Carol Johnson of the Friends Of Homeless Animals/RI rescue group sent me this photo of Bud as he was leaving the veterinary clinic in Arkansas this morning after his first laborious and dangerous treatment for heartworm. He will be in Arkansas for two more months before he can come and live with us.
SInce this very dedicated and competent rescue group adopted Bud, I’m deciding to adopt them. We raise a lot of money her for good causes – the refugees, the Mansion residents. Wouldn’t it make sense to support a group that saves heartworm infected dogs from all over the country and takes care of them and pays for their medical bills and transports them to the people who adopt them?
There are legions of dog lovers here, and this group seems very worthy to me. If you agree, think about sending them a donation, it has been an honor and inspiration to work with them, they have opened me up and got me thinking about a lot of things.
People have always abandoned dogs and mistreated them, but heartworm has only recently spread to the whole country, to a dog near you. I’d like to help this group. FOHA doesn’t only help heartworm dogs, but that is a focus of their work.
I think they would make a natural and worthy addition to our work. This idea has been growing in my head for a week or so.
It takes a long time and a lot of money to save these dogs. You can learn more about heartworm and it’s devastating consequences here, through the American Heartworm Association.
I am confident Bud is in good hands and will be here at the end of the summer. From what I hear, he is well worth waiting for. It seems he is a sweet and good-hearted creature.
And I see that he is almost the exact color of Red. Hmm….
One of my long and faithful readers was upset the other day when I rushed to the defense of Maria and her Flying Vulva potholders. I was also called to defend myself, for writing about them.
I somewhat playfully suggested that some of Maria’s critics were stuffpots and prudes, a sincere statement of truth in my mind.
In my world, and by social media standards,, that’s pretty lame stuff, but some people got huffy and Hazel and others were upset. They thought I shouldn’t be responding to people who called me and Maria disgusting and gross and immoral.
One woman said that as a Christian, she could no longer read my blog at all she thought it was about farms and animals.
“Maria’s art comes from a bold and creative place and that’s wonderful,” said Hazel. “What upsets me is your judgmental name calling of those readers who may have different values or upbringing or yes, hang-ups, or who may have religious reasons for being shocked. You write that you are trying to do good and be kind but it seems to me that your words are not kind and may hurt. Maybe just ignore them, let it go, and just celebrate Maria’s imagination.”
I appreciate Hazel’s thoughts, well and carefully expressed, but anyone who thinks I won’t support Maria or won’t defend her are getting some of that new legal marijuana and ingesting it.
I very much celebrate her art and imagination, especially in the face people who label it disgusting or an offense to Christianity.
They would not have liked Jesus, who really went after religious authority, and not with potholders.
I am in the midst of a great desire to do good, and I have, with much help, done more good in the past two years than in all of my life before. I wish this meant that I am pure and only good and without sin, but if I ever fall into that hole of belief, it will be the end of me, and of the good I hope to do in a time when good is struggling to be felt and heard.
Good is separate from me, it exists on another plane.
Hazel’s message was interesting and it did get me considering a much more important subject than the moral – or immoral – underpinning of the Flying Vulva potholders.
Hazel was really suggesting that if I wanted to be seen as good and kind, I should overlook the people who choose to argue with me and speak softly or not at all.
Good advice, but please, let’s be real.
That is not me, and being someone else is not my idea of good.
Apart from Maria’s art, I also celebrate my right and obligation to speak my mind, for better or worse. Isn’t that the point? And I hope I will always be willing to do that, not become some strained version St. Jon or St. Francis.
When I talk about trying to do good and being compassionate – and Hazel is correct, I do write about those things a great deal – it is not because I want or need to be seen as good and kind. I’m not looking for tombstone inscriptions. I don’t want to give up my lifelong crusade against hypocrisy.
It is because I want to do things that are good and compassionate, and there is a huge difference between the two.
I am not running for Congress or mayor or seeking sainthood or campaigning for nicest guy of the month. I don’t poll my readers to see what it is I should say every day.
I know myself well enough now to know that I am not always good and kind, and I will feely admit that, I will never be so saintly as to suppress my own intense and sometimes emotional and judgmental self. And I don’t define being a good person so narrowly.
I believe we are all good and bad and we all do good and bad, I have heard of very few humans who all evil or all good. Even Attila The Hun loved his horse.
I have little patience for people who define honesty as agreement only with the things they believe, or live in the narrow troughs of dogma. Or who embrace hypocrisy, the lowest form of life to me. I absolutely detest the closing of the American Mind, the left and the right. A pox on them both.
“Don’t you know how small it makes you when you criticize the President (as I occasionally do)?” asked one woman on my comments page?
