If you want to get close to animals and photograph them, it’s a good idea to show them the camera while they are eating. Animals associate anything close to them while they eat with good things, and i often stand by the feeder, or like today, put my camera right into the feeder.
Very few animals will take off at the sight of a camera while they are hungry and eating. I used to put my camera down next to the dog’s food bowls while they ate, so they would get used to it, and look into the lens, which most dogs do not like to do. Today, I leaned forward into the feeder and put my camera with a wide angle lens right into the hay.
Nobody stopped chomping for a second, they were at ease with me and my camera and I got a shot I liked of them eating. An unusual view. It takes care and thought to photograph animals and get close enough to capture their lives. I have worked hard to learn how to do it. I like this kind of shot.
Emma knows just how to get to me, I am a sucker for photographs of my granddaughter Robin smiling or looking mischievous. Here, she is mesmerized by her mobile, soon to be replaced by a mobile I’m sending her with five plush toys that rotate, sing and dance. A second mobile arrived here at the farm, it has music and whirling lights.
I saw some educational mobiles that teaching things to babies, but I balked at those and it got me thinking about what my teaching role is as an older grandfather who lives hundreds of miles away and will not be an integral part of Robin’s life.
Emma, I see, is committed to the idea that she wants Robin’s grandparents to know her and be close to her, and I admire her for that and respect her. I’d like that also. But I am still not certain what it means, given the limitations of geography and the very different nature of our lives.
Cute is not enough for a relationship in my mind, we have to wait a bit and see what happens naturally.
I do not see my role as teaching Robin, I see that as the role of her parents. Her parents obviously adore her, and she has relatives and grandparents much closer than I am – one of her grandmothers will be with her one day every week helping out, which is sweet and generous – and are all ready and able to be a part of her life.
That is not really possible for me.
I don’t think I want to be teaching her, or be a role model for her. That is for her parents. I don’t want to be intimately involved in her care, that is also for her parents. I am liking the idea of a thoughtful hit-and-run relationship. Visits that count. On my visit last week, I convinced my wary daughter to let me take Robin for a walk – no stroller, or straps or holder. Just me and her. Emma was concerned, reluctant.
I pushed gently.
She finally relented, and let me go out alone with Robin and we had the sweetest time. I was very careful and very much at ease. I did this with Emma many times, all over the Northeast.
I walked Robin in my arms to a nearby park and sat down with her on a bench. She was like an explorer seeing the Amazon for the first time (she had been outside before.)
Her eyes nearly popped out of her head, it was the most amazing mobile a baby could imagine – hundreds, if not thousands of New Yorkers of all colors, sizes, shapes and demeanor. Her eyes were popping out of her head. Bicycles, sirens, shouting people, dogs, vendors, people of every color, wearing every kind of thing. I had no idea what she could see or comprehend. Not much, I suspect.
People stopped to smile at her, ask about her, laugh with her, and she was like Fate, she was smiling at everybody, especially the kids from the day care play group who rushed over to see her and sing to her. We had great time, and I was back in the apartment in 15 minutes, just as Emma was ready to put on her jacket and go hunting for us.
(I do know how she felt, I didn’t let anybody hold her much for a long time.) I can make my occasional visits count by making them special and making sure we connect. I want to spend some time with her and just show her things. I want to show her that the world is a beautiful and loving place, she will hear many other kinds of messages.
Last week, I spent some time trawling online for a very special kind of mobile, one with music and moving lights, I think it will dazzle her. It’s strange, but I think I know what she will like. Isn’t that curious? I have only seen her a few times. I will send this other mobile to New York once she gets used to the first one I bought, arriving this week. There are a lot of ways to communicate with a grandchild that are not cute, cloying or invasive.
To me, mobiles are important, they can relax the mind and stimulate it. Babies are so dependent.
Am I hooked and overwhelmed with emotion, transformed and blown away? No, I am not, not yet. That is a process for me,not an automatic rite. It’s just the way I am constructed.
Robin has to become more of a definable person for that, and those smiles are getting closer. I hope it happens. Truthfully, I don’t know what my role will be in the life of this genial baby, despite so many other people telling me what it will be. We are all different.
I am open to anything, really, the world is filled with mystery, but I don’t need to know just yet. I just need to keep making my visits and occasional gifts count.
Connie Brooks at Battenkill Books said she received more than 120 pre-orders for Talking To Animals: What We Understand About them, What They Understand About Us over this past weekend as the result of a single blog post I published over the weekend.
The orders have come in from all over the country and Canada.
Connie showed me the swelling folders containing the advance orders, I was excited. Next Spring, I will be reading them and signing the books and personalizing them. We will also be giving people who pre-order the book tote-bags and picture postcards of Bedlam Farm and a limited number of Maria’s potholders.
She said it was a record for one or two days, much larger than other pre-orders so early on, so far from the publication date – in this case May of 2017. “There is a lot of interest in this subject,” she said. I was glad to hear it. I am pretty much alone with my blog and Facebook in this campaign, publishers leave the promotion of books pretty much to authors now, and I am going to give it my best.
