There is nothing that focuses one on life more than death. Death is a universal experience we will all share and I get closer to it every day of my life. There is an awful beauty to life and death.
Today, we are making a trip I never wanted to make – to mourn Paul Moshimer with his wife and partner and his many friends – at Blue-Star Equiculture, a place that has become nearly as important to me as my own home. But there is this curious dichotomy. At the same time I am eager to go and share in the experience of marking the passage of a rare and wonderful human being, a pilgrim every day of his life.
Maria will stay behind at Blue-Star this weekend to help Pamela and to help care for the horses, I will come home this afternoon to care for the farm and the animals, to teach my class tomorrow at Hubbard Hall, and then I will return on Sunday. It is typical of Maria and her great heart that she wants so much to help. There will be a four-day mourning period for Paul in the Native-American tradition, a fire burning day and night.
I am very eager to see Pamela and hold her, this loss is hers. Maria is very close to Pamela, they are sisters in a way, she will be a comfort to her, as she is to everyone she encounters. I want to understand this loss, if I can.
As sorry as I am to go and mark Paul’s death, I am anxious to see Pamela and touch my heart to hers and also touch and feel the brotherhood of Paul’s very devoted friends. I need them today, as I imagine they may need me. I need to go.
I doubt I will ever have as many friends as Paul had, or experience such devotion and love. I have often said that the men I love were either tortured as children or humiliated as adults, and both experienced both, as I have, it was part of our bond, and his bond with other opened-up men. Paul was a philosopher-king in so many ways, he was eager every day of his life to talk about all of the things most men run from for dear life – love, death, hope, self-awareness.
Paul and I shared a belief in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s idea that we are not born once when our mothers give birth to us, life requires us to give rebirth to ourselves again and again. Paul and I shared the very powerful experience of rebirth and a passion for redemption. We never have stopped taking responsibility for our trials and mistakes, we were both committed to being better and to helping one another be better.
Last night, I read my poem Golden Fields at the Round House Cafe, it felt good, I lost it a bit, but was buoyed by the warmth and trust of the people there, many of them bright and talented high school students.
Paul believed in me, and that is the greatest gift one can have. He always made me feel good about myself. He read my writing every day and thought about it, shared it, talked about it, challenged it. He was an intuitive friend and fellow traveler, it was a part of him. He was so open to the spirits and ideas and values of other people, he was so baffled, as I am, by the epidemic hate and anger raging in the world sometimes. I am grateful to the New York Carriage Horses for bringing Paul and Pamela and the horses deeper into my life and my life with Maria.
Pamela is a strong and powerful woman, I feel for her, I cannot pity her. She does not need that. She loves the big horses every moment of every day. She is passionate and suffused with faith and mystery and conviction, if there is any human being strong and deep enough to stand in the face of this awful storm, it is her. I hope I can be of help. So off to Blue-Star, another chapter in the crisis and mystery that is life.