We went to Whitman’s Feed Store this afternoon to get Fate a new bed and for Maria to buy a crop and a riding helmet. We met Kit there, a lifelong horse owner and rider. She was helpful in all kinds of ways, she helped Maria find the right helmet, the right crop (Chloe needs some encouragement), the right spray and fly treatment.
Fate is enthusiastic about meeting new people, she is jumping up on them, we are working on it.
Rachel Barlow is a gifted writer, illustrator, cartoonist, and now, magnet maker. She has been a student of mine on and off for four years, and I have told her a thousand times that she is a true creative, and can make it in the world as one. She has battled a number of demons to get there, but even she – notoriously unassuming about herself – is excited. She is selling her illustrated magnets like crazy at her new online retail therapy store.
Rachel does just about everything well – she is a skilled writer and illustrator, she has a wicked but gentle sense of humor.
Rachel’s enemy has always been low self-esteem, never talent. She has this idea that creative success can only come out of workshops and graduate programs, she and I have been quarreling about this for as long as we have known one another. Rachel doesn’t need anything but the will, and she is getting some real success now, and that breeds a lot of good will.
Rachel produces great work – witty and timely columns, drawings, sketches, she sells stories and drawings on her quite wonderful blog, “Picking My Battles, Toons and Tales From The Domestic Front.”
I like to describe Rachel as the sustainable Erma Bombeck, the great family columnist with a bit of a contemporary bite.
Maria invited her to the June Open House at the farm, and her magnets and drawings took off, one of the hot sellers there, even she is excited. Rachel eventually wants to make a living with her art and drawings and writing, and I believe very strongly that it is possible for her, she is beginning to sense the same thing. She has done it the right way, producing and producing, building up her blog and online portfolio, experimenting with different – and always inexpensive – ways to sell her work. Her magnets sell for $5.00, they are a great gift for almost everyone (what a great stocking stuffer for Christmas.). Rachel has been invited to return to show and sell her art at the October Open House.
She is taking my short story class at Pompanuck Farm in August. She deserves every bit of her success, and much more to come. Check out her stuff. You will not find many things to put on your lamp or refrigerator than these magnets, and her cartoons and drawings are just as wonderful.
Rachel is a living testament to the idea that we all have the creative spark in us, we just have to believe it and let it free.
Sometimes,I look out the window of the farmhouse – this time the kitchen – and I see poetry in the pasture, something timeless, a changing landscape, something that reminds me why I am living in nature, seeking a peaceful and meaningful life. How startling, in a way, to see a horse out grazing in the thick fog, I had to take a moment to re-orient myself. This grounds me, and touches me.
Paul Moshimer’s memorial is this weekend, and I am eager to be there and try once more to say goodbye to Paul, who killed himself more than a month ago. Blue Star Equiculture has released a beautiful video tribute to Paul, I watched it a few times this morning and was touched and saddened by it.
I did not know Paul long, and I am not at all certain now that I knew him well, but we had powerful moments of closeness and understanding together. I believe we came to love and care for one another. We connected on a creative level, as one pilgrim to another, as one reborn human to another, as men who came to great love late in life, as ethical beings trying to find a good and loving place in a violent and uncertain and sometimes hateful world.
We found time to talk to one another, listen to one another, visit with one another, to make so many plans with one another. Paul was very much hurt by the sometimes vicious and inexplicable attacks on him and Blue Star by people who claim to love animals and care about them. We talked about that a lot.
The memorial video to Paul is poignant and lovely and warm. A part of me wanted to cry, a part of me pulled back.
As a reporter, I covered many suicides, each one was mysterious, different. No one ever really understood them, unless the person was in physical pain too great to bear. People seemed to understand that.
I think suicides are the most confusing and painful kinds of deaths for survivors and friends and loved ones. After all, suicide is a kind of hiding, perhaps the ultimate kind, thus a great shock, and I wonder if I was really a friend to someone who hid so much of himself from me.
There is, of course, anger, and the inevitable guilt and disorientation. Should I have seen something? Done something? Why didn’t he talk to me, ask for help, reach out? I took many photographs of Paul, that is an intimate thing, some in the weeks before his death and sometimes I look carefully at them, I look into his eyes, his face, his charismatic presence for a sign, an indication, a clue of what he might have been thinking, of what was to come.
