Rocky follows Maria and I and uses us and Red as guideposts. Today we called to him and Maria walked up him to the barn and into his stall, where he will remain for most of the week. This frees up the pole barn for the donkeys and sheep without exposing Rocky to more trouble from Simon. Hopefully, the storm will help them bond.
The winds are really picking up, we locked up the coop with the chickens in it. The animals are skittish, restless, they are distinctly uneasy. I believe they pick up low pressure and other storm signals and can also read our feelings as well.
Sandy has begun whispering to me, rattling the shutters, blowing the hay out of the feeders, scattering the sheep to a farm corner of the field, the birds into their trees and nests. She is coming down the road, the air has turned, the sky has turned and life seems to be turning inward. I am coming, she is whispering, just close your eyes and listen to me, and I will swim over you like a flock of birds, a school of fish. You can love me, or you can hate me and fear me, it is no matter to me. I am beyond you.
Red and Lenore were concerned when I went into the cellar this morning to collect some pails. This morning, Maria and I focused on what we needed to do and got ready for the storm which looks like it will sail right over the farm. We put out extra pails of water for the animals in case the power goes out. We prepared the indoor stall for Rocky, who will spend two or three days there. We put the chickens in lockdown in their coop where there will be until Wednesday or Thursday. We set out pans in the pole barn for hay indoors if things get too messy outside. Later, we will free the donkeys up and put Rocky in his stall. The donkeys and sheep will have access to the shelter of the pole barn if they wish to use it. Sometimes animals prefer to be out in storms.
We are filling a bathtub with water in case our pumps shuts down. I will charge up the Ipod and Iphone and Kindle. I’m cooking a multi-grain pizza this afternoon with roast vegetables so we will have some food. I went to the local food co-op in Cambridge. People up here do not panic about storms, even big ones, and there were no lines and plenty of bread, water and vegetables and fruit. We have flashlights with batteries, and we have a fireplace and a wood stove to keep us warm. It is difficult to pierce the screen of hysteria and alarm and grasp among the media and politicians competing to be sensitive to my needs and safety, and actually determine what is actually going to happen here. I do take it seriously without surrendering to it.
It looks like we will get some high winds – 40 to 70 mph tonight and tomorrow which makes it a good bet to knock the power out as trees and power lines live together in the country. Not too much rain. It will, of course, be what it will be and we can’t do anything more about it than keep an eye on the animals and sit by our fire talking and reading and loving one another.
A Buddhist friend suggested that I love Sandy, embrace the storm, accept it as a part of life. That is lot better than listening to these strange people offering their faux sensitivity and idiotic warnings. The people I see worrying about me online and via e-mail – politicians, TV anchors are not the people I would turn to in trouble. And I don’t believe they are spending as much time worrying about me as they are covering their corporate and political asses. I love having neighbors who do care about me and Maria. I do hear the wind howling outside the window now. Things are heating up. I think we just lost a shutter.
I got an e-mail from my electric company urging me to call them if the power goes out. Post-Katrina, politicians are falling all over themselves to take every precaution and transmit every warning. Several of my neighbors have come by and let me know I can use their toilets (one has a generator) and get food if we need it. It occurs to me that our culture is filled with corporate and media and political people pretending to be sensitive, yet they are not. This, I think, breeds hypocrisy.
I like the idea of loving what you fear. I till try loving Sandy, a large and beautiful creature with plenty of presence.
A new friend who has read a number of my books told me yesterday that there was a thread running through all of them, and that, she said, was my search for a meaningful life. I thought as she spoke that this is my purpose, my point. It is why I came up to the country and bought a cabin 15 years ago, and then bought Bedlam Farm in 2003. It is why I have lived with animals, why I looked so hard for love and refused to accept a loveless life, why I have struggled to remove myself from the Fear Machine that surrounds all of – it is so much evident today – and why I work every day to bring peace to my spirit and a spiritual dimension to my life. This is why I take pictures and write books.
My path in the woods at Bedlam Farm has always symbolized this search for a meaningful life, more than any other part of the farm. This is where I walked with all of my dogs – Rose, Orson, Pearl, Lenore, Izzy, Frieda, Red, Clementine – and then Maria, who brought light into my life. This is where I can see change and growth. Yesterday I went with Maria’s friends to help her move to her new studio and I went early to take Red for a walk on this path. It was cloudy, windy, gloomy, whispers of Sandy, I suppose, different from the beautiful life that framed my images of the path. Maybe fitting.
This is the last time I will ever walk on this path or take a photo of it. I know it confuses, even upsets people, but I believe in moving forward in my own life, not looking back. Nostalgia, for me, is a trap. I have no wish to look backwards or lament what it is lost, or tell my life in terms of struggle. My life is ahead of me, not behind me.
I said good bye to the path, thanked it for the images, the memories, the chance to mark my life. Goodbye, in a way, to the dogs, to the Imaginary Squirrel, to the excitement, loneliness, confusion, creativity and fear that marked so much of my life. I am seeking some new paths, and finding them. That, in a way, is what a meaningful life is all about. Growth, change, self-determination, purpose. Love, love, love. And today the gift of this beautiful and awful storm, which will dislocate and disrupt, even take, the lives of many people. I think of them all today, hold them in my heart, wish them peace and compassion. Still, the storm is yet another unwanted but appreciated gift, another chance to turn fear away and to accept the nature of life. Another way to vote for myself, to say again and again, I will not live in fear, I will not pay for fear, I will not bend to it. That is the message of my path.
This morning, a new path, in so many ways.
