Fran laid her first egg this morning, and it’s a big one. It fit in next to some beautiful old junk in the big barn. Iike the way these shapes fuse into one another in the morning light. Fran is healing and doing well.
It’s an odd life, when you go from giving a talk on grieving for animals and come home to kill your increasingly aggressive rooster. When you photograph any object or creature, there is a relationship an intimacy and I felt badly about it, although I have no regrets or confusion about the decision. I woke up this morning and felt a need to do something creative, and then the morning sun answered me, sent me a message,told me to grab the camera, get off my butt and get out there. This kind of light only lasts for a few minutes, and I was running around in my bathrobe bare-footed (scared the daylights out of one of my neighbors driving by – to try and catch it. I did. Mystery and crisis are just around the corner. Life goes on. And On.
“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals…they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not like awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied…not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves Of Grass
Maria gave me “Leaves of Grass” yesterday, and I am grateful for it. I might read this passage at book readings for “Going Home” as it perfectly captures my own thoughts about animals and my life with them. They do not feel guilt, anger, recrimination. They do not second-guess themselves or get depressed or agonize about their fate. They are never dissatisfied with life, even when they suffer. I’m taking this volume with me on the book tour. If we see them as they truly are, that is in itself healing.
