Fate doesn’t care to herd the sheep, and they no longer pay any attention to her at all, but she brings a great joy and passion to her life.
She is a great navigator for us, she keeps a close eye on where we are heading and what it is going on in front of the car. That blue eye just shines.
Photograph, Thomas Toscano, the “Maestro” and Station Director.
My latest impossible and mad cap dream surfaces again this coming Wednesday, from one to three p.m., December 10 on the remarkable WBTNAM1370.
We are making some headway on the show, the calls are starting to come in, and thanks to new technology, they are coming from everywhere.
Please call if you have a question or statement to make about animals. The toll free number is 866 406-9286 (if you live in the listening area, call 802 442-1010. If you have trouble getting through on the first line, try the second.
There is no one there but us.
The equipment on this community radio station dates back to the Korean War, and I have to practically put the microphone in my mouth to get a clear voice out to the world.
I love being there, it fits me like a glove.
Thomas pushes a lot of buttons to get those phone calls to work, and he pushes more buttons to end the calls. From time to time, weasel children (truly, real weasels) march through the studio on their way outside or to secret hole in the walls.
Red can handle this, I better not bring Fate.
WBTN is blessed to have family of weasels living in the outer wall in winter.
Thomas Toscano, my on-air compadre and the director of the station can easily keep a good conversation going, but my favorite thing is to take calls and try to help animal lovers solve the many and myriad problems that come with living with pets or any animal.
They are not like us, they don’t have our emotions, they don’t speak our language or have our vocabulary so learning to communicate with them without emotionalizing or confusing them is hard.
I love to play the canine Sherlock Holmes, questioning the callers gently and then offering a resolution or solution. I give honest and reasoned advice – I am not excitable – based on more than 20 years of research, interviews and personal experience.
People call back and let me know how they are doing.
We are all about treating one another well, shy people are most welcome and treated with great delicacy and sensitivity. Thomas sometimes goes off on a first-rate rant, but this is never directed at a caller.
I bring prepared research and have lots to talk about, but the show really zings for me when there are callers, I love making that people connection and helping frustrated and even despairing people keep the animals they love and help them to live safely in our world.
So call the station, people are getting through our nearly century old equipment. If calling is trick on your end, you should see it on our end. 866 406- 9286.
For all that the station is nearly broke, the show is great fun for me, I think it is beginning to work. Please feel free to e-mail me your dog or cat or animal questions, I’ll read them on the air. Feel free to buy an hour of support/sponsor time by sending $25 to the station. We will mention you, your dog or cat or hose or cause.
You can live stream the show here, or you can download a free radio App like Simple Radio here or from the Apple App Store. If you wish to hear a podcast of my show, go to WBTNAM.US and make sure to download it to hear it all. If you’d like to support/sponsor an hour of “Talking to Animals,” send $25 here.
You can support the station by visiting their new WBTN Wish List. We may need community radio more than we know.
The station is badly in need of support, my hope is that “Talking To Animals” helps. You can also e-mail me your questions at any time – jon@bedlamfarm.com – and I’ll read them on the air.
Thanks for listening; “Talking To Animals,” Wednesday from one to three. WBTNAM1370..
And please call if you can. That’s what it’s all about. 886 406-9286.
I’m not sure what to make of fish. I love sitting next to the tank with my 100 mm macro lens waiting for the orange fish to slide into my viewfinder.
I’ve been around fish for much of my life, but they are something of a mystery to me. I don’t know how smart they are, the orange fish knows my voice, I think, and Maria’s, when she hears it, she rushes to the surface looking for food.
It is calming to watch her glide down into the thicket of plants that grow at the bottom of our 29 gallon tank. I like the sense of calm and ease she projects, she is not a fancy fish, but a simple fish.
She is hardly and adaptable, like a good working dog. I don’t know if she has a consciousness or not, but I like the simplicity of her life and her ability to glide. I’d like to be able to do that.
Almost every day, I get messages from people telling me what and who they miss from my life, from my books or my blog.
Today, I got a message from someone saying they miss Ed Gulley. I got three messages this week from people saying they missed Ali and the soccer team and the stories of the the refugees in need.
A man from Ohio send me a message yesterday saying he missed Simon, my donkey. And lots of people miss Rose, my remarkable border collie. And Kelly from the bog, and Tyler our young handy man.