I believe in this book and i believe it will find an audience among animal lovers who wish to understand their pets – and horses and donkeys and sheep and barn cats – in a new and wiser way. Animals are in peril in our world, climate change and human greed is destroying their natural habitats and the animal rights movement is too often trying the force them away from work with human beings.
We need to talk to animals and listen to them so we can better understand what they really need and how we can keep them among us, not drive them a way to isolated private preserves and the ranches of the rich where they will never work or be seen by the vast majority of people again. We need to find humane ways to work with them so people can re-connect with them, so they can heal and keep their wondrous partnership with people intact.
The book details the techniques Maria and I have used over the past 15 years – visualization, body language, emotion, food – to talk to animals, and also to actively listen to them rather than project our thoughts into their heads. I am glad there is already interest in this book, I will fight hard for it.
Battenkill takes Paypal and credit cards, and I will personalize each book as requested. If you like talking to courteous and knowledgeable humans, as I do, there are several at Battenkill Books and they will help you and be happy to talk to you. 518 677-2515. Many people who call the shop for my books end up coming back again and again for other books. It is essential that bookstores like this survive and prosper, Connie is doing well.
This is precisely the kind of independent bookstore we want to survive and need to support. Amazon is doing fine. Thanks so much for your interest. We are just getting started.
The Red dog loves to sit on the crest of the pasture hill and look out over his territory, he is the King of the pasture, he keeps a steady watch over the sheep, and keeps an eye on me and where I am. Once in awhile, I look over and see this regal and devoted creature sitting quietly, he wants nothing more than to serve.
Here’s a burst of truth I can offer you that the other pundits will not share with you:
Donald Trump has a bigger problem than Hillary Clinton. He is boring. He is putting people to sleep all over the country. I think of a crazy old uncle, bitter and whiny, raging on endlessly about all the people who screwed him in life. It is tiresome.
And I have a confession which I will make up front: I hate whiners and I hate whining I am immoveable on the subject.
When my daughter Emma was three, I told her she could have anything within reason that she wanted, provided she never whined. And I got her everything within reason that she wanted.
And she has never whined to this day.
Mr. Trump whines every single day, and I am bored with him.
What does it mean to be boring: according to the dictionary, it means being monotonous, tedious, irksome, tiresome. It means being Donald Trump.
He’s got the media all wrong. Their ideology is money, not politics, but he knows that of course.
It isn’t that the media is biased, they will put a cockroach on the air all day if it draws ratings and profits and screams loud enough – just look at this campaign. But they are missing the big story. Donald Trump is not undermining our democracy, he is putting it to sleep.
The candidate whose face and image has become all-encompassing on media, has become boring, and if they don’t know it today, they will know it soon enough, when their ratings come in. The marketers know it already. You can be a lot of awful things in America and do very well, Mr. Trump has proven that, but you can not be boring and do very well.
This week, I have moved on, and about time. Life is way too precious to listen to this stuff every day. I am old enough, I can’t waste any more hours or days on it.
In America, marketing is a religion, billions and billions of dollars depend on market research. Two days ago, I went on B&H Photo to look at the price of a portrait lens, I was just browsing, and since then there hasn’t been a five minute period when an image of the lens didn’t pop up on some website or in some e-mail or Facebook post. They know what all of us are thinking and wanting and liking, it is a science, not a guess.
The marketers have known for months that Donald Trump will lose, and have known for weeks something I just figured out recently: he has become profoundly boring. Some people are screaming and railing at his rallies, but much greater numbers of people, myself included, are falling asleep when he talks and shouts and reaching for a good book or some music.
Listening to Trump rant on every day about the end of the world and all the many conspiracies against him is about as inspiring as putting a tin can on your head and banging it with a hammer for hours. I mean, there are just a lot of wonderful things to be doing in life, this is not one of them.
For awhile, I was fascinated by Trump, and so was everyone else. He was very different, a celebrity with an aura of success and a kind of 50’s idea of glamour hovering about. He has a gift for communicating with the outraged. I remember staying in one of his hotels on a book tour and staring at the gold-place faucets in the bathroom, I thought I was in France just before the Revolution.
it was simply beyond my grasp that someone like him could get nominated for President by a major political party, he lied and strutted and insulted and bullied and improvised, usually all at once in a sort of stream of conscientious. He was crude and always seem to have disturbing issues with women, he seemed piggish to me, sometimes disgusting.
The people who love him because he is not a politician are correct. He isn’t. I used to cover politics, and my own hubris required that I understand what seemed, on the surface, to be incomprehensible.
I got momentarily hooked on Trump, like so many people, I had never seen anything like him, and eventually, like so many people, I was horrified, which, as we know, is also addicting. I was also frightened for my country, which I love.
I was one of the people driving news websites to unprecedented ratings and tons of profit. They do not ever want the campaign to end, and will pretend to the last-minute that the apocalypse is upon us and that Trump, like Godzilla, can rise up out of the muck at any time.
I wrote several months ago that I believed the campaign was over, and that he would lose, but I had no idea just how over it was going to be. And is.