No, I don’t. Criticizing Presidents is as American a pastime as baseball, it doesn’t make me small or large, it just makes me me.
And I am in good company, along with countless citizens throughout our history. Me is not always sweet, it is not in my genetic makeup, and if it were, I’d be long dead. How wonderful to live in one of the few remaining countries where we can criticize our President? And I can write what I like.
That is something to celebrate.
Giving myself to others in my mind – doing good – means giving without expecting anything in return. Or needing praise and thanks or acknowledgement.
I know a wonderful woman – she is a saint – who does good deeds day after day, who brings people pies, sits by their bedsides, writes checks, brings food and clothes to the needy, comforts the devastated. No one knows how much she does and if I ever mentioned all that she does, she would strangle me. Virtue really is its own reward.
She knows how to give.
Giving to others without expecting any return can only happen when I have fully accepted myself for who I am, good and bad. I have to love myself, that has to be enough. And I do not need to be good to do good.
There is no spiritual person on the earth, from Thomas Merton to the Dalai Lama, who would claim that they are always good and kind, that they are saintly and perfect. The spiritual life is about tilting the balance to good, not eliminating all bad. Its about the search for good.
The truly spiritual people of the earth, from the Pope to Gandhi talk quite openly about their sins and their shortcomings, that is the very definition of spirituality. You will rarely see a more humble person than Pope Francis.
That is how one grows, from the darkness, not the light.
Why do I talk about doing good and try to do good and ask others to help me?
I do it for me. Because I am selfish. Because it makes me feel good. It makes me feel grounded in these bumpy times. Because something in me loves to help people. It gives my life focus and meaning. It brings me into contact with good and needy people who permit me to help them and feel good about myself.
It teaches me patience and perspective and gratitude. It honors my ancestors and also my country. It gives rebirth to my life, my writing, my photography. It gives me the life I want.
What do I get back? It feels good.
For me, faith is not about being silent in the great dialogue raging around me, it is about trusting that I will give gratuitously and do good and I will receive gratuitously, but not from the people to whom I give.
I remember when a good person in California sent Ali $80 and then sent him an angry letter a week letter scolding him for not writing him a thank you note. I remember an angry man who donated $100 to the Mansion for some picnic chairs, he was furious that I hadn’t yet put up a photo of the chairs two weeks after his donation.
I remember a woman who asked for a $100 refund because the RISSE women’s basketball team has not yet gotten itself organized and into regular league play.
I urged Ali to return the $80, I gave the man his money back for the chairs and posted the photos of them in time, I gave the woman her refund instantly because it was the right thing to do and because I don’t wish to take the money of people who expect anything in return, or who give with conditions.
I don’t want money from people who want something back, and thankfully, not many do.
Sometimes, people get upset with the Mansion residents because they can’t answer the letters they get or even answer them at all. Sometimes, these people contact me wanting to know what’s wrong. I don’t tell them what’s wrong because it’s not my business to do that and because the letters, like everything else, are offered without strings.
People come and go, live and die, I can’t ever say.
Ali and I could never possibly answer all the letters or acknowledge all of the wonderful gifts or take photos right away of every thing we do. There are just not enough of us.
But besides that, there is great danger in pouring ourselves out to others in the hope that they will thank us or acknowledge us or give something in return. It leads to the feeling that people are taking parts of us. You cannot give to others if you do not own yourself, and you can only own yourself when you have mastered the idea of unconditional love and giving.
When I know myself, I am able to give according to the receiver’s need and their ability to receive, and nothing else.
I seek to be grateful for what I can give without clinging to it, or expecting anything in return, and joyful for what I can give without bragging about it or calling attention to it.
I will one day be a free person in this way, free to love and to give from my heart.
But there is an important codicil to this. Giving does not make me good, or better than you or anyone else, or kinder than anyone else. I don’t need to be a saint to do good, I will never be so kind and good and noble that I am no longer human, and will no longer do the dumb and mindless things that humans do.
I am sorry to disappoint you, Hazel, but unlike St. Francis, no one will ever canonize me when I am gone. I am no saint, I am just me.
“Once you have grace,” wrote Thomas Merton, “you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don’t really want to do.”
“He’s A Good One..”: Bud And Dr. Jonathan Bradshaw: Photo By Carol Johnson
I am excited by all the very good things I am hearing about Bud, the dog I’ve adopted from Arkansas who is currently in a clinic being treated for heartworm, a runaway disease in the South that is now spreading rapidly across the entire country.
I used to balk at heartworm tests and treatment, but I was wrong and know better.