Many people still miss Gus, or Elvis, my brown Swiss Steer. Or their own dogs and cats, which many people miss for years and years. I haven’t thought of Winston, my first rooster in years, but two readers of the blog said they missed him just a few weeks ago.
According to one study by a major insurance company, over a lifetime, we will lose and miss some two hundred thousand material things, plus people, relationships, money, elections, loved ones.
That’s a lot of missing. I only hear about a fraction of it. It is certainly mind boggling.
I don’t mind these messages, they are neither intrusive nor unwanted, they are often poignant, even sad.
I take them as compliments to me and my writing. I would hate to write about characters, people or animal, that no one cared about or missed.
In a way, I feel responsible for all the things these people miss, I’m the one who wrote about them and knew them in the first place. I wonder why I’m usually not the one missing them. Perhaps it’s the detachment of the reporter, or writer. Perhaps my subconscious is warning me off of that path.
Much of my life has been lived in a state of detachment, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity.
Yet, as often happens, I am not always sure what to make of these messages, since I have different feelings about missing things.
I think it’s important to think and talk about the way in which we miss things, since it happens so often and runs so deep, and what that says about us, and our own lives.
I believe that while pain and loss are inevitable, suffering is something of a choice. I choose to not suffer from the past, since it is often all about remembering or missing or mourning things, especially as I age.
Missing animals and people from the past is, to me a form of nostalgia, and I consider nostalgia a kind of trap, a fly trap, a bog. It is so easy to get stuck in the past and to come to believe that everything that was, is better than everything that is. It seems noble to me to remember the things we loved in the past, but missing them is about something else, I think, something more complicated, something of a heavy burden perhaps.
Remembering is involuntary, missing is a choice for me. I tire quickly of people who see their lives as one continuous lament. I never speak poorly of my life.
I don’t often care to focus on what’s gone, when there is so much here now and so much more to come. I have never seen the point of missing things I can’t bring back, this is something no one can complain their way out of..
People write me about what they miss, what they lost, not what they have, what they celebrate, or hope to gain. To me, missing things is a story about how we understand our lives, and how we deal with life and change and disappointment.
There is an intimate connection for me when people tell me they miss Rose, who died eight or nine years ago. The writer often has an intimate connection with the reader, good or bad. Sometimes I feel people are scolding me about the things they miss, as if I should be missing them, too, or writing about them more, or reversing events – Simon, Ali and the soccer team – and bringing them back.
I am not a writer or a person who goes back. For some time, it was just painful for me. Then, as I moved through life, it just seemed pointless. There is room for only so many things in my head at one time, and I am a lover of life right now, that is where my imagination and creativity resides.
I am often surprised by the things in my life that people miss, it’s not the way I think, which doesn’t make it better or worse.
Isn’t life itself a parade of things to miss, everything I see today could be something I can miss tomorrow.
One reader did complain that I almost never write about the people and animals that I have lost in my life. She’s not done with Rocky the blind pony, or Elvis the Swiss Steer, or Rose or Orson. They still live in her imagination.
I did that. This is a powerful thing for me to think about.
This characteristic of mine, a very deliberate choice, is disappointing for many people, who don’t wish to see all those people and animals go away in their minds. I think I understand that, I hope I do.
We all are condemned or blessed to live in our own heads, thought.
I feel pretty much the way Cecelia Ahern, the author, feels about missing things. She wrote about missing that it doesn’t matter how much, how often, you miss things because you can’t control the comings and going of living things. “Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.”
I’d go farther that Ahern.
All things and all people go, just like that, or over time.
I accept this as a part of life, it does not surprise me. A loyal and valued reader named David Harris e-mailed me the other day, and the next day I learned he had died in his sleep. I sat in silence to honor him for a few minutes this morning.
I was fond of David, he was special to me, supportive, thoughtful, civil. I never met him or spoke with him. But this is what it means to be a human being. We are the only species in the world that knows we are doing to die, yet we always seem stunned by it, as if we were cheated or robbed.
I can’t say that I will miss him, I hope to remember him.
I am more interested in life than death, more drawn to the living than the dead, more interested in the present and the future than the past.
The past is a sinkhole for me, a place to get stuck. There is only so much room in my head, I want it to be crammed with the now, because the now is where I live.
