Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

In a sense, the history of dogs is the history of the human search for compassion.

If you were to ask me what is the single most destructive and dangerous human trait, it is a lack of empathy and compassion – for people and for our sister, the earth.

it kills and harms more people and causes more wars and does more harm than almost anything I can imagine. Just watch the refugee children cry out for their mothers from behind the prison bars where we have placed them.

The history of dogs is, in many ways, a lost history. We love them to death, but so often fail to see their significance.

Historians and sociologists believe the first isolated and violent humans first learned compassion and empathy from the dogs who protected them and guided them in their search for food and who they came to love and nurture over time.

For 15,000 years, dogs have helped teach humans how to love and feel.

Most of us have always known that dogs are good for us, and for our mental and physical well-being.

From them, we learn skills that are essential to maintaining peace and harmony. Conversely, psychologists have found a strong correlation between the abuse of dogs and the abuse of people.

Cruelty towards animals is widely recognized as an indicator of mental illness and psychopathic behavior.

In my work, I have seen dogs comfort the lonely, connect people to one another, and  keep love alive where it is missing or fading. They provide unconditional love and connection in our fragmented and polarized world.

“Dogs,” writes Mary Elizabeth Hurston in her fascinating book The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000 Year Love Affair With Dogs,  “are heirs to a rich, varied heritage reflecting their influence on modern thinking, as well as the thinking of our ancestors.

In this sense, canine history not only chronicles the remarkable story of a uniquely adaptable animal, but documents the spiritual and emotional evolution of the human species as well.”

In our time, the left and the right, those avatars of our increasingly inability to think for ourselves, argue about everything, but not about dogs. Most of us love and need them, there are more than 70 million dogs living in America today, many filling the holes in our emotional lives.

The ability of people to empathize with other creatures has been considered one of the seminal and unique landmarks of human beings, requiring not only a sense of the self but a capacity to recognize others as distinct and separate from the self – in other words, the very essence of consciousness.

As the culture of compassion continues to evolve outside of politics, there is a growing body of anecdotal and empirical evidence to suggest that dogs and other animals have the ability to express compassion for one another and for us.

It is this idea that draws us so powerfully to them, to living with them and rescuing them and loving them back.

In our civic arena, our leaders seem to be losing the very qualities of empathy that have always been associated with great leadership and great civilizations.

Dogs have so much to teach us. “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures,” said Albert Einstein.

In his landmark book, Pets And Human Development, Dr. Boris Levinson, a psychologist and scholar, noted Americans growing disenchantment with the institutions that once sustained them – technology, politics, religion.

They were becoming disconnected from one another, and alienated from the institutions of government, which they believed no longer served them.

Even more than a half century ago, Dr. Levinson wrote, alienation and isolation was resulting from complex stresses created by a technological society whose values and institutions were in many ways dehumanizing. And this was written in 1963, before America became a Corporation Nation that forget what it was that people are for.

He foresaw a time when we would turn to dogs and other animals, when they would provide relief to beleaguered humans, giving much love and pleasure and reminding us of our origins.

I think this time has come. I think dogs are keeping love and compassion alive for so many of us, and may yet teach us how to care for one another.

In my lifetime, dogs literally taught me how to live and care for another living thing. To me, it is no accident that our very cruel and uncaring White House has no dog living in it. Dogs soften us and guide us away from the dark side of life.

It is something of a strained cliche to hear dog people say they don’t trust people who don’t love dogs. That’s too far a stretch for me, I know a lot of good people who don’t love dogs.

But if  you look at this idea another way, there is certainly something to it.

Dogs force us to be good, they challenge us to be patient and empathetic and to listen. A great dog demands that we be better people, and this gives me nothing but hope and optimism for the future of humanity. Love is always alive when dogs and cats are around, and more of them are around then ever before.

People who love dogs are by no means perfect, but they often demonstrate the better sides of humanity: love and compassion and nurture.

There are just too many dogs lovers for us to all drift to the dark side.

After every storm, I find there’s a gift left for me in the blue birdbath. This time it was a pink flower I never saw before blown off of a nearby stem. Sometimes I think there’s a garden elf named Maria who leaves these gifts in the birdbath for me, but she denies it and looks innocent.

I never quite imagined the color impact of the blue ceramic birdbath, I just thought it would look like in the garden. But there is a secret voice in the head of every photographer whispering “color, color…”

At first I was going to say Lonely Poppy in the wildflower garden, but I changed it to Solitary Poppy. This poppy, one of my favorite flowers, stands in our wildflower garden all by itself, soft, proud, whispery. It flows back and forth in the holy gentle breeze.

Eight or nine years ago, during my darkest winter, I went regularly to visit Steve, a fiercely religious pastor in a country Presbyterian Church. Steve always told me he was a Jesus man, and he was quite open about hoping I would embrace Christ as my Lord and Savior and keep myself out of Hell.

But he was always drawn to rescue, he took me  in like a stray dog wandering in the cold, offering me tea and peanuts when we met, sometimes in  his kitchen, sometimes in his big old drafty Church. He even invited me to his weekly farmer’s lunch. I loved going.

Steve was, as he put it a “Jesus man,” he was also a very good friend to me and a minister of compassion, when I would come to him in panic and pain, he always invited me in, we would talk together and pray together. Steve was – is – the real deal and I will always be grateful for the refuge and comfort he gave me.

We argued a lot. