I am exploring a new faith, a new turn in my spiritual church. I am joining the Church of The Minding Of Your Own Business, it fills a very urgent spiritual void at a critical time – in our world, everyone on earth is minding everyone else’s business and it is, I think, threatening free thought and authentic sharing. People are not only afraid to drive around with their dogs now, or let their horses nap in view of a fence, but I have friends telling they are afraid to mention rawhide on Facebook, they will immediately be branded as dog criminals.

This has often gotten me to thinking about the threat to authenticity.

How many people, I wonder, are afraid of speaking the truth on social media or their blogs for fear someone will mind their business and tell them what they are doing wrong. I have a very promising writing student who is terrified to write about her love of horses. It isn’t because she’s afraid to write, she’s afraid people will tell her what she is doing wrong.

I deal with it this way: when I’m afraid to say something, I know I have to say or write it. And I do.

When I wrote about training Fate the other day a reader called “Dogman” immediately posted this message questioning the way I did it:  “The problem is that you are sitting down and praising her afterwards.for sitting still. She knows if you catch her in the act you get mad,but there are no real consequences.

Because you forgive her pretty much straight away. The- “I’m peed of with you” for a long while after is really important. I would have put the steak on the floor near her while you sat reading with an occasional glare. The time after they are caught is more important than the moment they are caught.“

As many of you know, I am not overly fond of people who diagnose humans and dogs over the Internet, you get what you pay for.

I didn’t tell Dogman that Fate has stopped going near our counter, or that I didn’t care to sit on the floor with a steak in the living room glowering at her. I’d rather scare the hell out of Fate with a throw chain and leave it at that (this drew some rebukes, a trainer pointed out that this was a “negative” reinforcement. No kidding, I said.)  It worked for me.

If this steak sfuff works for Dogman, great, I salute him, and good for him. What does this have to do with me and my dog?  Why do I have to do it? I was struck by his absolutely confidence that he knew what was best for me and Fate, even though he had never met either of us or set foot in my house. I thought of the old idea of minding your own business, which my grandmother taught me, and I told him I belonged to the Church Of Minding Your Own Business. We had to learn from our own triumphs and successes. He vanished.

And I got this idea that this is my faith, this business of boundaries in a world without any.

My faith is this: I do not tell other people what to do. I do not tell them how to get a dog or how to live with one. I share what I know and what I learn and they are free to take it or leave it. Every person, every dog, every home, every family is different. Each of us has to learn what works for us. The sad truth is that there is not just one way to do it, if there were, every dog in the world would sit, stand and lie down on command and instantly.

An editor was reading over a book manuscript of mine recently, and she made a note in the margin, she said my readers would want to know where I stood on the important animal issues of the day, she urged me to disclose my views on breeders and especially, whether I was comfortable eating meat. (Some of you might shudder at the thought of my disclosing more of my views.)

I said I wasn’t comfortable addressing “hot button” issues, I do not have answers to all the raging controversies in the dog world.  I am not the Grand Vizier, eager to dispense my “positions” to the world. I gas off enough as it is.

If people want to use a breeder, they should, and if they prefer to rescue a dog, they should. If they don’t want to eat meat, they shouldn’t, and if they want to eat meat, they should.  It is not for me to say, and I honestly don’t know. I said I believed in minding my own business. She said I was perhaps the only person in the world who did. My church is quite small.

I have a pastor in mind, he is a toothless and reclusive hermit who lives in a tiny wooden cabin not far from me, he has no electricity or heat, he has never invited anyone to his home, nor has he been known to go to anyone else’s. He has never told anyone what to do and doesn’t seem to know what a smartphone or computer is. He surely doesn’t have one.  He rarely speaks to anyone, and is not on Facebook, nor does he tweet.

He sounds perfect. And there are no dues or tithes or requirements.

I am fascinated by the fact that social media has almost completely broken down the idea that we should mind our own business. it used to be an almost sacred trait in America. In my town, the old timers say, you could get shot or beat up for minding somebody else’s business. The idea was that we were free to make our own mistakes and learn from them.

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy,” wrote C.S. Lewis long before Facebook and text messaging, “and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” How much more relevant that observation is today than it was before World War II. Because it is in solitude, silence and privacy that wisdom is found and mistakes are understood and successes savored.

Yesterday I mentioned giving rawhide treats or bones to my dogs and several people immediately posted messages on Facebook warming me urgently to not give rawhide or bones to my dogs, it was, they said, extremely dangerous. I saw a good friend of mine, a vet for more than 30 years that afternoon, he laughed. “In all my years I’ve never taken a piece of rawhide or a bone out of a dog’s stomach,” he said, “only balls and socks and pieces of shoes and rocks.” Dogs eat bones, he said, that’s how they lived for thousands of years.

Henry David Thoreau has always been an inspiration to me, and I read Walden many times when I first came up to the country and realized how alone I was and how many things about nature that I did not know. But I came up to the country for the same reason he went to Walden Pond:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” – Henry Thoreau, Walden; or Life In The Woods.

Like me sometimes, Thoreau was being a bit dramatic. People visited him regularly and often brought him food. He was  rarely truly alone. His mother and best friend lived just down the road. But his idea of living deliberately is important. He wanted, like me, to see what the world had to teach and he wanted, when he died, to not regret that he had ever lived.  He wanted to live meaningfully and independently, and so do I.

I often imagine Thoreau on Walden Pond with Facebook, a stream of warnings and alarms and critiques pouring in on him and he sought to find his bearings. Don’t drink the water, don’t eat the squirrels, don’t hurt the birds, remove your human waste far from the pond, be wary of your wood stove, don’t harm the trees or eat the fish, or feed the bears and raccoons. You build the cabin wrong, be sure to glower at the foxes when they come for your food. Think of the nasty notes he would have gotten from the animal police, the environmentalists, the people on the “left” or the “right.” Why, they would ask, would you put  yourself out there if you didn’t want to know what everyone on the earth thinks?

Day by day, I imagine him getting angrier and angrier, posting nasty messages in return, losing his confidence and clarity, feeling not the beauty of the pond but the tension and argument of the world around him.  Sometimes, that happens to me People have lost the very idea of minding their own business, and there is no mistake about it in my mind, it is a catastrophic loss, far beyond bad manners.

I think Thoreau would have thrown himself into the pond, and happily drowned.

Not me, I am eager to live deliberately. I want to confront the essential facts of life. I believe the Church Of The Minding Of Your Own Business is the right religious organization for me. So far, I am the only member, and this gives my faith a certain mystique and cache.

Minding one’s own business is not about pique and contrariness. it is about self and identity. I think I need to find our for myself what works, how to train my dog, how to live safely in the world. I didn’t ask the Dogman for his advice, and I honestly don’t care how he glowered at his dog. It is not, you see, my business. And the fact that I share my life does not make my business his, no matter what happens on Facebook.

Living is so dear, I want to learn how to do it by myself, which is the only way I will ever learn.

When a woman wrote me last week and told me I must tell Maria that her new hanging piece did not have enough color in it in the bottom third, I very politely declined. I don’t relay messages to Maria or tell her what colors to put in her hanging pieces, I prefer to live at least a few years longer.  It is not, I said, my business.

She  wrote back right away, annoyed and shocked: “What do you mean?,” she demanded to know. I had no idea where to start.