I remember reading a children’s story when I was young about a man who wandered the countryside, looking for messages from the sky, everyone thought he was crazy, and he thought the same thing of them. He wondered how they could go about their lives disregarding the sky, too buy. I wander the woods sometimes talking to the sky, and I spent most of my life wondering why I was crazy and everybody else was sane. Lately, I have begun wondering if the opposite is true, if I am sane and the world is crazy.
I suppose we are all sane in our own way, each of us answering to our own lights. The sky seemed to riot today, it was like a Times Square Billboard, changing colors and depths, the sky was sending me all kinds of messages all day, it was a cacophony. This morning, it was dark and worm, then a deluge, then snow and ice, then a deep freeze began, the ground hardened, the roads became slick. Everyone hear talk about the black ice, it is perhaps the most universally feared thing in the country, we have all had hard experiences with it.
And then, a glorious chorus, in the late afternoon the sky cleared and let burst one last glorious burst of light, it framed my barn and the trees so beautifully, I appreciate the backlighing from the heavens. This was an interlude, an intermission, a reminder not of how cold and intense the sky can be, but how beautiful and uplifting. Are you getting my messages, the sky seemed to ask me?
Yes, I said, I am getting them, I am hearing them. Today you showed me the rainbow, life, death, darkness and light, awe and glory and finally, the great work of art, light and color. I can warm my spirit if not my body.
If there is a single project I have been working on steadily for the past 15 years, it is this: talking to animals. Studying the way they communicate with us, the way we can communicate with them. The writer Henry Beston said some years ago that we do not have a language for communicating with animals – many people believe they can, but I think it takes great care, listening and observation and in my life with dogs, donkeys, barn cats, chicken, sheep, goats and cows.
This is precisely what I have been doing every day. Maria’s presence has enhanced this research, many of you have seen the images of her communicating with the animals on the farm, we both have been working together on this, it is the most fascinating thing I have undertaken in my life with animals, I think I can contribute something meaningful to the subject.
I want to go to the next level with it, that means money and time. My wonderful camera, my Mark III 5D is having some troubles, I use it so often and in so many different conditions, it is always with me in cold, sometimes rain and snow. I don’t have two cameras, I switch lenses all day long, I see the time is drawing near when I will need a new camera, and I want a camera that will help me capture the images I need for a project called “Talking To Animals,” an e-book and paper book project. I began this when I had Elvis the steer, I learned from Orson and Rose, from goats and roosters, from dogs and donkeys. This work has flowed from Simon to Rocky, from Frieda to Red, in each case I have learned now to communicate with these animals in visible ways.
Many of you have followed this remarkable part of my life.
The camera I want – the Canon DX 1- costs $7,000 plus the obligatory accessories, so roughly $9,000. It is fast and powerful, and will help me capture the images I need for this and all of my work, but especially this project. In the other world, I would have submitted this cost to a publisher and included it in my advance, it would have been simple. In this world, I have to raise the money myself and I don’t have that kind of money available. So after much consideration, I am putting together a Project Funding request on Kickstarter.com, a remarkable new website that offers artists the chance to seek funding for their work via the Internet.
Directors, producers, writers and artists are raising money to fund worthy projects online – people are even funding movies there – expanding the new relationship between creatives and the public that consumes their work. Some people are at ease seeking money from the outside world, I am excited about it but also uneasy. I want to make my own way, pay for my own way, but I also recognize there are some limits to that in the new order. I want to be paid for my work – the subscriptions were my first step, so was my new and successful book tour for “Second Chance Dog” – but not for my life. There is a big difference for me, my life is not a drama or a crisis, the world does not owe me a living for the choices I make.
But once more, as with the blog and Facebook, I have found a new tool to keep me relevant, to help me continue my work in a rapidly changing world.
I have a number good friends – artists and authors – who have argued that this is the new model for creativity, it is empowering, enabling and gives the consumers of art a chance to support artists in a very personal and direct way. That is persuasive to me, I have seen this happen through my blog. I accept this idea and will try it.
So I’m putting together a Kickstarter Project proposal which will be up on the Kickstarter site in a few days. People can contribute through a very simple Amazon billing system, if I do not reach the goal of $9,000 then no money is taken, exchanged or received. So in a way, people can decide if they think this a worthwhile project or not, once again, the process is being shared, and there are some rewards for some contributors – notecards, books. I love the subject, I am communicating and listening to animals every day, I am putting together the foundation of an emotional language with which to talk to animals and hear them, in a sense my life’s work. And it is important. In the increasingly emotionalized world of animals, we are projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto them, we are not pausing to learn what they are really trying to tell us. This work may have saved Simon’s life and Frieda’s as well, it has helped Red evolved into an animal who can slip into every part of my life.
When the Kickstarter project is up, I’ll let you know. If it goes well, this will be my next book and e-book. I am learning to navigate the new world and find myself in the quite unnerving but wonderful position of doing things almost every day I never imagined doing just a few months ago. Let’s see what happens.
I decided to call it an Earth Show, we all have tickets, it is quite spectacular. I woke up early and saw it was 54 degrees – it was -18 a couple of days ago, and much of the 10 inches of snow had melted in the warm deluge, by noon it was 34 degrees, the temperature dropping rapidly, the water turning to ice. It will be below zero by nightfall, many warnings of frozen roads as the rain is just stopping. On my Facebook Page I asked people to post the temperatures where they were, and it is pretty amazing, it is worth a look, they range from – 50 in Minnesota to 15 in Alabama, to – 40 in South Dakota.
The earth is putting on a show, I propose that my Facebook Page might be a place where we can gather to share the weather where we are, talk about how the animals are doing – lots of good stories already – and warm one another’s spirits, if not their bodies. We are soul-warmers here, sounds like many of you will need it tonight.
If you love people or love animals, your heart might go out today for the hard days so many are enduring, these are among the hardest days I have seen the donkeys and sheep and barn cats have to get through, the temperature fluctuates wildly, plunges to painfully cold depths, and if there is a silver lining in this dark cloud, it may be that Mother Earth has finally found a way to get our attention.
To move us past the mind-numbing paralysis of the left-right paradigm where everything, even the earth itself is politicized and polarized and awaken us to the power of what we see and feel and hear. All most of us have to do is look outside and see the roiling world around us to see that that the earth is bleeding and calling out to us. Most of us – not all – can easily survive such cold, we sit by our wood stoves, turn up the furnace, get our parkas and blankets out, but the animals we love, inside and outside of our houses, cannot do those things, they flock to the heated water buckets to stay warm, the wind and cold blows snow and ice into their shelters and onto their coats when they venture out, there is hard ice to try and walk on, no place for their hooves and paws to dry out for long.
I can give them shelter, warm water, good hay, I cannot make them comfortable or keep them warm, they accept their lives, but I do not accept our blindness and cowardice, my mailbox is filled with the struggles of people all over the country to keep themselves and their animals warm, people in Mississippi and Alabama and George are not prepared for this kind of cold, they have no simple way to keep themselves or their animals warm, millions of livestock have perished in different parts of the country.
Perhaps our common love of animals will jar our sleeping sensibilities to awaken and hear the messages I am hearing these past few days, the bitter cold, shrieking winds, plunging temperatures. I hear them, to go straight to my heart, for me, for you, for Lulu standing guard out in the pasture. Perhaps the wind brings the news of a great awakening, I am resolved that we have to try and heal our world.
