Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

I took Red out into the pasture this morning, and I’m happy to see he had a strong  morning out there.

He sat between the donkeys and the sheep and kept order, he didn’t have to run or move much, and the sheep paid him little mind, but kept in their place. They knew he was there.

I think this is important for Red now, it gives him work, movement and sense of work and dignity, important to dogs like border collies.

Red has nearly died several times since he’s been with me, he is a stoic and resilient creature. But I don’t think even he can make a fractured spine go away. But I see he does have up and down days, and this morning, under another painted sky, was a good morning.

Mother Earth is singing her song to me this winter, bringing me her beautiful paintings in the stormy sky. What a gift to any photographer to live under a morning sky like these.

It seems that there is a new storm every other day, some of them  angry and disruptive, and others, like the one last night, polite and inoffensive.

All of the storms seem to clear in the morning, all of them  bring beautiful skies and tableaus, each one of them a message from our mother, the earth.

It is, for me, the tableau that never fades or is taken for granted. Red sitting the sheep, keeping watch, Maria shoveling manure from the barn to the manure pile, and above us, another Dawn Of Glory.

I dug out one of my favorite Rumi poems, and wanted to share it:

“The dawn of Glory has come spreading its light

and the bird of my soul bursts with song

In the radiant sun the dust of my body settles

and the Beloved comes to sit at my side.

Touched by His grace my forlorn heart 

stirs joyously and begins to dance.

The one whose back has been bent

by the journey springs back to life.

The heart is the light of the word

and the soul its brilliance.

One sets the beat for the other to dance.”

— Rumi

If you heed the call, wrote Joseph Campbell, you begin what he called “the dangerous adventure.” It is always  dangerous because you are moving out of the known and familiar sphere of family and community and into the great unknown, the great beyond.

This is the stuff of myth, the Hero Journey, the oldest human story.

No other living thing on the earth can do this, it is unique to the human being.

Campbell called this Crossing The Threshold, the crossing from the conscious to the unconscious world.

It  may be a divorce, a revelation, a broken heart, a death, a move, getting lost in a dark forest, a plunge in the ocean, a sickness, a flight, a shock, finding yourself in a new or strange place.

It might be called an ascent or a descent, it might succeed or fail, you may return or get lost, but this is the dangerous  adventure, the call to life, the path into the unknown, through the door or the gate or the cave or the clashing rocks.

I answered the call, and am still on the path, still on the journey, there is no end for me, I think.

What I have learned is that once I heeded the call, there is no turning back, no cheering crowds, no flags or finish line, no celebration. Once I stepped on the path, I knew the path would be my life.

It is not a weekend at Disney World.

I find lately that I am Crossing the Threshold again.

I am listening to myself, speaking my truth, setting the boundaries I need.

I have entered another phase of life. I am shedding friends who are not friends, turning from the unhealthy, from the people who take too much, and the people to whom I gave too much.

All my life I feared decisions, and all my life I made so many wrong ones, hurt myself, hurt others. The conscious mind rears up again and again and closes the door. The big idea in the hero adventure is to walk boldly through the door again and again, into a world of the unfamiliar and the frightening. To quit or run is catastrophe, the unimaginable.

I am shedding much of my life, clinging to creativity and to love and the idea of doing some good and finding meaning with my life. These goals are beginning to take shape, they are what is on the other side of the door, they are giving my life purpose. The great boon of aging is that I finally have seen enough to know something.

On this journey, my Sherpas and I – dogs and magical helpers – have shed many of the burdens that bent me over and left me blind. Family, ambition, delusion, anger, resentment, money, loneliness and terror, even false friendships that blocked my path to consciousness. I am comfortable with me, I cherish my aloneness, I don’t need these things any more, I have what I need, I had it all the time.

On the journey, if you are blessed, you may even find love, a kind of Excalibur of the soul, something to light the way and keep us warm. I was lucky.

I wonder at the power of it all, the most frightening thing about this journey is that there is no victory, it is all about staying on the path. Everywhere you go, there are tests to pass, a bewildering initiation into the mysteries of life.

I listen to myself now, I listen to my heart, I see the roadblocks and traps and pitfalls, they make me feel uncomfortable, and when I am uncomfortable, I know to stop and speak and turn and even run, if necessary. If it doesn’t feel right, then it isn’t right. You cannot have a healthy relationship with angry or unhealthy people.

One image for the journey, writes Campbell, is that the hero is chopped to pieces out there in the unknown. That came very close to happening to me. One great challenge at the threshold can be the encounter with my dark counterpart, my shadow, the demon and broken soul inside of me.

I was the most malignant enemy I faced, I was the demon.

The hero has to slay the other and go and enter this new world alive and intact. I left a lot of me behind.

