fate unless she gets too close, then she runs her off. Zelda has strength and character. It was sad when she lost her lamb last year, we were hoping for the next generation Zelda, and she was downcast for days. I doubt she will get another chance at motherhood. I tried to capture her strength and focus in this photograph. It was taken with my new 35 mm lens.
My black and white photography has brought me to a new chapter in my life with animals, a new project I call “Sout Portraits,” in which I seek to capture the souls of animals as well as their stories. To capture the soul of an animal, you need to be patient, you need a fast lens, you need to work to make the animals comfortable with the camera.
I have been working at this for years. I always let the animals see the camera and sniff it, I always give them food when the camera is around, I always have it hanging off my neck when I come into the pasture.
With the dogs, I often lay the camera down next to the food bowl while they eat. A good lens is important, because the souls of animals are often reflected in their eyes, and only a fast lens will capture the eyes and show it in contrast. It is not easy to catch the eyes of a dark or black sheep or dog.
I stood across from Susie for awhile and let her study me and see what I was up to. She wanted to see where Red was, she pays no attention to Fate. I have given her treats from time time to time, she is used to me and my camera. Curious, rather than frightened, she looked me right in the eye.
Sheep have big and wide and beautiful eyes, they often looked puzzled and surprised at the world around them, I think they understand little of it. Susie has been with us awhile, and she produces some of the most beautiful yarn that Maria sells.
My journey into black and white (I’m not giving up color) has inspired a move towards portraits, of people, of animals. I want to capture their souls, if I can. I haven’t done as much of that as I wanted to, the problem with a big long lens is that you don’t really get close enough to see the soul sometimes.
Fate is the queen of the stone walls out in the woods. She climbs each one, scans the horizon, looks pleased and proud of herself, and continues on her journey through the woods.
Biologists have always known that the plants and animals have their own councils, says scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass). Some trees, she writes, warn each other of disease and drought, sometimes the wind carries their messages from one to the other, transmitting hormones and microbes and other news.
“in the old times,” writes Kimmerer, “the trees talked each other. They’d stand in their own council and draft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was dismissed.
In her remarkable book, Kimmerer, a scientist herself, challenges that idea. The conclusion that plants cannot speak, she said, was drawn because they lack the mechanisms that people and animals use to speak. (We make this same mistake about dogs and cats, we imagine, in our arrogance that they must speak like us, and in our words.)
Recently, she wrote, scientists and biologists have begun exploring the idea that plants and trees do have ways of speaking to one another. Pollen, for example, has been carried for thousands of years on the wind, communicated by males to receptive females who make nuts and other foods. If the wind can be trusted with that, why not with messages?
There is a growing body of evidence, she writes, that the old ones were right, that trees are talking to one another. They communicate with hormonelike compounds that are carried by the wind, laden with meaning. Scientists have identified specific compounds, Kimmer says, that a tree will release when it is under the stress of insect attack – gypsy moths or bark beetles, or drought.
Trees who receive these warnings can often manufacture defensive chemicals.
This is a stunning idea to me, I have been reading about it more and more lately. I think there are people who live in nature, and see us as a part of it, and people who live totally apart from nature and see it as something completely different from us. It is easy to destroy nature when one sees it mostly as an inanimate system without feeling or consciousness. In that way, we go about our business, assuming we have the right to destroy the world so that we can make money.
I never thought about nature much until I lived in it, and Maria has furthered my consciousness about our connection to other living things. So have our animals, as our connection to them has grown.Walking in the woods, each day, I have come to feel the animate presence of trees, I can sense that they are aware of us, I can almost feel their connection to one another, their sharing of the sun, of the water in the ground.
I think they know us now, they envelop us when we walk, they feel the vibrations of our feet, they know if we are friend or foe, fellow traveler or enemy.
They seem gentle and benign to me, of course, not looking for conflict but intensely aware of each other, and why wouldn’t they be? What makes us think we are the only living things with a consciousness for community?
Walking in the precincts of the woods and forest, I no longer take it for granted. I try to take only what I use, only what is given, and to use it well, to be grateful for the gift of it, and to return the favor in any way that I can. I do this by caring for the woods, keeping it clean, protecting it from danger and harm, walking where I should. By respecting it as part of the chain of life that connects us all.
