We’re approaching a new stage with Fate in our training. She approaches the sheep confidently, she circles the flock to keep them together, she does not yet have the authority and presence to move them by herself. That will come. The big issue is to get her to “walk up,” that is to walk up slowly and in a straight line towards the sheep. Red does this quite naturally and easily.
Fate, like many young border collies, tends to break into a run when released, she has a hard time slowing down and “walking up.” We are making progress, though. I stand in front of her and call her to “walk up to me,” tapping my chest, once every few days offering some treats. When she walks a few steps towards me, I put her in a lie down. Then we do it again.
She is beginning to get the idea. Next I will stand with the sheep between us and call her to walk up in straight line. This is still tricky, as the ewes sometimes rush out to challenge her, and she has to back up. She is getting big and strong, she is not intimidated by much of anything.
Otherwise, her training is proceeding beautifully Red still works with her most of the time, and that will remain so until she can intimidate the sheep the way he does.
I know hate pretty well. When I was a kid, I hated a lot of people. My father, sometimes my mother, my teachers, the bullies down the road. Later on, I expanded the list of people I hated – bosses, company vice-presidents, corporate blood suckers, rich people in their pools, rabbis and priests, bigots and hate-spouting politicians.
As I grew older, and began to understand the toll hate had taken on me, I began to think about it. I decided to give it up, it was simply too great a burden for me to bear. I know how to hate, I did it a lot, it can flare up every now and then. The Dalai Lama says it happens to him all the time, also, this is good for me to hear. It is a fading echo in me now, I can’t quite remember the last time I really felt it.
But it is the fire of hatred that has mostly gone out in me. Life does that, the gift of aging is that we finally know something, even if it may be too l late to make use of it.
Hate makes little sense to me, it is the mark of the hollow man or woman. Hatred is always a gift to the haters of the world, who are legion. Just watch cable news. Joy C. Bell wrote that “If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.”
There is, of course, a lot of hate out there in the world, and a lot of people who do it. It has become the sad discourse of our civic life. The Internet seems to have given haters a cheap and easy – and free – path to travel, but hatred is certainly not knew or unique to the digital world. It just can move around more freely now, and without consequence. People ask me all of the time how I deal with hatred, and there is, of course no easy answer to the question, on or offline. Honestly, I rarely run into it these days.
As a public person for a very long time, I am sorry to say many people have hated me, although I have found that their numbers correspond almost precisely to the hatred that still lives inside of me. Hate is a powerful magnet, it finds like-minded hosts in which to live. Without them, it withers and dies and hunts somewhere else.
My response to the question has become easier and more clear, at least in my mind. Hate is a provocation, a test. The gift of the hater is that he or she forces one to decide just who we wish to be, them or us. Hatred, like outrage, is an addiction, in a sense, it needs more hatred to survive and grow. Hatred is the fuel that feeds itself. Love and light are the things that kill it, every single time.
Hatred was too much for me, you can’t really hate someone else without hating yourself. I kept seeing it in the mirror. I knew that it would eat me alive, corrode my sou, infect my child, poison my love. Hatred is the great test of compassion and empathy, I have learned that I would always prefer to be hated rather than hate. I came to understand that they were the real victims, not me. Martin Luther King said he would never stoop so low as to hate someone back.
I think one of the best things I ever read about hatred came from James Baldwin. He encountered a great deal of hate and haters in his life, he wrote beautifully about hate. He said that he imagined one of the reasons people cling to their hatred so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be left only with pain. How true.
A brilliant analyst with the unfortunate task of trying to heal me in New York City said that pain and hate were twins, each eternally connected to the other. Beneath any hater, she said softly, was a terrified human being. Pity them, she said, don’t ever be them.
When I read James Baldwin, bells went off in my head, and I knew that hatred was not for me. That was not a ship I wanted to go down with or on, not a path I wanted to take. Thomas Merton, my favorite writer on the spiritual life, gave me yet another insight on hatred: “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
And that was a good way for me to deal with hate, to look inside of me, to see every act of hatred as an opportunity for me to look at myself, to be better. Whenever someone said or did something hateful to me, I asked myself: “is this what you want to be?” It wasn’t. Sometimes in our world, this is the best course for growth imaginable. You will never resolve anything with a hater, you will never make it right. You can only do that with yourself.
And then, finally, there was Billy Graham, my unlikely pal for a few weeks when I was a reporter covering one of his crusades, teaching me in his limo late at night: “Hate will suck the blood right out of you like a vampire,”he said, “it is the song of the devil.” Wow, I thought, it can’t get any clearer than that.
I went to the pharmacy this afternoon to pick up my medicines, and I saw that Bridget had a twinkle in her eye, she had something to say to me, she had news. It wasn’t bad, she said. She told me a reader of the blog had called up and wanted to send her several hundred dollars to help pay for the cost of my medication. I had given her much joy over the years, she wanted to pay me back. I didn’t ask who she was, and Bridget would not, of course, tell me.
It was an incredibly sweet gesture, and I was touched by it. I could not, of course, accept it. But we worked out a deal that made me feel good.
It was uncharacteristically quiet in the pharmacy, I was the only customer. Bridget and I could talk about it. Even good insurance plans have what is called a “hole in donut,” the point in between your deductible and the catastrophic limit, at which the payments go sharply down again. Few people know what their holes are, and nobody in the insurance companies explain it or talk to pharmacists about it. You don’t really know until you show up where you are, and the pharmacist has no idea how insurance decisions are made.
