Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

Bud is on the Alpha Dog transport, his truck left Arkansas at 4 p.m. Thursday and is heading up along the East Coast. ending up in Connecticut, Vermont and Maine.

We’re picking Bud up at 11 a.m. Saturday in Brattleboro, Vt. I keep going over the list of things we need, but I think we have everything. Bud is a good deal bigger than Gus, he weights about 27 pounds.

I could tell that Carol Johnson was sad about putting Bud on the truck, she grew pretty fond of him, and he adored her and the steady stream of treats, snacks, chips and cake he got to nibble on.

We’re bringing a crate in case, but Bud may just end up in somebody’s lap for much of the. I imagine the truck ride – it’s a huge FDA truck with heating and air conditioning and space for the dogs to move around.

But I imagine Bud will be more than a little stressed out after leaving Carol and driving in truck for 48 hours. We’ll take a few days to acclimate him to the farm and get used to us for a few days.

He has an appointment with our vet Monday morning to get registered there and checked out. Dr. Bradshaw at the Southern Veterinary Clinic in Arkansas says he is quite healthy now.

I can’t wait to see how he takes to the donkeys, he can see them from the yard, but he isn’t going into the  pasture for  a long time, never if he doesn’t like the idea of it.

We’ve got two small beds, but I think he might need a medium, one for my study, one for the living room. I’ve bog treats and American rawhide chews for him. I’ve never had a dog that didn’t like it on the farm.

Carol said her cats and a one-eyed poodle named Walter were delighted when Gus left, he sometimes chased the cats and he didn’t get along with Walter at all.

Carol says she’ll miss him, but I promised a steady stream of photos, plus his story on the blog. There will be no dearth of photos.

I’m not sure he’s fully housebroken, we are about to find out. More later.

I am seeking to embrace a new kind of spirituality.

I trust my vocations – writing, blog,  and photography – and I do not permit anyone to undermine them or lead me astray or threaten my identity.

I speak my mind, and I don’t bend over backwards to please my friends or any enemies.  I fully accept  that my ideas about authenticity and directness are much more likely to lead to isolation and a sense of aloneness than to connection and popularity.

I understand that I am different, and that this is disturbing to many people. My farm and animals and closeness to nature are sacred to me.

I expect to end my life in poverty or close to it, but the tradeoff is that I hope to have learned how to love and to leave behind ideas, images and other gifts have helped to heal, expand, or lift the hearts of others.

The point of the new spirituality for me is that I have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and fighting for and living out faithfully and with conviction.

The Big Men In Trucks – Vince, Chad, Ray – did an amazing job yesterday re-building, re-storing and re-landscaping the barn. They straightened a bow wall, removed several inches of soil, replaced gates.

This involved five  hours of tractor work, the digging of three different ditches, and some skillful tractor maneuvering.

I don’t have all the bills yet, but I think they will be quite reasonable, especially given the amount of hard work necessary.

You don’t need all the details, but our Pole Barn is restored, the animals have a dry and safe place for shelter in the winter.

I want to say I am thinking of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford this morning and the terror she feels. I can feel it right through all of the screens.

I do also feel some empathy for Judge Cavanaugh, mostly because he is a human being, like Ford, struggling with fear and great hurt. I cannot imagine what these days are like for him either.

Empathy is important to me, and the difficult thing about empathy is that it matters the most when you are trying to feel it for someone you don’t love or support. If you only feel empathy for people you like, then does empathy exist at all?

Our growing inability to feel sympathy for people who disagree with us is  wrenching and low.

I am discouraged the way we have come to treat one another, our whole civic process seems to be so ugly and dispiriting. I am determined in my own life to work to treat people with respect and dignity and compassion. I am committed to doing good rather than arguing about what good is.

I am not writing this to take sides in this awful and wrenching process – it seems to me that it is savagely cruel to almost everyone caught up in it, including those of us who suffer from watching from afar. It is a stain on the country that calls itself the birthplace of democracy.

I can’t find any winners in this process.

I will not be watching television this morning, that probably means very few people will be reading this. I’ll hear about it soon enough.

I refuse to submit to the notion that this awful spectacle is my news.

Is is not my news, it will never be my news.

My news was on this morning when I went out to the pasture and saw Maria talking to her beloved donkeys. My news will come later today when I bring badly needed slippers to J at the Mansion.

My news will come on Monday when I meet with the headmaster of the Albany Academy in the hopes of persuading the school to accept another worthy refugee child in addition to Sakler Moo.

My news will come on Saturday when my new dog Bud comes up the East Coast to Brattleboro, Vt., where Maria and I will meet him and bring him home. Bud has been poorly treated at the hands of numerous human beings, and I am happy to be able to change the narrative of his hard life.

Today, I wish the few people who will be reading this post peace and compassion as you navigate the poison in our civic system today and this week. I will do whatever I can from my farm to offer some brights spots for your day.

That is the gift of our animals.