We got up early to get the farm ready…check gates, put the sheep in the side pasture, haul out chairs from the barn, put up the donation box, the banners, the chalkboard listing events. Today, shearing at 1 p.m., poetry readings at 2, sheepherding on and off all day.
Bud will get his debut as a working dog, sort of, Maria put up her fiber representation of the White Cliffs in New Mexico where George O’Keefe lived and worked, and she also hung the crochet gun she carried during the women’s march in January,
The 8th annual Open House is just an hour away, and I think in some ways, I can measure the different years by the dogs who wait at the gate. So many different dogs have scanned the lives of our Open Houses, Izzy, Lenore, Rose, Frieda.
Dogs are a passing parade, they reflect the different passages of our lives. This is Bud’s first Open House, Red and Fate are veterans, they love the crowd, the attention, the work.
I thought Bud would have to spend the day in his crate, but he already seems like a veteran. We’ll see how it goes.
Will anybody show up?
Will it have the warm and gentle feeling we hope for?
Will Maria and her troupe of gifted artists sell their work?
No way to know. The Open Houses are meaningful to Maria and to me, a celebration of our work and creativity and life with animals and in nature.
I think the truthful answer for me is no, not yet, perhaps never.
“Don’t walk in front of me,” wrote Albert Camus, “I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me….Just be my friend.”
I keep looking for friendship, it has always been important to me, but few things have caused me more pain and confusion than my inability to keep close friendships or trust the friends I have, or see them clearly.
Looking back on my lengthening life, which I rarely do, this struggle over friendship stands out as one of the enduring difficulties and failures of my life.
I think sometimes of the rich gallery of once close friends I never see, speak to, or hear from. Casualties, really, lost memories. Their faces sometimes flash through my mind during the dead of night, ghosts wagging their finger at me in disappointment and scorn.
There is lots of research to suggest that people who have parents who emotionally or physically abused or neglected them are much more likely to have enduring troubles with relationships, they often seem frightening and threatening.
They learn to keep their distance.
I understand that is my story and the story of so many other people. But that does not really help.
I am close to absolutely no one that I have known for more than a few years. I have a long history of forming close friends and then seeing the friendships blow up for one reason or another, often to my amazement.
I am uneasy when people get close to me, I invest my friendships with too much emotion, and they almost inevitably and predictably blow up or crumble, usually to my great surprise.
I once was blind, and still cannot really see.
I have worked hard on this and thought I was safe from it, but I lost another good friend recently and it really stunned me.
It was a stab to the heart, it ended angrily and with cruelty and it was a deep and familiar hurt.
I was so unprepared for it, and it so hurt all the more. Enough is enough, I thought. Something is wrong with me.
Sometimes I run away from my friends, sometimes they run away from me.
I tend to think the problem is mine.
I do, after all, suffer from mental illness. I know I am flawed, but the doctors say unhealthy relationships are almost always a two-way street. The answer, then, must be to find healthy ones. Not so easy.
I was in one form of therapy or another for more than 30 years – I stopped several years ago – and I was told again and again that as an abused and assaulted child, I had deep and somewhat inevitable intimacy issues.
They would, the therapists said, be very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.
Getting close to people, the shrinks told me, would be a challenge.
Nobody gets too close, or stays there too long. Maria is the first person in my life to change that story. Our relationship began as a friendship and has deepened – we are lovers and partners as well.
She has restored my faith in trust. Self loathing is not a form of humility, it is a form of self-abuse.
The truth is, I have made some progress in making friends, but I have given up on the idea that I can or should form close relationships that are mutual, nourishing and long-lasting. I’m not sure they even exist, and if they do exist, I’m not sure I could manage one.
How can I learn not to wait for the explosion?
I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I am getting older and am more and more inclined to simply live out my happy life and accept who I am and how I am. We can’t all be good at everything, we can’t have everything we want.
I am lucky, I have many things I want, more than I ever imagined.
I don’t really trust myself to have close friends, and it follows that I’m not sure I trust friends either.
In addition to Dyslexia and some other disorders, I have suffered greatly in my life from what the therapists call Co-Dependence.
Co-Dependence is a pattern of behavior in which people find themselves dependent on approval or some other person for self-worth and identity.
It can take the form of giving too much or taking too much. One key sign is when one’s sense of purpose in life is wrapped around making extreme sacrifices to satisfy a friend or partner’s needs.
Or trying too hard to meet someone else’s needs.
Or giving a way too many pieces of yourself. At the core of co-dependence is low self-esteem and identity, the symbols of a battered ego.
I could not bear to relate the trouble this has caused in my life, the money spent, the emotions drained, the disruptions to my life and the life of others.