I was not expecting a $600 charge that morning, it was the first time in my life I couldn’t just hand the pharmacist a charge card and walk out with the medications for me or for my family. I shared the experience.
Truthfully, it was no big deal, even though it rattled me. I am healthy and have money.
Bridget hears this every day, we just broke the charges and the medicines up into three parts rather than get a three month supply. It’s a tough period at the farm, and I will have to learn to do that from time to time. The treatment for open heart surgery and diabetes can be expensive, even with good health insurance, which I have. The cost of medicine rockets up in a chaotic way all the time, and no one seems able or willing to control. I have my medicines, many people do not.
My point in writing about this was that it was important to me. I was not born with money, I have been quite poor at several points in my life, including during my childhood. I am learning about money all over again, and I look forward to figuring it out. Surprises charges of $500 or more are not in my budget plan.
I am not destitute, I can afford to pay for my medicine, I just have to think differently about money, I can’t, like most people, just get what I want when I want it. That is how almost every writer and artist in the world l lives, along with billions of other people and my family consists of both a writer and an artist, neither of us has any shot at getting rich. This is the life we chose together, and I love it and do not regret a second of it.
The experience of being under pressure financially is no longer, I discover, the curse of the poor. It is becoming a universal experience. People like me, who never had to worry about money, do now, ever since the recession and other changes in work and the economy. We are all more or less in the 99 per cent, at least almost everyone reading this.
But the experience made me feel closer to my own sense of community, to the people who talk to me in line, some of them have to buy their pills a few at a time. Some can’t buy them at all, and just skip a month or so of medicine they badly need. Or skip doctor’s visits or surgeries they need.
Many are embarrassed to ask for help, it’s a small town, word always gets around.
Asking for help is hard. It took me nearly 60 years to understand how much help I needed, and to go and get it. This saved my life and enriched it.
Bridget said the donor predicted that I would be difficult and be “too proud” to take the money, I would put up a fight, she said. Bridget, who knows me, agreed. He’ll never take it, Bridget predicted. But I could tell Bridget had something on her mind, and sure enough, Bridget offered me a compromise. Why not take the money, she said and give it to somebody who does need it? What about some of your customers, I said, I know you can’t tell me who they are but what if you parceled the money out to them to help them buy their medications?
That would feel good.
She agreed, and I agreed. I expect the donor will agree. This very kind person wanted to help me, and it was not a question of pride for me, but of need. I do not want to use troubles to raise money, that seems manipulative to me. I do not need that money, I will have all of my medications and will pay for them. And then there is this, health insurance, for all of the screaming about the Affordable Care Act, is still a nightmare for so many people. It is good to remember that and remind people of it, those who don’t already know.
The Internet can bring nastiness and insanity into our lives, it can also bring generosity and thoughtfulness. The day I posted the blog, someone I know put up a gofundme page to raise money for my medications. They seemed to think I was near death. I got them to take it down. I am not in that kind of need, I said, and thank you.
My current experiences with money are teaching me a great deal, making me stronger, more responsible for my life, and in my own mind, more authentic. I have promised to figure it out before I leave this world, I still have a good chunk of time.
Plato urged people to be kind, “for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” I have a good friend who is being cruelly attacked online by an angry man not long after the death of her husband. She cannot understand such hostility and it frightens and upsets her. She is all about love.
I have been talking to her about this, she has gone through various stages of anger, hurt, and questions about responding. I have been writing online for 30 years, and it is a rare day that I am not confronted with the love of many people and the rage and hatred of a few. I have learned to Ignore it. This person cannot hurt you, ultimately he can only hurt himself. Do not feed him, or do him the honor of thinking he is important. Hating him back is just fuel for him, the nourishment his rage needs to survive. Starve it to death.
How awful to be a person like that, and I thought once again about compassion, as my donkey Simon taught me to do.
Who do we feel compassion for, if not for the broken, the wounded and the hateful? How awful to be the target of him, I told her, how much worse to be him. He is fighting a much harder battle than you or me. Easy to say, hard to do.
So this week has given me a chance to feel and learn from the two sides of help, the both sides of the coin, to help and be helped. Confronted with my medicine bill, I figured out how to help myself, that is the best help there is. Thanks to a reader’s generosity, I can also pay it forward and help others much more in need than I am.
And perhaps I can help a friend deal with the insanity and rage that new technology brings into our homes and our consciousness. Some people struggle to be kind, others struggle to be cruel. Others look for every chance to be generous and give.
That seems to be the conflicted nature of humankind. But I want to say thanks, dear donor, you are kind to want to help me, and you have helped some people in more need than I am in. Something hopefully for you to be proud of.
Sometimes, the place seems to be bursting with life. Life and energy are important, some people can’t wait to slow down, but I can. The farm is rocking a bit these days, between the pony neighing and galloping around and Fate tearing back and forth across the pasture. This energy is infectious, it pulls me along.
At the gate, in the morning, there are not two eager and focused working dogs ready to go inside. They look at me with great intensity and expectation. Can we go to work? Will you open the gate? This eagerness is the hallmark of the border collie, although it is also the hallmark of the dog who gets to work – the agility dog, the herding dog, the seeing eye dog, the hunting dog, the dog who loves to chase a ball.
This eagerness, this enthusiasm, this passion of expectations, is infectious, it makes me want to go to work too. The working animal is a sacred ritual of the human-animal bond, one of the joys and beauties of life. It is humbling to be the source of such power, such expectation. I always remind myself not to take it for granted, or to ever misuse or abuse it.
