26 February

What Means The Most To Us. The Chronicles Of Friendship

by Jon Katz
What Means The Most To Us. Gus chasing Fate around the sheep in a storm

Who means the most to me? When I honestly ask myself which person in my life means the most to me, I think of HenriJ.M. Nouwen’s lovely book “Out Of Solitude: Three Meditations in the Christian life.”

I have been writing about friendship a good deal lately and thinking about it.  I have struggled with friendship my whole life, I have had no friends or few friends, and have most often lost the friends I did have. Sometimes they ran from me, sometimes I ran from them.

For some years I thought I suffered from a kind of reactive attachment disorder, some damaged kids push away anyone who gets too close.

Intimacy is the greatest danger to them. It is still difficult for me.

But my therapists said no, it wasn’t that exactly. It was more a case of my not being available to other people because I was too busy trying to keep myself afloat.

Now, in a new phase of reflection, I see that I am making friendships, they are good and nourishing, and that I don’t need friendship in the way I always thought I did. My idea was full of drama and co-dependence, of rushing towards crisis. Good riddance to that.

As I get older, and have sought help, I’ve come to settle. I am more comfortable with myself, I do not live in fear, I am less need. Friendship is no longer caught up in the web of my past, it is what it is, it stands or falls on its own terms.

Unlike love, I don’t believe I must work hard to keep a friendship, a good friendship would be simple to keep, and natural.

Friendship is about trust, nourishment, empathy. And then, love.

What I have found to be true for me, this idea of who means the most to me – was beautifully put by Nouwen in his book of meditations: “…we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an  hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

I think that is the kind of person who means the most to me.

26 February

Travels With Gus: Journey Of Joy And Emotion

by Jon Katz
Joy And Heartbreak

We often think our pain and heartbreak are unprecedented, and if our eyes and hearts are open, learn this is false.

Empathy is a hard and long lesson. Then we live and experience life. The things that torment me the most are the things that connect me to all of the people who are alive.

Oddly, in my hospice and therapy work, i have seen death and illness close-up and many times, and it has taught me a great deal about empathy.

But my life with dogs has been different, rich, challenging, rewarding. I have had the pleasure of having some great dogs, and when they left the world, they left quickly, they were ready to go.

Gus is one of these experiences of life that challenges me emotionally.  This is new to me.

All of my dogs who died have gone suddenly and quickly, I had not yet had to endure a chronic, always fatal disease with a dog, a disease that moves slowly and mysteriously, and about which almost nothing is really known.

Gus is not ready to go, he loves every minute of life, and brings us great laughter and joy.  His spirit is on fire, and no dog with a spirit like that is ready to go.

Yet his sickness is never far away, a challenge to me and the way I have always looked at the world and lived my life. I can’t control this illness or fully comprehend it, I can only tinker with it and make things a little better or a little worse.

Yesterday, Gus rode with us to Vermont to pick up Maria’s wool. He stood on the panel between us, put his head on my shoulder and fell asleep, snoring like a an old B-25 bomber in a World War II movie. Eventually he made he way onto my chest and fell asleep again on my shoulder.

Moments like this are especially meaningful to me, I love to nurture and I love to be loved. I haven’t always had love, and I appreciate it when I see it and feel it. By the end of the trip, Gus had spit up on me twice, spitting some foul-smelling bile onto my jeans and my shirt and sweater.

It was an hour or so before we would get home, and I foolishly had brought no towels or disinfectant spray.

He vomited a third time, this one on the panel between us, bright between the panel and the driver’s seat, deep down and onto the floor. We held our  breath on the way home, on that journey there is really no place to stop.

Later in the day, Gus hopped up onto my favorite chair and spit up again, this time on my sweater and pants again. And again, I changed my clothes.

What was it, I asked myself over and over again. Too much yoghurt or recovery food? Too much of the bland gastroenteric food? Not wet enough? Too wet? Too much of the new food too son? Was it the car ride? Time of day? Something he ate on his walk in the yard? In the house? In his vomit, we often find rabbit and sheep pellets, they are everywhere, even if we never see him eating them. Was that it?

The answer was the same every day. Don’t know, aren’t sure.

I hate helplessness, I have felt it often and deeply in my life, and I vowed not to feel it again. I was kidding myself.

Once a week I tell Maria this can’t work, I don’t wish to live like this, we really can’t do this for years and years. We need to think about putting him down. We work hard we have little free time, I don’t want to waste it cleaning up or trying new foods or holding Gus upright after every meal.