My life is a good place now, I have come a long way, and I do no harm, and am deeply aware of my problems, but those scars will never leave me.
I’ve sometimes had a Jesus complex in which I throw myself into the saving of other people. To some extent, this can be a healthy and wonderful trait, if it is bounded and considered.
In another sense, it can be just another form of mental illness, the loss of perspective that puts oneself in danger for the sake of feeling worthwhile.
I never see this friendship thing coming until it rears up and bites me on the ass.
Maria is my miracle. We have overcome so much together, our love is deeper and stronger than ever.
She has also suffered from co-dependence, and she permits few people to get very close to her. We are both extremely aware of co-dependence and keep it out of our own relationship, which is about building identity and self-esteem, not taking it away.
We each have our own lives, our own identity, our own sense of self, even if other people often thing of us as one single entity, even though we are quite different, and do very different things.
For me, it comes down to trust. Can I ever trust friendships again, having failed so painfully and miserably to sustain them for so long? Should I? I am a serial failure at friendship, and yet I have a full and happy life?
Why not accept it and move on.
Henri Nouwen, the spiritual author, preaches trust. “Trust that those who love you want to show you their love in a real way, even when their choices of time, place and form are different from yours.”
I think I understand that you get what you give, and if you are not open to receiving the love of a friend, you will not be able to give real love in return.
He also, bless him, warns against self-abuse and blame.
When a friendship does not blossom, when a word is not received, he says, when a gesture of love is not appreciated, don’t blame it on yourself.
“Every time you reject yourself,” he writes, “you idealize others. You want to be with those whom you consider better, stronger, more intelligent, more gifted than yourself. Thus you make yourself emotionally dependent, leading others to feel unable to fulfill your expectations and causing them to withdraw from you.”
My idea is to claim what gifts are unique to me and look within myself for friendship and trust, to live as an equal among equals.
My idealized idea of friendship is not something I need any longer, or am even seeking.
My wish is to set myself free from my obsessive and possessive needs, to give and receive true and honest affection, and yes, friendship.
I no longer think it is likely to happen, although I am good at change. I am always open to being wrong.
He sits on command except when he is excited about food. We are expanding his “stays” to about 20 seconds, I’ll keep at it until we get to three minutes.
Yesterday, a wake-up call, he was too aroused in the pasture yesterday. One of my failings as a dog trainer is impatience, I sometimes jump the gun and push dogs too fast too soon. I have always been an impatient person.
Bud charged too close to the sheep and the donkeys, it didn’t look or feel good, and it was a warning sign to acclimate him to the animals here rather than just turn him loose on them.
I believe strongly in letting dogs work out their problems, one curse of the Boomers is that they don’t permit their children (or dogs) to have any problems, so they never learn how to deal with them.
So I started a calming training regimen for him today, we returned to the pasture. I took him out near the sheep and donkeys on a leash, walked him around, then let him off.
(I never run from a problem with dogs. If there’s trouble, I move towards it, I never abandon the dog to troubling or dangerous habits.) And I keep a very strong attitude in my head: We will figure it out.
But ran with Red and Fate a bit this morning, but otherwise he sat calmly in the pasture today, a dramatic difference from yesterday. My training theory: Boston Terriers are family dogs and are rarely aggressive but often protective. Bud does not yet understand that these animals are part of our family; he thinks they are intruders and rushes to warn us about them and push them away.
I can tell by the way he reacts to them that he sees them as a threat, not as part of our little community. I can also see he is beginning to understand that they live here, and they are not going away.
My idea is to be flexible, calm and consistent. I always study the dog to see my opening, my opportunity to get a message through to him.
This dog seeks affirmation and loves food. those are pathways into his psyche. And he is smart and sensitive to our responses. That is good fodder for training.
My approach to the pasture issue is to go out with Bud to spend time with the animals on a leash, and then let him off leash while standing close to me, getting verbal reinforcement for being calm and also some treats to distract him and keep him from obsessing.
We go out alone, no other dogs to arouse him, and then we go out with Red, who calms Red and who Bud studies faithfully. In this way, Bud will come to see the animals as part of our family, they need to come inside his umbrella of protection.
And I clearly see Red teaching Bud, and Bud watching him closely.
I did this twice, once yesterday, once today, and saw visible results already. Bud loves to run around with Fate and Red, and he did that, but he kept his distance from the sheep, barking at them once or twice.
They paid no attention to him – a sign that he is calm around them. He paid no attention to the donkeys at all. I plan to do this for several weeks until he is familiar with the animals and begins to understand who lives here and who doesn’t.
People with pets don’t grasp the value of working with animals like sheep and donkeys. By watching them, I can read the dog. They are prey animals, and if a dog is aggressive, they freak or panic. They are not afraid of Bud in any way, they don’t charge or run or take flight.
By watching the donkeys, who were grazing within a few yards of Bud, I could see they were not concerned about him. They were yesterday.
I think that this approach will help the problem resolve itself with no shouting or drama or tension. Dogs don’t like either, neither do I.
Otherwise, we are doing well, remarkably so for six days. Bud is marking much less than he was at first, only once or twice in the past couple of days. He comes when called 100 per cent of the time, only not always instantly.
He has defecated inside the farmhouse twice, both in the evening, both in the dining room and on that carpet, which is old and has hosted many dogs. More crating in the evening. He does go outside, and is outside for much of the day. I think he can’t yet quite distinguish the old carpets from grass.
I never correct him unless I catch him in the act.
He was table-fed before coming here, and started hovering and even jumping up on our chairs while we ate.
I got two cans of Pet Corrector, which hisses and sprays air at dogs who jump up or obsess on human food. We never give our dogs any kind of human food and Red and Fate pay no attention to what or where we are eating.
When Bud put his paws up on my knee while I was having dinner, I gave him a blast of air from the can, he took off for the dining room, and then came back into the living room and went to sleep on the couch. He didn’t bother us again while we ate. I don’t think he will.
We are socializing him steadily and the Open House will tell us a lot about his confidence and tolerance. I’ll bring him out on a leash a few times to test things. I think I’ll bring him out when we herd the sheep as well.
But has been at the Mansion training for therapy work three times, and has done well each time.
He is jumping in and out of the car by himself and is climbing the stairs with some confidence. The trick is to keep moving.Once we are moving away, he comes along. And once he hears the sound of food being poured into an aluminum bowl, he is down the stairs in a flash.
Bud is anxious about being alone, he always comes once he senses no danger. And he is still wary about coming through doors or up or down stairs. He seems easier and more confident by the day.
Bud is now fully crate trained, he sleeps in the crate until 6 a..m. and then I take him out and he hops into bed with Maria and I, and cuddles with us for a while, then moves down the bed and leaves us alone.
But is calming down, slowing down. I feed him first – he is a bit of a food guarder – and then feed Red and Fate. Normally, I would feed Red first as he is the oldest and biggest, but Bud is anxious around food as dogs are when they never got enough when young. My goal is for them to learn to eat together, and we are close to achieving that.
Bud always wants to know what the other dogs are eating, even before he is done with his food. I stand with the dogs to discourage that.
He eats his food, and then Red and Fate eat theirs, Bud goes and checks on what everyone else is eating, then goes back to his food.We don’t have a problem.
Gus is bright and observant, he anticipates our behaviors as smart and anxious dogs will do.
He gets a lot of slack for a week or two, he’s been through a lot and this is a big change for him. But I believe training is essential for his safety and well being, my prime task as a steward. He needs to learn how to live safely and comfortably in a hostile and difficult world.
I’m going to continue emphasizing hanging out with the farm animals, then working on basic calming training – come, sit and stay for up to a half hour.
Bud is a great dog and we have all the elements in place for training. I work at home, and he is bright and attached he loves food. That’s really all I need, those things give me a foothold on Bud and how he things.
When I train a dog, i find the thing the dog loves most – work, in the case of border collies – and I ruthlessly exploit that to teach the dog what he or she needs to know. None of my dogs get anything for free.
One day at a day, steady every day. He’s going to be a great dog. More reports coming.
Dogs are part of the architecture of life. They fill some of the holes in our lives, help to heal some of the broken parts, join the structure of our lives. For as long as I have been writing – books, blogs, magazine pieces – there has been a dog around me, usually more than one.
They are part of the architecture of my life, and are essential to my writing. They ground me, keep me from being lonely, support me. Every dog I have had in my writing life has become a writing dog.
That is, they understand that I need silence and peace to work. Lenore sat on the couch in my office before we moved it to the living room. Red sleeps on a bed next to my desk. Fate often comes in to join us in the evening.
They all know to be still in there, there is no playing and I take no notice of them. When I write, there are no dogs around me, and yet there are dogs all around me, they just pick up what I need.
My newest writing dog is Bud, takes up the same space Lenore did, only on the floor. He curls up on the small dog bed and lies absolutely still while I work. Dogs wish to please us, it is how they live.
While I write, I hear Bud’s soft snoring. I am grateful that he has joined the architecture of my office, and of my life. Like the good ones, it feels as if he has known me for years. And I loved the afternoon light brushing against him as he rested from an exhausting day.
