It was warm yesterday, Maria sat with her fiber chair – she calls it a Rapunzel Chair – for a couple of hours in the sun. The chair will grace the porch when it is finished, the second chair. We don’t plan to sell it, or even sit on it, although the barn cats love it. I love to see this creative ritual, I don’t know anyone other than Maria who would have thought to do it. The chair is an old wreck salvaged from the barn, baling string from the hay is bringing it back to life.
Of all the species on the earth, only human beings have the ability to be unhappy with their lives, or to yearn for something different, or to commit wanton violence on other humans. We are the only species that hates, regrets, conquers and despairs, feels guilt. We are the only species who feel greed and who despoil the earth.
As much as we love to project our own troubled and complex emotions onto animals, the hard truth is that animals are much too wise and spiritual to feel the things we feel or think the way we think. They are not reflections of us, they are nothing like us. That is the very key to understanding them.
They do not yearn for more success, seek to conquer the earth, fight on cable news, post on Facebook, join the mobs on Twitter, or sue and envy one another. They do not seek wealth.
Animals live within themselves, accept the boundaries of their existence. I have seen many animals die on this farm, and I have never seen an animal waste away on grief, or spend months and years grieving. In a day or so, they are living as usual. They do not understand death, but they accept it.
Their faith is survival, their lives revolve around species, food and safety. They do not despoil the Earth, buy nasty political ads on television, cheat on their spouses, seek more power, write nasty e-mails, abuse one another without cause or despair over their regrets in life.
I am very different from the animals I live with.
But I think, in may ways, my idea of faith and their practice of faith is convergent.
I don’t see them as inferior and helpless dependents, I see them as my partners and sometimes, my teachers in life. No one seeking a spiritual life could possibly do better than to spend time with animals, to listen and learn from them, they are wiser than most teachers I have known.
My faith, increasingly, is acceptance, just as they live and practice acceptance instinctively and completely.
Every morning, the animals wait patiently to be fed, they come out of the shelter of their barn, they seek nothing more than to be with one another and graze and explore, or sit quietly in the sun or shade and contemplate what they see and know and feel.
This is precisely what we humans have not learned to do, or if we have learned it, we have either forgotten or been dragged out of ourselves by greed, fear, corporate privations, feckless politicians and the complexities of technology.
What have I learned from them?
In spiritual terms, I am learning to accept life in somewhat the same way they do. They do not lament life or worry about death, they have no awareness that they are going to die.They do not waste time on worry about the future or clutter their lives with wasteful human ritual.
Yesterday, Bev wrote to me on Facebook scolding me for having (years ago) tossed my hen Henrietta off into the woods after she was hit by a car. She just caught up with one of my books. The hen, she said, should have had a decent service and burial.
I did reply and said Henrietta had no need of a human burial. I would prefer her to become food for the many animals out in the woods rather than be eaten by worms and bugs in the ground. (I also suggested uncharitably that she mind her own business.) And why, I wondered, it is proper to feed the worms, but not the mice and raccoons and coyotes and owls and rabbits?
Earlier this week, someone came up to pet Red and assured me that her dog would be very jealous when she got home because she petted. I didn’t have to heart to tell her that dogs don’t get jealous, envy is a human emotion, animals live above our pettiness and neuroses. But she would not have heard it.
And that is unfortunate, because the key to understanding animals and learning from them is the realization not that they are like us, but that they are not. Dogs don’t need to be jealous, we need them to be jealous. They are just curious.
Both anecdotes speak to acceptance, something I am working hard to achieve and with more and more success.
Think about it. Do we need funeral parlors and caskets and embalming for our many millions of hens?
The farthest thing from a hen’s consciousness is a proper burial We are the ones who cannot accept life, that people love dogs and will pet them without consequence, or that chickens are eaten by half of the animals who live in the country, and are a part of the very natural food chain. They die quickly and often.
We will all, every one of us, lose the people we love, and the people who love us will lose us as well. If we live with animals, we will see many of them die, they do not live as long as we do, and they do not (yet) have a for profit health care system to keep the alive beyond their time. If we are shocked by every death of every living thing – something that will happen to all of us – we will, by necessity, live lives of continuous despair and drama.
As human beings, we have not yet learned to do what animals do.
We cannot respect or accept the living and plentiful contradictions, disappointments, tragedies and losses of which real and true life are full. In fact, crisis and mystery is life.
Our computers will crash, we will wait for hours in doctor’s offices, our fillings will fail, our payments will get lost, we will back into another car, get sick, lose the tiles on our roof, have a tree fall down in the yar, our knees will hurt from time to time, or even all the time.
When I had my open heart surgery three years ago, I had two choices. One was to be shocked and angry that this was happening to me, another was to be grateful that doctors could now take my heart out and make it work again. I chose the latter.
Like the animals, I am learning to accept life. I believe in rebirth, it the the up side of being human.
We can make ourselves crazy, or we can make ourselves whole. We can live in our neuroses, or in our hope and faith.
I call this acceptance grace, and without grace there can be no unity or simplicity in our lives, only fear and doubt and regret and anger and contradiction.
When a man enters a monastery, he must stand before the community and answer the ancient and ritual question:
Quid petis? :“What Do You Ask?”
His answer is not to ask for wealth or security or fame, or a life free of sin or surprise or disappointment. The answer is that he seeks mercy.
The monks are seeking mercy from God, but I seek mercy, for myself, from the ones I love, from the people who read my writing and look at my photographs, from my friends and daughters.
What Do I Ask?
I seek the wisdom to understand that is simply a matter of accepting life, and to see everything in life as a gift.
