I am grateful to my Dahlia Garden, my first Dahlia garden, which will be expanded for next year. We will dig up all of our bulbs and put them in the cold storage room in the basement. Every day during this long, hot, wet and sticky summer, the Dahlia garden has given me beautiful colors, bright photographs, all sorts of enchanting shapes and petals and range of colors. Thanks, thanks, thanks.
Donkeys are observers, they are always watching, listening, smelling. They take in their world every minute and sometimes they look at me with such intensity I think they are looking right into my soul. Perhaps they are.
It seems every time I go to Battenkill Books on Saturday’s in my job as Recommender-In-Chief, Red and I make a soul connection. Long time blog or book readers, or, as happened Saturday, someone who just wandered into the store and touched our lives. Jolene is entering a local convent in September, she came into the bookstore with her closest friend from their home far up in the Adirondacks. Jolene’s life is about to change, and her friends are happy for her and sad to be losing her.
Jolene was understandably both excited and terrified at this enormous change in her life. She is 62, deeply religious. She and Red connected in the most powerful way, she said she has never seen a dog like him, the way he looks deeply into the eyes of people and holds the gaze, it felt, she said, like a soul connection. I wanted to give Jolene – her name will change soon – a copy of Thomas Merton’s Journals or “Seven-Storey Mountain,” the story of his decision to enter a monastery, but the bookstore was out of both, so I gave her a copy of “Running To The Mountain” instead, there is much about Merton in it. He inspired my run to the mountain.
Red seemed to sense something in Jolene that connected to him in some way I cannot really explain, part of it was her gentle and affectionate nature, part of it was her fear and excitement – dogs can smell all of these things – and part of it was my connection to her. I too, I said, came up to the country to find out things about myself, to pursue a spiritual life in a different way.
We talked for awhile, we understood one another.
She and Red sat on the floor for the longest time, I gave Jolene my phone number and said we could bring Red for a visit anytime. Her order is small, three other woman, she is the youngest. The nuns there do not recruit, they wait and Jolene hopes more women will think of joining them, it will not be a simple existence or an easy one. This kind of commitment and faith and sacrifice seems so rare to me in our time.
Women used to enter the cloister when they were young, Jolene said, now it is much more apt to be in middle-age or later. Three of the convent’s nuns are in nursing homes. Jolene’s friend was supportive, yet I could also see the loss in her face.
I was touched by Jolene, her decision, I could see she was both frightened and exhilarated, as Merton was, as anybody would be, I suspect. I felt some sadness coming her, I didn’t ask her why she had made this decision. I have a feeling it is a good one, I will be thinking of her.
And how strange, this bookstore thing, I remember Ron Dotson, the vietnam vet, showing up, coming to the farm. I remember a woman, a long-time reader who came to see me, then e-mailed me to say she would no longer read my blog because I shot the rooster who attacked Maria. I met a gentle man and his wife who drove from Georgia just to shake my hand in the book store, new friends calling on the phone. So many good people, so many people with whom Red and or I made a soul-to-soul connection.
I will be thinking about Jolene today, about the spiritual life, the drama of leaving your world behind and entering another, glowing, frightening, powerful realm. I did it in a different way but I have a sense of what it feels like to make this leap of faith.
So, apparently, does Red.
