I really got into twigs and their shadows today

  January 15, 2008 – Well, it is cold. The farmers all joke that this is the way winter always was, without the media yammering on all day about how dangerous and dramatic it is. “They said on the radio to keep your pets inside,” one of the farmers told me. “Are you supposed to bring the cows in the living room, too?”  He was joking about one health official who warned people not to expose their skin to the air today, and he said he wanted to call him and ask him how that would work in the tractor he was riding to spread manure.
  The animals just get through it. So will the rest of us.
  I spent a lot of time outside freezing and taking photos, trying to write, hauling wood into stoves, trying to thaw water lines, graining the sheep and donkeys. Tomorrow will be as bed, and relief mid-week next time. If this is a Canadian air mass, I’ll stay down here.
  Still trying to focus on photographic images, and had some luck I think. I was talking to a friend who is big on de-centralization as the future.
  I remembered leaving CBS because I thought there was more security in being a writer (there is none) than working for a corporation. I’m struck in all of the media analysis on the world coming to an end as we know it why there isn’t more questioning about the nature of large corporations, who seem unable generally to be competitive, intelligent, or solution oriented beyond tossing people into the street whenever there is trouble. It seems to me as a history buff that when individuals ran corporations like CBS, GE, Ford or General Motors, or publishing houses, they were innovative, competitive and successful. Modern companies, run by lawyers and amorphous boards of directors seem often to be spectacularly inept and insecure places to work, to say the least.
  There seems something to the notion of a smaller, more efficient, de-centralized world, perhaps one in which individuals regain some control and corporations less. Hope so. The corporate model of business doesn’t seem to do well. They make crummy stuff, outsource, layoff and seem unable to make quick or innovative decisions.
   It is frightening to work for these kinds of companies, as they are as incapable of loyalty and humanity as they are of efficiency and innovation. I have always loved the idea that we are responsible for our own lives, and for our own security. My friends who have “secure” jobs are not secure, and the people I know who have some independence and control over their own lives seem to have a whiff of the future. Hope so. Corporatism has had its time, and reminds me of Communism at the end – tired, confused, brutal.

January 15, 2008 – Izzy and I met a new hospice patient yesterday, Sonny, who has cancer spreading throughout her body. She lay in bed, and Izzy hopped up on the bed, and in his gentle and intuitive way lay next to  her and she is a gentle woman, soft-spoken, who loves to read and she said said her grandson came over and heard that she was in a hospice program, and he was young, and he asked her, “Grandma, are you dying?” and she was stunned.
  She wasn’t sure she wanted photos taken because, she said, her hair was a mess, and we both smiled at that.
  No one, she said, had ever asked her that before, about whether she was dying, not even her closest friends, and she had never thought of herself
in that way, and she thought about it and said to her grandson, “yes, yes, I guess I am.”
  And he nodded and said, “oh.”
  And she said it was very peaceful and profound to admit that, and to be home, and comfortable, and clear about where she was.
   And she asked if I might come by and read to her from one of my books and I said I would be happy too, and I thought, what a good visit, what a good thing hospice is. And what a good creature Izzy is.