I’ve watched the beautiful sunsets in the fields across from the farmhouse for years, but have never been able to capture the wonderful feeling of the sun dropping over the hill. I stood out there for a half hour today with my new lens, the Archomat, trying to see if this time I could get the feel of it. I must have taken 100 shots, this lens is so difficult to master.
When I saw the sunlight bursting through the trees, I thought I might have caught the feeling of it.
I know I came close, this one had a lot of emotion. Photography, like training dogs, has taught me patience and determination. I can wait now, the time will come.
The Gray Hen is fading, she won’t be here for long. She is no longer able to get up in the roost, we haven’t figured out where she sleeps, probably in the barn, she sometimes spends the night with Minnie on the porch, she seems quite attached to Minnie and no longer feeds or sleeps with the other hens.
One morning, she will be gone, taken by predators or died of natural causes. I might have to shoot her if she seems to be suffering, or has worms or maggots on her. The other hens will no longer let her near the roost, chickens are cold blooded and unforgiving.
She is on the porch in the morning, she is up early and moving about. I have grown fond of the chickens, but I do not love them as I love the other animals. Maria does, and she takes wonderful care of them, bringing them leftovers from restaurants and our meals.
The gray hen follows me around during the day sometimes, I think her mind and instincts are going. She seems confused and disoriented.
She isn’t getting out of the way of the car any longer, or of us or the dogs. The dogs are avoiding her, giving her a wide berth, just like the other two hens. Animals always know when a member of their herd or flock is sick, they become dangerous and attract predators, so they are often driven out of the herd or the flock. The hens have done that to the gray hen.
Minnie loves the chickens and is always good to them, she always lets them stay close when they are sick. I remember her sitting with my dying rooster Winston at the other Bedlam Farm. She stayed with him for days, and fended off the other chickens when they tried to peck his eyes out. Chickens are not loyal or merciful to one another.
Minnie stayed next to Winston until I put him down by shooting, he was covered with flies.
I don’t know what the point is where she needs to be put down, we’re not there yet. But sick and oddly-behaved hens do not last long, something picks them off or they simply die. And I do not think it’s merciful to keep chickens alive beyond their time.
I respect the chickens and their industry. I used to think they were dumb, but they are not dumb, they are very smart about what they need to be smart about – like many animals. I hope the gray hen doesn’t suffer too much, if we see that she is, I will give her a quick and merciful end.
I had an interesting time writing yesterday about social media, my new lens photos, and the idea that they were harming the eyes of some of my readers eyes. I laughed a lot when I wrote it, and many people laughed when they read it. Some did not, of course, humor has no mother or home in a left and right world.
This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, I do. But I especially love irony and satire, it is often a part of my work.
Of course, life and fate has its own idea of a joke, and this morning, I found myself getting my eyes dilated in an opthamologist’s office, and my own issues were not simple.
I have to see a retina specialist in a few weeks, and we’ll see where we go from there.
I decided to make the grim doctor smile and asked him it if was possible that my eyes have been damaged by my new lens and its soft focus. He looked at me curiously, as if I had dropped out of the back of a horse (I don’t think he jokes much in his office) and handed me some plastic tinted glasses so I could drive home without being blinded by the sun.
Good luck, he said.
I know it seems odd, but I am not comfortable discussing the details of my eye issues on Facebook or Twitter. If it develops into a grand and running drama, of course I will share what I can, as I try to do. I think it’s quite ironic that all of this happened in the week that my photography and people’s eyesight have come to the fore in my blog.
They say you get what you deserve, with dogs and lovers and people.
I got a lot of response to my piece.
One reader said I was too sensitive and judgmental, another said she was “boggled” at the idea I could be bothered by anyone’s suggestion that my photos were harmful to people’s eyes, or by people seeing my work in terms of their medical problems, a first.
Most people caught the irony of the situation,and there was a lot of chuckling. But of course a number of people think it is just wrong for me to challenge comments online that I find intrusive or uncomfortable. The idea is if you share your life or put your work out there, you are asking for it, deserving of it, and have no right to complain or squawk.
This, in my mind, is how the Internet has become a cesspool of hostility, intrusion, invasiveness, rudeness, insensitivity and cruelty. I do not agree that someone in my position should be silenced by my willingness to be open, or needs to pay a price for it, and I will, as most of you know, speak out about it every chance I can.
If we all did, then the Internet would be a freer and more compassionate place, so might the country. Many women can testify about the idea that people should be quiet when they are uncomfortable because it might make somebody else uncomfortable.
I am surely sensitive and often judgmental, I would hate to be an insensitive writer and photographer, that doesn’t really work for me. If people don’t wish to know what I think of their comments, then don’t write to me, isn’t that what some people are saying to me?
I may be sensitive, but not so much that I ever shut up or will give up my right to speak. As to being judgemental, I plead guilty. I don’t see that changing, if I were not judgemental I would not have much to say every day.
And don’t kid yourself. I have been writing online for more than half of my life, and if I were truly sensitive I would probably be dead. A good friend says I have perfected the art of appearing sensitive at times, while I have the hide of a rhinoceros. I fear there is some truth to that, just ask Maria.
What really makes me angry is the hypocrisy behind this faux victimization and absurd double standard.I love to laugh, but I love to tell my truth even more.
If you share your life honestly, them you should not have to expect to be a toilet bowl for people and their own issues. If you reply, you are arrogant or judgmental or too sensitive. Yuk. I will never go for that.
If any of you really find my comments offensive or arrogant, then you might take your own advice, shrug, accept it as the price of being online and reading things on the Internet for free, and move on, just like people are always telling me to do. But most of the time, they don’t do it, they would rather be mad and argue.
Truly, I can take it, but I know too many people who have been silenced because they can’t. This is a never ending struggle. It will never be won, and can never be lost.
I think I hate hypocrisy more than anything in the world, and I think that is perhaps the issue I ultimately have to accept or change. That’s what makes me the angriest.
Hannah Arendt, the moral philosopher and brilliant writer and one of the great inspirations in my life, shared my view about hypocrisy. I shudder what she might think to say to people who wrote her to say her writing was damaging their health or was no good because it made them uncomfortable.
I am a pussycat in comparison.
She called hypocrisy “the vice of vices.”
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices,” she wrote, “is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
One of the side effects of Gus’s appearance in my life is that I find myself taking photos I never expected to take (along with some taken with my new lens). Gus is highly photogenic, adventurous, fearless and unpredictable. Most mornings, we put him on Lulu and Fanny’s back, they both seem to enjoy it. I think Gus likes the view, and it supports his idea of himself as King Of The Farm.
It never once crossed my mind living on my farm that I would ever take a picture of a dog sitting on a donkey and checking out the better view.
I always do a double-take when I see this, but I also get a kick out it. Gus may bring the circus back single-handedly. I think that is why I called it Bedlam Farm. Bedlam seems to happen here regularly. People are already insisting I buy Gus a small dog saddle. I don’t think so.