Then, a minute later, I’ll find Gus sitting on my chair or perched on the sofa with a toy for me to throw or play tug-of-war. Remember that dogs are not allowed on the sofas in our house and i don’t play tug of war with dogs.

When I go upstairs to bed, Gus is always waiting for me on the bed, I don’t know how he always knows I’m coming. His squiggles like a fleeing garter snake, and jumps up and showers me with kisses,  then growls and challenges me to wrestle with him. I oblige, always.

Once or twice a week, I tell Maria that I’m out of ideas, I’ve tried every combination of food there is, I’m out of gas, we should think about finding another home for him, if possible. Some people are committed to doing this, I’m not. It’s not how I wish to live with dogs.

Maria usually smiles, and says, “oh, you just love Gus so much.” Not that much, I usually mutter. This morning, I tried yet another combination of foods, this one simpler and more nutritious. If Gus loses  weight, that would be the beginning of the end.

Five days a week, I think I am finally getting on top of it, finding the right foods, feeding him upright, offering the right amounts at the right time. And good for me we’ll be fine.

Today was a very good day. I saw Gus spit up a bit, once on the kitchen floor, once in his own mouth, he swallowed it. Sometimes I can see his comfort when he regurgitates, but Gus is not a moper or a sulker. He bounces right back and is ready to play, run outside, take ride in the car, or hop up onto a lap.

He is a world-class cuddler. In the morning, when I wake up he is on the pillow, hovering above me, waiting for my eyes to open. When they do, he pounces, licking me up one side of the face and down the other, making all kinds of strange grunting sounds.

What, really, can you do with a dog like this, other than to keep mixing and matching, recording vomits, spit-ups and regurgitations, washing a lot of clothes and keeping a good supply of Nature’s Miracle under the kitchen sink.

Human beings are remarkable creatures, truly, I think the answer is always just around the corner, when the answer is, of course, right under my nose.

There is nothing heavier, than compassion, wrote Milan Kundera. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone or something, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

26 February

Plains Goddess: Women On A Farm: Photo For Sale

by Jon Katz
Woman In A Storm

I call this kind of photo a “Willa Cather” photo, because to me, it pays homage to some of the great unsung heroes in American life the women who share the life of the farm.

As most of you know, I am not a farmer, but a writer who lives on a farm. There is a big difference.

There are sheep and donkeys and dogs and chickens and barn cats, we have some of the work of a farm – hay, manure, water, feed and shelter.

I am now 71 years old, and there are things I can do and things I cannot do. I can write and take pictures, I haul hay and water around. I could not live here by myself any longer, a hard pill to swallow, but a reality I accept in good faith.

I see my wife, Maria, as a Willa Cather figure, one of the Plains Goddesses she loved to write about. Cather was a great chronicler of the prairie, the precursor in many ways of the family farm.

On any farm, no matter what kind, there is a woman who shares he sometimes brutish life of the farm – like hauling hay around to feeders in a grinding snowstorm, first shoveling the ice and snow out of them.

There is a Plains Goddess here on this farm.

Even with a vigilant border collie, she is often plowed into by hungry animals, or knocked to the ground, or covered in ice or snow or soaked by heavy rain. She climbs ladders, fixes windows, cleans out roosts, hauls firewood, gets splinters, chills to the bone,  tends wood stoves, climbs on ladders, replaces bulbs, fixes broken gates, tends to the animals, talks to each one and comforts them.

After that, she vanishes into her studio, where she loves to be alone and work alone, and makes her art, now sold all over the world. She does whatever she needs to do with strength and focus and creativity, even leading the sheep to their hay in a storm.

Wherever she is, she is herself.

She is a contemporary Plains Goddess to me, and I see this photo as being about something more than her,  it’s about the mostly unheralded women on the farm, I think of Carol Gulley Of Bejosh Farm,  no one in this world works as hard as she does with the possible exception of Carol’s husband Ed, one of my brothers from a different mother.

They are both made of Willa Cather stuff.

This photo is dedicated to the Prairie Goddess, (although most of them don’t wear colorful slouch beanie hats and psychedelic leggings.

Please check out my new photo-for-sale gallery on my website. This photo is for sale for $130, it’s 8.5 x12 inches, printed on rag paper, signed, unframed. For information, you can contact the goddess herself, [email protected].

26 February

Living With Meaning In A Torn World: Thoreau and Pope Francis

by Jon Katz
Thoreau And Pope Francis

“The world rests on principles.” – Henry David Thoreau.

This weekend, I was reading the writings of two people I admire and have learned  from,  different as they might seem to be: Henry David Thoreau and Pope Francis.

