Month: June 2012

I had elaborate plans for Red when Karen Thompson sent him up here. I wanted to work with him, to acclimate him to life in a house, and also to socialize him and bring him gradually into my world. Red has his own plans, his own Fast-Track Acclimation. He knows how to work, he lives perfectly well in a house, and he has begun socializing me in earnest. I no longer dare go anywhere without bringing Red, his friends and his girlfriends waiting for him at every stop along the way. We pull in, he hops out of the car, greets every woman he can find, hops back into the car.

I went to  Gardenworks to get tomatoes today and Red made some new friends, Meg Southerland, who owns Gardenworks and Arlene and Nicole, who work there. I don’t really have a plan any longer, other than to keep going. I plan to keep posting an album of Red’s new friends, and he is making some new ones for me as well. He had a more elaborate plan than I did. Red loves women at least as much as he loves moving sheep around. Love and work. Freud had it.

I have, as many of you have noticed, been knocked off my pins by Red, shocked and challenged and awakened by him. I have always been drawn to the mysticism of animals, and Red is a mythic dog in many ways. The photos don’t create that, they sometimes capture it.

I was a bit in shock losing Rose and Izzy within a few months of one another, and I really had no idea how I might find another dog. I began e-mailing some well-known breeders and friends in the border collie world and I got an e-mail from Karen Thompson of Thompson’s Border Collies reminding me that she had helped me train Rose in Pennsylvania a few years ago. Karen is a person of faith and she told me she had a wonderful dog, a big red dog, who had been taken from Ireland and brought to the United States and had been working as a demonstration dog on her farm. God wanted him to go to me, she said, and this took me aback, but when you know Karen you know this is very real, very genuine.

I think Red is one of those spirit dogs I write about all the time, one of those magical helpers Joseph Campbell wrote that lucky people encounter on the Hero’s Journey. I have been waiting for him, he has been waiting for me, I think. We do compliment and complete one another. This is a dog that can walk by my side through life, in work. He brings me more deeply into the natural world through his herding work, he inspires my photography and writing, he accompanies me on the daily driving that is a part of my life. He goes everywhere, stays by my side, greets everyone gently and lovingly. It is surreal, in that I feel he has been here my whole life, yet he has only been here a week-and-a-half. He will take me places.

Dogs have always appeared in my life to take me places. Orson brought me to Bedlam Farm. Rose helped me live here. Rocky, the blind pony, led me to our new home. And now, here, Red appearing out of nowhere to take me to yet another place.

Red is a magical creature, filled with power and complexity, work and love, strength and vulnerability. When we go out to work in the morning, he is transformed into an ancient and almost mystical spirit. I can only imagine what he would have meant to some shepherd struggling with his flock. When I get my new video camera, I will show you his very spectacular outruns. He circles the sheep so joyously, in such a burst of freedom and abandon, so fast and so wide, that it always stirs me to see it.

Karen told me he overruns a bit, and she was working on that, but I have to say I can’t correct it and don’t want to. In his runs around the sheep, Red shows me the way, to burst free of the shackles fear and convention place on our lives, to run and run with a joyous abandon. I could not train him out that. He always ends up where he ought to be. That is what inspires me.

To find the magic inside of myself and set it free. And run, run, run with it’s beating heart.

One of the greatest obstacles to my spiritual practice is my struggle to learn the art of doing nothing. One reason I like border collies is that I am so much like them. I have never been good at doing nothing. Donkeys are teaching me how to do nothing, as they are masters of the art. At night, they graze and move around the pasture. When the temperature goes above 80, they simply do nothing, and they do it well and for many hours. This is a true contemplative, meditative state. I want to work harder at doing nothing. Donkeys will help me.

When Red and I arrive at the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop each Thursday, the members of the group are usually gathered outside at a picnic table, talking to one another about their writing, their blogs, their lives. They encourage each other, praise one another’s work, trade blogs and ideas they have found useful and interesting, laugh about me. We go inside. We talk for two hours, sharing our ideas, talking about the structure of stories.

I am struck by their support for one another, their eagerness to listen to each other and share their passion for their work, which is as varied as their lives. The group includes a physician, a former milkman, a professor and artist, a professional photographer, a student/waitress, a housewife/programmer. Their gifts are astonishingly varied – writing, photography, animation, poetry, collage. They have great ideas and are telling them in ambitious and exciting ways. I am nourished just being around them.

I wanted three things from applicants to the workshop. Experience in writing or other creative forms, a willingness to listen.  I wanted them to be nice and generous. I looked for that in their work. It was important, I have learned, that creative people feel safe when they seek to break out. When I hear stories about writing groups, it often sounds like going to the dentist – necessary pain.  I  wanted them to see writing and creativity as businesslike and challenging, but also joyous and fun. This is, I think, the formula that has often eluded me and many of the writing workshops I know about.

I think I got it this time. We have a powerfully strong line-up of ideas. We are working on structure and form, the process of writing. The next workshop will be at Bedlam Farm. I can’t wait.