I never imagined a tape out there where he would brag about “grabbing pussy.” Today, The Upshot, for my money the most reliable political projection and polling site in the world, said Donald Trump’s chance of becoming president, with just a few weeks to go, is now down to 8 per cent, the lowest they have ever been, and the lowest of any presidential candidate in modern history.
Those are not the numbers of a charismatic, ascending political leader.
This morning, it was reported that Young and Rubicam, the giant marketing firm that has tracked Donald Trump’s consumer brand for many years through surveys and market research, says the public is no longer intrigued by him, his ideas, or his products, hotels, or golf courses. A candidate who has depended solely on personality to propel him is no longer seen as likeable, interesting or glamorous.
In recent weeks, the number of consumers who say Trump is distinct has fallen by 10 per cent, according to their highly respected survey, which corporations pay a lot of money to see. Those who think he is fun have dropped 13 per cent. Trendy: down 17 per cent. Stylish, down 21 per cent.
“Trump,” says the latest Young and Rubicam (these are surveyors who would push a gila monster if his numbers were up, they don’t care who runs for president if he or she can sell) “is becoming boring even to Republicans, but his worst performance is among those who identify as political independents (that’s me) or members of smaller political parties. Among those folks, who could be considered swing voters, Trump is 17 per cent less fun, a whopping 37 per cent less dynamic and 30.6 percent less distinctive than he was just 90 days ago.
In politics, they call that “free fall.”
This report is highly relevant to me and my life. A few days ago, I browsed the news on my Iphone 7 Plus, my gateway to life beyond the farm, and I saw Donald Trump at a rally looking just like my deranged old Uncle Sam, waving his arms and fingers around, sniffing and spitting and scowling and ranting and whining about how everyone in the world was out to get him, or had screwed him in one way or another.
I was becoming bored, and profoundly so. How often can anybody listen to this?
Donald Trump had become my own worst fears about myself as I turn 69, that I would become some cranky and nasty old man ranting about the world and the good old days, and young people today, and African-Americans and women and immigrants and crooked politicians ruining my life, causing my book sales to drop and my royalties to vanish and excusing my misdeeds and failures by saying other people were all doing worse things than I did.
In the past few days, I have picked up on my book reading, I have downloaded the new Nora Jones CD and listened to Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks to honor his Nobel Prize. My music listening and book reading had declined during my pre-bored fascination with Donald Trump, I counted about 25 times I checked my Iphone for the news one day and awakened to the fact that Mr. Trump was no longer interesting to me.
Wow, it is so much nicer listening to Norah Jones than Donald Trump, it is hard to believe both people exist in the same universe.
Mr. Trump just keeps shouting the same things every day, the only thing new was the target list. Lately, he began trying to eat his own, and it occurred to me this was getting very, very old.
I am very sorry for the many good people who have chosen to put their faith in this dysfunctional and aspiritual human being, they have just permitted themselves to be betrayed one more time, by one of the biggest hucksters of all time. They will perhaps one day be grateful that they were spared the ultimate betrayal, his becoming the leader of what is called the Free World.
Donald Trump is not only boring, he isn’t even original. Mencken wrote about him a half century ago in his classic, Notes On Democracy.
Of all the emotions related to the emergence of Democracy, wrote Mencken, “fear remains the chiefest among them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos…The whole history of the country has been history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, Pancho Villa, German spies, the Kaiser, Bolshevism.”
And Mexicans, Immigrants, journalists, Clintons.
The demagogue himself, writes Mencken, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman,
usually comes ignominiously to grief when he actually has to propose a program beyond fear and the easy manipulation of the mob.
Sound familiar? We have seen worse than Trump and survived them. We have been there before.
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People have to make up their own minds and follow their own beliefs. I don’t tell others what to do or think.
As for me, I feel liberated by the revelation that Donald Trump is not only a boor, he is a bore. I know every single thing he is going to say before he says it, and only the names change. It is no longer fascinating, there is no longer anything to divine or observe. I will learn nothing by observing him.
If I were to meet him, I would tell him I would happily listen to his ideas and programs if he would promise to stop whining, just for a day. Alas, that will not happen. He has nothing to say, his whole program is one continuous whine.
I’ll skip the debate Wednesday night and get back to the fundamentals of my life that have done so much good for me – walking in the woods with Maria, making love whenever possible, reading my good novels and books, plugging my headphones into the Iphone for an evening music hour, meditating in the back pasture with the donkeys, working on my next book, meditating, doing therapy work with Red, taking photos for the blog.
Donald Trump is over for me, and not in the way I always thought.
He isn’t going with a bang, but a whine. Not only is he certain to lose the election, the marketers have pronounced him beyond dead, he is worse than that, he is now boring. Angry old men in America cannot be boring and nasty every single day, week after week, and sell whatever it is they are pitching. That is not how marketing works, not in commerce, not in politics.
As for the good people who e-mail me almost every day wringing their hands about this disturbing wreck of a man, I hope they will check out Young and Rubicam’s marketing study. Back to the fundamentals of life.