On Sunday, I re-read “Laudato Si,” Francis’s stirring encyclical on the environment, and also the new and quite wonderful biography of Thoreau, “Thoreau: A Life,” by Laura Dassow Walls.

Our world often seems hostile and disconnected to me, and surely, to you. Reading these works, it seems to me that our political leaders are too narrow or too shallow to look at some of the larger and perhaps more spiritual problems that plague humanity and lead to so much violence, hate and conflict.

People are unmoored, it seems, they feel helpless or discarded, and are, at least according to our news,  increasingly violent, paranoid and suspicious. Some are so damaged and ill they murder fellow humans for no reason at all, and then are branded as “monsters,” as if they made a rational decision to murder others and then destroy their own lives.

Our planet is sick, people are sick and lost, the spiritual grounding and underpinning of human beings seems lost, and we are adrift. This is a surprise to many people living in 2018, it is not a surprise to Pope Francis, it would not be a surprise to Thoreau.

In our corporate and polarized nation, our religion is money and security, and that is a frail package to hold so much weight and meaning. Our wisest and most compassionate people have been marginalized and dismissed, driven to the margins of life. Our “pundits” are mostly arguers and shouters,  small people, they make a lot of noise but have nothing to say. Reading Francis and Thoreau is a tonic, it reminds me that there great minds in the world, it is  a tragedy we don’t listen to them more carefully.

Trying to understand the horrific tragedy in Parkland, Florida, we can all see that violence and rage are no longer confined to the act of murder itself, but spread out in concentric and ever-widening theories, dark and heartless speeches from the NRA, conspiracy theories, fake news bots from Russia, accusations of child murder, proposals to turn schools into armed fortresses.

I am no pessimist, but I have lived long enough to understand ritual, and we are in the familiar stages of trauma: grief, finger-pointing, faux sympathy, a cowardly political structure that cannot and will not move. Yes, for things to improve, they will all have to be dragged out by the hair, screaming.

We can barely empathize with the loss and sadness before we are pulled into frothing whirlpools of hate, suspicion and recrimination.  That is how they get away with it. We are so divided, nothing can happen.

Our media, which celebrates and feeds off of  conflict, puts all life into the context of the left and the right, two narrow and unyielding ways of looking at the world. Everything flows from the eternal argument.

We all talk only to our base, we all live in our own echo chamber, we learn to hate anyone who disagrees, we can only hear ourselves and choke on our anger and helplessness.

Almost every rational human i know is ready for more sides than this. And there are more sides than this, that is the hope.

One would think that the unfathomable slaughter of 17 innocent school children would unite the country, if nothing else, at least for a few hours or days. What is there to argue about? This cannot happen again.

But no, it just becomes another debating point in the endless conflict about the national soul, another path to grievance and fury. Our short attention spans can no longer endure long and complex arguments, we will just move on to the next atrocity when it occurs.

Heartbroken children become “crisis actors,” law-abiding gun owners become demons and enablers.

Our leaders slime the marble halls like slugs with hemming and hawing, equivocations, rationales, excuses. Every parent in the world wonders if their children could be next, a truly unimaginable reality once but now something our leaders simply seem unable or unwilling to confront.

Our world has turned upside down. It is the children who shock us with truth,  and inspire us with their fearlessness, it is the adults who lie and dissemble and hide from responsibility.

How do we live sanely and with meaning in a world like this?

More than any great mind i know, Pope Francis and Thoreau help me understand what is happening and what I can do about it.

Francis looks at the world around him, and sees it clearly and honestly. Unlike the politicians, he is a spiritual man who can look back and see a larger truth.

The social dimensions of global change include the effects of technological innovation on employment, social exclusion, and the inequitable distribution and consumption of energy and other services. They spawn social breakdown, increased violence and a rise in new forms of social aggression, polarization, drug trafficking, growing drug use by the young, and the nearly universal loss of identity. Hopelessness and helplessness are epidemic.

One by one, our workplaces and social and cultural institutions have been and are being corporatized, money is the national ideal, there is nothing more important than profit and loss.

The astonishing growth of the past two centuries, Francis writes, has not always led to an improvement in the quality of life.

“Some of these signs,” he cautions, “are also symptomatic of real social decline, the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion.”

Thoreau also warned about the consequences of humans becoming disconnected from nature, animals and the natural world. This would, he foresaw, bring political conflict, destroy the earth, and the unravel the bonds that connected human beings to one another. Both men understood the importance of a spiritual life, and the sacred bond between humans and their environment.

“I would remind my countrymen,” wrote Thoreau, “that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.”

