Pearl is getting up there. She has titanium rods on her rear legs and has arthritis, and she has an ear infection and two big hotspots. She has special food, takes a lot of bills. Vets are like human doctors, in one way, they are big on tests and pills. Lenore loves it when she comes, she dotes on Pearl and is alway around her. The two are a beautiful pair. Pearl came to me five or six years ago. She was a Show Dog who couldn’t be bred anymore, and her legs were shot. So I got her. Then my daughter begged me for two years to take Pearl to New York Ciy and I relented.
The two have been happy there and Pearl is the toast of Park Slope. She’s here for two weeks. I’m glad Lenore watches over her so closely. Pearl is in the autumn of her life and is such a sweet, beautiful and open-hearted dog. I love seeing the two of them together.
For the past few years, it has seemed sometimes that much of my life is about opening up. Opening up to Maria. To friends. To Frieda and the dogs. To the donkeys, and now, Simon. To a spiritual life. To the people who talk organic and chant and tap and buy local. I’ve become a lot of what I used to ridicule, and perhaps this is common among people who get older. But I don’t think so. Most of the people I know close up when they round 50, and squawk a lot about the price of things and the way things used to be. For all of the problems of the world, I don’t want to be anywhere but here, nor do I believe that the past was better than the present. If you doubt it, read any book or two about World War II.
Up until a few years ago, my life was shaped by fear. All of my life, every part of it. As fear has receded, I have opened up, and it cannot be that the two things are not connected. Fear is a killer. It kills hope. It kills change. It keeps us closed, often frozen in lives we don’t like or want. In our culture fear, is everywhere, sold on the stock market like any other commodity – the news, health care, politics, insurance, retirement funds, old age, medical tests, the weather. The government warns that sleeping in bed with dogs can kill you, and doctors say you should test yourself all the time for everything and take pills to avoid ever dying, and public health officials warn to avoid stray kittens because they carry disease, and dogs will bite you, and Storm Center sells ads by the millions for “Catastrophic Weather Coverage Round The Clock,” and politicians say we are in great peril every day of our lives from terrorists, foreign hordes or deficits or school teachers and librarians, and authorities say fear strangers because they can kill you and the news says fear lettuce and sugar can poison you.
And why do you wonder why people are so afraid? Maybe because they believe all this stuff and don’t notice how profitable it all is to everybody but us.
So maybe the best thing to do is downsize, work on those IRA’s, and don’t actually see, touch or talk to people and animals in person or ever eat unpackaged food. For that matter, don’t even go outside. Speaking only for myself, I would much rather pour honey on my butt and sit on an anthill.
We all have to make up our own minds, but I can tell you my heartfelt view that living in fear is not the way to open up. Fear closes you up, paralyzes you, seals off your heart and soul from love and positive experience. It will kill off your dreams as fast as a bullet, and maybe much more likely to. Last week, an old and dear friend came to see me – we hadn’t seen one another in a few years – and she said she was shocked at how open I was, how I hugged her and touched her. “You’ve never hugged me in all the years I’ve known you and I wouldn’t have dared hugged you. But you hugged me!” Hmmm. Well, this week, I was on the Internet kissing a donkey. Life is strange, life evolves. Maybe too much opening up isn’t good. But if it is, I can look anybody in the eye and say as the fear went away, openings emerged. The two are not unrelated. If you ever want to kiss a donkey.
More than anything for me, the experience of Simon has been about opening up. And working together – with Maria – to heal him and communicate with him.
There are so many things going on emotionally with me and Simon it is hard to even list them. Around the farm, there used to be a “me,” and now there’s an “us.” Maria and I have been drawn even closer by our working to together to acclimate and help this sweet and accepting creature, brought back from the edge of darkness and life. Then there’s the powerful emotional experience of rescue and rehabilitation. Concerns about projecting, emotionalizing, being self-righteous, dealing with anger. The management of these emotions with animals is difficult, and it is simpler sometimes to just use it to feel good about yourself. A trap, I think.
Simon is opening up. This morning, Maria and I went out to see all three donkeys braying softly, calling to us. We groomed and brushed them, as we do every day, but then something extraordinary happened, and the three donkeys opened up and opened us up, and were an entity, and we both began talking to Simon, and he to us. We did it differently, in keeping with our own psyches. I’m glad it was caught on video and thanks to Maria for encouraging me to let her do it, rather than just take images of her. That was out of balance. I shouldn’t be hiding behind the video camera, and I don’t want to use her to do that.
Those of you who have been following the blog perhaps know how difficult this was for me to do. But that is the message of Simon to me. Keep on loving. And open up, open up, open up. Come and see. I am very pleased and unnerved to be sharing this very private thing with you. Opening up is not easy for me, or for men generally. I work at it every day. Come and see.
The Studio Barn. Where Maria works. Where My Heart Lives
“There is a place that is as far from here as breathing out is from breathing in. For the word is very ner to you. Where life forever holds gentle sway over death, where people are human with the same grace that a willow is a willow, where the struggle and the yearning between male and female is at last resolved.
It is to begin with, all inside us.”
I think sometimes we look for peace everywhere but where it can be found – in our breath, in our sighs, in our fingertips.
I think I am learning to talk to Simon. Got a video, I think, for later.
Minnie was a feral kitten born in a litter under a porch in North Hebron. A waitress I knew at a restaurant showed me a photo and asked me to take her. I didn’t see her for the longest time. I would leave food in the barn, and it would vanish, and occasionally I would catch sight of her. She hid for months, and vanished whenever strangers came around, but then she changed. She was curious and very affectionate. She loved Winston the rooster, as she loves hanging around with Simon.
Minnie has evolved into a sweet and social creature, although she lives the mystical life of the barn cat, up in the rafters, sleeping on hay bales in the sun, stalking the fields at night. In the afternoon, she loves to sit on the hay bales and catch the afternoon sun. Lately, she has permitted me to approach her. I am enchanted by barn cats, exotic and remarkable animals who live in the murky space between pets and wild animals.
Yesterday I took a video camera in for a brief visit. Come along.