It was a long time before I understood that the dark counterpart, my shadow, was me. In this idea of the hero journey, I was stomped to pieces and then resurrected, my magical helpers formed a magic circle around me and led me out of the darkness.

Finally, I could ask for help.

No wonder I feel lonely sometimes and exposed.

My world will never seem or be ordinary or familiar again, and there is no time or space to rest. There are doors to burst through everywhere I look, again and again and again.

In my last book, “Talking To Animals,” I wrote for the first time about my work with visualization and animals, especially dogs. The book did not get much attention or many reviews, but I think it was important to write it. I know from a lifetime of writing, that ideas have stood or fall on their own, and I’m not sure the world is ready for this one.

This is a familiar experience for me, I am always ahead of or behind the curve, that is just my place in the firmament. (I will be discussing visualization and animal consciousness this coming Wednesday on my radio show “Talking To Animals,” on WBTN1370 from one to three p.m.

My research led me into the writings of Patricia McConnell, Stanley Coren, Sy Montgomery, James Serpell, and Temple Grandin, five writers about dogs and animals that I respect greatly.

Researchers believe that dogs think and communicate through what some call “movies of the mind.” They think in visual images and stories, it is, I believe, much like videos or movies. They communicate to one another in body language, smell, voice and eyes.

They don’t have our words and language, and their thinking is very difficult for us to decipher, since they can’t speak to us in our words or feelings and tell us what they are thinking. I have been working on training and visualization for years, and have had some great successes and spectacular failures.

My first success was with the Swiss Steer Elvis, I succeeded in getting him to come, sit and stay by clearing my head and imagining what I wanted from him. I did this work further with Simon, my criminally abused donkey, I imagined him letting me reach into his swollen and painful jaws and rubbing ointments and medicine onto his badly infected gums.

I expanded this work and used it successfully on pregnant sheep, on Red when he came to me in therapy work, and with Fate when I abandoned trying to turn her into a skilled herding dog. I have  used it extensively to train Bud and help him recover from two years of brutal and sustained mistreatment.

Visualization is mysterious to many people, it sounds like voodoo a bit. Quite simply, visualization is nothing less than imagining the outcome you want, clearing your head of extraneous thought and feeling, and projecting your wishes to the dog through mind, body language and emotion –  the same way they speak to one another.

Dogs are astonishingly sensitive to and aware of our moods.

I used this technique in helping Bud understand what things he could chew and what things he couldn’t chew. It was helpful in getting him to eliminate outside, even in the cold and snow, which was alien to him. And it was most helpful in getting him to trust us and accept our affection and direction.

I’m going to be writing about visualization more and more on the blog and also talk about it on the radio Wednesday. The most detailedexample of visualization came when I spent a year, training Frieda, Maria’s man hating rottweiler/Shepherd mix to come into the house and co-exist with the dogs and people who lived there. I wrote about it in my book Second Chance Dog.

I remember standing with her, clearing my head and projecting what I wanted – for her to be calm with other creatures and responsive to me. You have to believe it can happen for the dog to pick up on your confidence and certainty. Maria has used this technique with the donkeys and the dogs also, and she will come onto the show in the second half (two to three) to talk with me about this for 20 minutes.

Call if you want to talk about it: 802 441-1010 or 866 406 9286. You can listen here. Of download any free  radio app (I use Simple Radio.) Or e-mail me at [email protected]. You can also hear a podcast of the broadcast by going to WBTNAM.US. This is a great topic for us to talk about on the broadcast, along with our other current topics: how dogs think, and animal consciousness.

A mild winter storm is almost on us, the skies darkened and thickened this afternoon. We went to visit our friend, the poet and writer Jackie Thorne at her home in Glens Falls, she treated us to excellent Thai food, one of my great pleasures in the world, but  one that is not readily available to me here in my excellent small town of Cambridge.

It was great sitting with Jackie and talking with her. She is an impressive writer and a gifted poet, you can see her work on her blog here, Creative Journeywoman, she is a student in my Writing Workshop. I’ve suspended the workshop for a while, I’m just up to my neck in projects and work, including finishing my next book, “Gus And Bud: Lessons Of A Year On Bedlam Farm.”

Jackie is a deeply thoughtful animal activist and philosopher, I am hoping she will write her next book on humans and animals and what our responsibilities are to the creatures who share the world with us, and are in great peril from our greed and indifference. Take a look at her blog, you won’t regret it.

When we got home, you could almost touch the new storm, not massive here, but still, another one. We are thinking of Spring.

Fate curled up in a dog bed by the fire, I sat and meditated  – this is my Peaceful Hour –  on Being Kind To Me, and a Gentle Mind. This is something I have been working on lately, as I enter yet another chapter of my Hero Journey.

As I mediated, I opened my eyes to see Fate resting in a glow of Red from the fire, and I wondered once again at the ability of dogs to enter into the spirit of our lives, and share our passages with us.