If slavery was the moral issue of Thoreau’s day, guns and children are the moral issue of ours. They both saw the problem as being much larger than the issue itself.

In addition, writes Francis, when the media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, act rationally, find truth, tor to think deeply and love generously.

Could this insight ever be seen more clearly than in the aftermath of Parkland? There is little charity or empathy, no common agreement on responsibility, morality or humanity. Our media and new technology has  created parallel and distinct universes, each with their own ideas about truth, facts and morality.

The great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between people, is not acquired by argument and data, or by labeling and endless and unbending argument. Data along leads to overload, conflict and paralysis.

Data is everybody’s master, and that’s where we are, trapped in this dark and sorrowful bubble of arguments without end, carried by people who can’t learn or listen.

Pope Francis is a truth-teller. I believe he is correct when he says that today’s media enable us to communicate and share information. But they also shield us from direct contact with pain, fear, joys and sensitivities of others, we each use our own newspaper or cable channel or website as a proxy, a way of avoiding human interaction.

Historically, human-to-human dialogue has been the only way to resolve conflict among people We see every day the result, a deep, angry and melancholic dissatisfaction with different opinions – we are learning to hate the other side – and a poisonous sense of isolation and fragmentation.

There is hardly a single great thinker in the world from Plato to St. Augustine to Thoreau and Einstein and the Dalai Lama who did not believe that a connection with nature is essential to human growth and survival. When we are disconnected from the animal world, from the natural world, we are broken, we lose our grounding and stability. Animals are not just something to rescue, they are our partners and guides through life.  We have lost not our connection to them, and we turn a blind eye to the wounds and cries of Earth, our Mother. We sacrifice her for more money, there is  never enough money.

So here we are, most of us,  crammed into cities, working in jobs we hate, living only for money, with no common spiritual or moral ethos to live by.. We can’t even agree that the murder of young children in their schoolrooms is not acceptable in a civil society.

It was striking to me to see how similar Thoreau’s views are to Francis’s, it is almost as if each spoke with the other.

Thoreau believe civility and empathy were essential to humanity. He believed that living in nature, and understanding the natural world was essential to personal health and fulfillment and to a functioning political environment. Thoreau believed that great conflict s- slavery, guns and violence, the corruption of money in politics – were not single causes whose cure would solve our problems but symptoms of a much larger sickness preying on a broad universe of beings, not all of them human.

The two men have also shared the view that society cannot be healthy if the Earth, our Mother, is sick, dying or forgotten. And the animals driven away.  If people feel helpless and ignored, they will inevitably find destructive ways to regain power and control. They give power to demagogues and dictators.

In a very limited way, I did the same thing Thoreau did. I left the wasteland that my community had become (and my life) and moved to the country, to live in nature and re-connect with the natural world.It has, as Francis and Thoreau both suggested, helped to heal me, to return meaning and compassion to my life.

Here, I have begun to think deeply and love generously. I am not yet where I want to be, but I am on the road. This year, I am learning to re-connect to people, to speak to them and listen to them. To love generously and continuously.

“Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator,” wrote Aberjhani “Quotations From A Life In Poetry.”

“The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, “he write,” the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

Reading my history, it is not lost on  me that the most fearsome armies in human history were not led by warriors, but by preachers of love: Mandela, Dr. King, Jesus Christ, Gandhi. Theirs are the legacies that endure, that capture our hearts and soul. I learned a while ago that cruelty is easy, compassion is hard, Thoreau and Pope Francis said so.

26 February

Starting My Week: A Cart For RISSE

by Jon Katz
A Cart For RISSE

I got up early this morning, sat and meditated with Maria for a few minutes, went for a two-mile walk, then bought a three-tiered plastic organizing cart for RISSE, the refugee and immigrant support center in Albany. The Army of Good has been relentlessly chipping away at the new RISSE Amazon Wish List, there are still more than a dozen items left.

At RISSE, they are a bit stunned with joy. They have never encountered anything quite like the Army Of Good.

Neither have I.

They are beginning work to replenish the page. The kids toys went fast, and are arriving steadily, they are already being used in the after school program. Thanks so much. Before I even think of looking at the news, I go to the Wish List page and buy something that supports the refugees and immigrants new to America.

It is grounding and nourishing for me to start my week this way, it sets a tone and insulates me from the torrent of anger and hostility and tragedy they call the news.

It feels good to do good. This is my antidote, my spiritual vitamin, and I see I am not alone. This is great way to support the American dream and the American soul. Thanks much. You can see the list here.

Email SignupFree Email Signup