I don’t miss Ed Gulley as much as I remember him and think about him. Someone speaking to me after Ed’s funeral – a religious man – said he couldn’t imagine why God would take a person like Ed Gulley and permit him to die from brain cancer.
But, I said to myself – not to him – aren’t we all going to die? And for those people who believe in the omnipotent God, isn’t it his or her purview to decide who dies and when? Aren’t believers supposed to honor that, isn’t that what they worship?
If we live a life with animals, we will know loss and death, as most of the people reading this do know. I wish Ed had lived longer, but he did have a full and rich life, and he told me often he had no regrets and was grateful for the life he had.
I admired him for that.
Ed did not wish to be remembered as a God, or a saint or an angel, he told me, but very much as a man, with all of the complex baggage and contradictions that entails.
Ali was working with me for two wonderful years, and then things changed, and he is now working with someone else, and so am I. I think of the soccer team kids often, but they needed more than I could give them. It was time, all things have a time and a place.
I did miss them for a few weeks, I think of them often. But my head is spinning with the people in my life now, and the things I am doing now – my marriage, my farm, my dogs and animals, my photography, my radio show, my books, my blogs, and now, my acting classes.
And I have found many other refugees to help in several new and different ways. Isn’t that what life is about? I think my job is to provide new and different things for people to miss. Gus is gone, Bud is here.
I don’t wish to do the same thing, over and over again, for the rest of my life.
I have so many things in my past life that are gone, there would be no room in my head for one new idea if I spent all day marking and mourning and missing the old ones.
Honestly, I don’t want to think of Simon and Lenore and Orson, and Elvis and Simon and Frieda and all those sheep and chickens. Spirit creatures, I believe they have moved on, they are enriching the lives of other people as they did mine.
I want to think about my life right now, of the animals and people and things that make up my life in 2018, 2019 just around the corner.
I am a speck in the scheme of things, I can hardly believe how little time it takes for a year to go by. I am resolved not to waste that time, it is precious and in my mind, that means moving forward for as long as I can.
And if the people and animals never change, wouldn’t my life be boring and one-dimensional? Wouldn’t my readers be numb? What can they learn from that? Stasis is the enemy of the creative, it leads nowhere but nowhere.
A woman from Seattle wrote me months ago to say she loved my dog Rose dearly, “and I miss her terribly, almost every day. ” She asked if I could put up a photo of her once in awhile.
Maybe once in a great while. Rose was the least sentimental dog I ever loved. If I know her, she is lying in clover in a green pasture with no horizon, telling sheep where to go. She sure isn’t missing me, not if she has sheep.
I only think of Rose once in a great while, and I do not miss her. I owe her that, my wish for her is to have her own life, as I have mine.
I have three wonderful dogs to live with, and I am busy caring for them and loving them. They don’t need Rose in the house, or in my head.
As their steward, they deserve my full love and attention – look at what Red has been going through. I can’t love a score of things, there isn’t that much good love inside of me, and Maria takes up a goodly chunk.
What did we expect of Rose? Or Ed? Or even Gus? That they would live forever? That nobody dies? That the soccer team would never grow older or up?
That people won’t change and do different things in their lives? Life is all about change in so many ways for me. Change is the very definition of creativity.
I’ve thought a lot about life and acceptance in recent years, and my idea of acceptance means respecting life and change, to me death to me is life’s sister, part of the family, not our enemy.
We will all get the chance to live well and die, we are here for a blink. I wish to be discerning about how I use my very short time.
Red and I have been working together for a number of years now, and we have accomplished a lot together. We are close, for sure, and there is a deep and enduring trust between the two of us.
Red has helped a lot of people, including me, and I see that he is not nearly done yet. He is working his way back from a week ago, where he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Over the objections of some people, I am returning Red to work slowly, and with great caution. No running, no getting close to the sheep. Red is getting healthier by the day, and some work is an essential ingredient of that.
My vet and her staff drive by the farm every day, and if they see Red out in the pasture, I will get into trouble. But there is no twisting or running, and I can see how good it is for him to be doing this.
Come and see Red work, and keep the sheep in their own part of the pasture when it comes time for hay. I think this is work we will be able to do for a good while.
I love working with Red, and figuring things out with him. We have a wonderful foundation to build on.
Come and see.