It is a lot cheaper and easier to prevent heartworm than to treat it. Heartworm was once confined almost entirely to the South and Southwest, but since rescue dogs have begun being adopted all over the country, often from Southern states, heartworm is now in all 50 states.
When I started my life with dogs in New York and New Jersey, heartworm was almost unheard of. Every vet everywhere knows about it now.
It is now illegal to transport a dog with heartworm, so Bud has to be treated in Arkadelphia, Arkansas by his vet, Dr. Jonathan Bradshaw (above.) This week he had his first treatment, he has been on a course of antibiotics, heartworm preventatives and steroids before beginning the actual worm treatment.
This is a complex, dangerous and months-long process, Bud will not be coming to us for about two months. Bud was on doxycycline, increasingly in use for dogs infected with heartworms, which is spread easily and quickly by mosquitoes.
This week Bud began the treatment, a series of injections that kills the worms, and if not done carefully, can kill the dog as well. There is only one drug approved by the Food and Drug administration to kill adult heartworms in dogs, an organic arsenal compound that is injected into the dog’s lumbar, or back muscles.
On the days injections are given, and in Bud’s case for a couple of days later, the dog is required to stay in the hospital for observation to make sure doesn’t have any serious reactions to the treatment. He may also be on steroids for a while.
Canine heartworm survivors are retested after treatment and six months later to ensure that all of the larvae, micrfiliariae and adult worms are dead.
At the end of August, But will get another injection and will rest and be monitored for another 60 days. If he is cleared by Dr. Bradshaw, he can come to live with us, the rescue group Friends Of Homeless Animals/RI will being him up to the Northeast where we can go pick him up.
A dog like Bud – abandoned in the Arkansas woods and initially terrified of men – would have been unlikely to be alive a dozen years ago, before the rise of the rescue movement.
Bud would probably have been put down right away. I sent another donation to FOHA/RI, they spent an enormous amount of time and money saving and treated homeless and heartworm-infected dogs.
I am impressed by them.
If you want or need more information on canine heartworm, I’d highly recommend the American Heartworm Society, they have all the information you might need.
You can check out their available dogs at FOHA/RI here, most, but not all of them, are small dogs. They are pretty appealing.
The group put me through a lot of hoops, but they are warm-hearted, available and empathetic, both to people and dogs. That is a bit unusual in my experience. They never made me feel uncomfortable or unworthy. Bu expect a good workout.
If you wish to help the treatment of abandoned and heartworm dogs, you can see the dogs and also donate here.
It is expensive to treat these dogs and transport them all over the country, I think this group might be a good match for the Army Of Good. I’m thinking of adopting this rescue group on my blog, they have opened my heart a bit, they have some intriguing dogs from all over the country.
I am hearing the nicest things about Bud, from the vet techs and Dr. Bradshaw and from Carole Johnson, the conscientious and big-hearted member of FOHA/RI who has been fostering Bud. “He is really a good one,” said Dr. Bradshaw, “a sweetheart.” Carole Johnson, who has nursed Bud back from the edge, says the same thing.
At first, Bud was terrified of men, but Dr. Bradshaw says he has seen no signs of that.
A vet tech told me Bud was a sweetheart, “a really calm and sweet dog.” He sounds a bit more laid back than Gus was, but Fate will take care of that. Me too.
I am much looking forward to having him live here, we will take good care of him, Bedlam Farm seems to be a healing place all of itself. Feels like a good match.
For the past four or five years, Zelda has been the leader of the flock, the watch sheep, the one the others followed. Zelda is getting old, she is losing her teeth and her coat is thinning.
Rosemary, part of the Gang Of Four pack of Romneys we rescued from a nearby farm, is our flock leader now. She stands guard, sounds the alarm, leads the others where she thinks they ought to go, and they follow.
When I come into the barn with my camera, she comes forward to stand between me and the sheep.
I’m working on my get-to-know-the-sheep better. I’m a border collie person, I am always with a border collie, and the minute the sheep see me, they start to gather and move. I’m not a huge fan of sheep, I like their gentleness and pastoral grazing, but I have never really bonded too closely with any.
I think I think like a border collie now, and a border collie cares for the sheep, but does not, I think love them, if you know what I mean.
So I make Red lie down away from the Pole Barn and I went into the barn with some watermelon rinds, which sheep love to chew on. Giselle is not afraid of me or the border collies, she is a proud Romney, and it took Red nearly a year to get her in line.
The other sheep tend to shy away from me, Giselle tends to come up and sniff my camera. It was good that I had a wide angle lens.
I am making headway in my sheep campaign, they are getting more curious about me and less wary.