I don’t find any, although many other people did see this in him, and were not as shocked as I was.
I think of his very beloved wife Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach, and her great pain and sorrow, and I feel deeply for her suffering and bewilderment and loss, and her search for understanding. She has the right to know why this happened. She will figure it out, if she hasn’t already. She is a brave and beautiful and wild and strong and loving woman, I’m not sure there is a higher compliment than that.
But I will be honest, I am angry also, as I imagine she must be sometimes. Why die in that way? Why leave no note or message or explanation? Why give up on life when he was so passionate about everyone else living theirs? Why hang himself on a big tree behind the farmhouse, a spiritual center of the farm? Why put others in the position of finding him and being traumatized and having to heal? That was not my friend.
To me, friendship is the very opposite of hiding, I hope my friends understand my heart and my soul and are not ever so shocked by what I do.
Was Paul really my friend? If he were, wouldn’t I have known, wouldn’t he have shared some of his great pain and depression with me? I know the answers, I’ve heard them many times. Suicide is personal, it is most often hidden, because the people who really wish to leave the world don’t want to be saved.
Everyone seems to have a firm idea about Paul’s death, but I do not. Suicide is not rational, it is often mysterious, sometimes impulsive, almost always beyond the comprehension of many of those left behind. I’ve heard many clues and theories, I can guess at others, but the truth is I will never really know why Paul committed this ultimate act of sacrifice and resignation. And yes, I suppose I feel betrayal too, in one sense, even though Paul owed me nothing and I have no right to expect anything from him that he could not or would not give.
I don’t judge Paul, at least not consciously. If there is one thing we own on this earth, it is our life, and no one has to right to tell us what to do with it, whether we must live or we must die.
Yet I feel what I feel, and I am no saint. I have fought depression and anger and fear almost every day of my life, and I meant to fight it to my last breath, there is joy and love and meaning and purpose wrapped all around the dark side of life. I have never once thought that my life was not worth living, that my struggle to heal and to be an authentic and connected human being would bear fruit.
And I will share the hardest part for me. I will not ever understand how someone so good can leave the world in that way, if I ever decide my time on the earth is done, and that is my absolute right, I hope Maria will hear about it first from me. I know there is a good reason Paul could not do that – he was such a good man – but I also know that I will never comprehend it or know what his reason was. That was a part of him I did not know.
So I am still trying to figure out how to say goodbye to someone I came to love in so short a time, and trust. I am not sure I trust him now, even as I know how blameless he is. I know there are no clear answers to my questions, but they play with my mind sometimes, my mind often goes off on it’s own adventures.
I have learned in my hospice work not to ever tell someone else how to grieve, we all do it in the way we need to do it, it is a process for everyone of us. For me, saying goodbye is not one thing, but many things. Paul was a truly wonderful man, his love of the horses interspersed with an equal love of human beings. I believe this is a human being who did good every day of his life, who saved many lives in many different ways, and who never stopped pummeling himself for the mistakes he inevitably made, that all of us make.
If all men were born and shaped like Paul, the world would be a loving, peaceful and gentle place, we would never hate or hurt one another, we would not ever despoil the earth. Mother Earth would be well now, the animals would be safe and present in our every day lives. I am very sorry I did not get to talk to Paul about the encyclical written by Pope Francis called “Laudato Si.” I am so sorry he didn’t see it and read it. It would have given him great hope, perhaps changed his mind.
“Yet all is not lost,” Francis wrote. “Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.” That, of course, was Paul, what his life was about.
So I will go to Paul’s memorial this weekend with an open heart and an open mind. I will let myself feel what I feel, and hope to find small ways of helping Pamela heal and move forward with her great work at Blue Star Equiculture, work Paul so passionately shared and believed in. Blue Star is the future, for animals, for people. It is the new start. Paul helped make it so.
Paul told me once that he was certain the horses were talking to me, and calling on me to write about them, he is sure they were talking to him. So maybe I’ll stop by to talk to them about Paul, maybe they will help me say goodbye. Maybe the beautiful video will help too.
Our barn cat Flo is flirtatious when she sees me outside, she is forever trying to lure me into some belly-scratching. It took two years of seduction for her to get into the farmhouse in the winter, she is patient and wily.
