I have this recurring image of life as a vast sea, sometimes rough, sometimes placed, and we are navigating it all of the times, sometimes plowing into an iceberg, running around, sailing on on a beautiful shining surface, caught in awful storms and great calms. I’m not big on metaphors like that but this photo brought the image to mind, that we think our troubles are all ours, that our suffering and disappointment is unique to us. My spiritual work has reminded me of the importance of selflessness, a hard thing to achieve. Everyone suffers, everyone struggles, the spiritual work is to remind ourselves again and again that life is good as well as hard, joyous as well as painful, affirming as well as disappointing.
Wherever you look, if you keep your eyes open, you will see islands of connection, affirmations of love, the gentleness and beauty of the human spirit.
I took this photo of Rose several years ago, and many people have asked to buy it. It was a foggy summer morning at Bedlam Farm, high up on the hill of the outer pasture. I sent Rose up to get the sheep and she vanished into the mist, and then suddenly, the sheep came running, Rose right behind.
I don’t really like to sell it but it came up again this week in a very different way. A friend of mine has a brain tumor and has been seeing specialists trying to treat the illness. I don’t know the details, but I sense he is at a crossroads and is thinking of returning home, far away from the East Coast where he is now. I haven’t spoken with him since he was diagnosed and I don’t know, really, how he is thinking or doing. I get messages and updates from the family, which I appreciate, and he has great support and a powerful spiritual ethos. He is also a great animal lover, especially of dogs.
I was somewhat at a loss how to help him, as he was very engaged in treatment and didn’t ask to speak with me. He has plenty on his plate and he may not be able to do much communicating, I don’t know. Ours is an odd friendship, he doesn’t have a computer, doesn’t use devices to communicate, he travels quite often. But when we see each other, there is a powerful connection, a soul connection I think, he is a loving and creative spirit. I think of him every day since his illness began. I began sending him photos each day, those of the animals, my windowsill photos, Red herding sheep. I got a message from his wife thanking me for the photos, she said they look at them each day, they were astonishing, they said, a complete and very happy surprise. They asked if they could print seven or eight to hang on the wall of the room where they sit and meditate together every day.
They wanted to look at them every day. That nearly brought me to tears, that I am lucky enough to be able to take photos like that. They have the photos now.
How wonderful that my photos would bring comfort and inspiration at such a time. There are so many ways to communicate with people. You don’t have to speak on the phone, or e-mail or text or send messages via Facebook. Am image from the heart, a touch of color and light sometimes send the most powerful and healing messages in the world. I think some of these images are healing, they have helped to heal me and others. I can’t say I understand how it works, except that images of light and color reach across time and space, cut through human disconnection and mechanical clutter, sail like an arrow right into the center of the soul. There, they can do great work, perform miracles sometimes.
And then there is Rose, who is gone, but not ever gone. One reason I do not grieve for Rose is that I do not believe she is gone for good. She just keeps on working for me – and perhaps others – again and again. I don’t know if I will ever see or talk to my friend again, but I am grateful to be talking to him in this way. It’s the oldest kind of communication on earth, I think, perhaps far superior to our texting and compulsive messaging. Good wishes to you my friend and healing thoughts. I will sleep better thinking of you looking at my photos every day. And thanks to you, again Rose, running in your golden fields, you are the proudest of the spirit dogs and the most faithful and loving thing. I always said of you that you always got it done. Get it done again, girl.
Every morning, the sun rises over the big barn and falls on this very old bottle – we dug it out of the ground in the woods of Bedlam Farm. I think every morning of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the most wonderful writer I have read. He has dementia now, I am told, and rarely leaves his Mexico City house. He wrote once that we are not only born once, when our mothers give birth to us, but that life requires us to give birth to ourselves again and again. That is, I suppose the hero journey, for those foolish and restless enough to try and make it. It can bring great pain and loss or great gain. Every morning, when the sun hits the old bottle, I resolve to give birth to myself again, to wipe the slate clean, to experience the miracle of rebirth.
I wipe the slate clean. What happened before does not matter. My struggles and disappointments, my laments and confusions, losses and embarrassments, are not relevant today, no one cares about them, not even me, and like the poet says, the world moves on, the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, nor all your piety and wit cannot change a word of it (Omar Khayyam). Today, this morning, I am reborn, I am beginning my life anew, and the rest of my life will be what I make of it.
What I mean to make of it today is this: to be grateful for my life, and to speak well of it. To find love and celebrate it every day. To kneel before the creative spark and seek out the color and light and love in the world and remind people that they exist and are strong. I will seek to know the truth about myself, to be authentic and to use whatever gifts and powers I have for good. To be connected to other human beings. And to kneel before the wisdom of the donkeys and the dogs, and listen to the messages these profoundly spiritual beings have for me.
Although donkeys are generally portrayed as odd or funny in our culture, that was not always so. Donkeys are perhaps the most mythologized, painted, written about and spiritual creatures in the animal world. The animal we call a donkey is rightfully called an ass – a pejorative term in our culture. It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that English-speaking people substituted the word donkey for ass to differentiate it from the worse arse, meaning the human butt. Increasingly, donkeys are being called “asses” again, although I am not yet completely at ease with that.
Donkeys were revered in the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim faith, sources of wealth, wisdom and companionship. More than 40 million donkeys, most of them in the Third World, continue to work with humans, haul goods and wood, till fields, provide transportation. Donkeys even had their own Celtic goddess. Epona was the protectress of horses, asses and mules (hybrid crosses between a donkey and a horse) as well as their human caretakers. The Romans adopted Epona as the protectress of their cavalry. Hephaistos was the Olympian God of fire, metalworking and stonemasonry, and is usually portrayed as a bearded man with a clubfoot, riding on a donkey. Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem, the Prophet Mohammed instructed his followers to be kind to donkeys, Napoleon rode a donkey into the Alps during his invasion of Europe.
We tend to laugh at donkeys, and smile at them, in our culture they are portrayed usually as somewhat goofy and ungainly creatures, but looking at Simon, Lulu and Fanny this morning, I was reminded of their very deep spiritual history and the great respect and dignity they were afford in emerging human societies. I see that dignity still in them.
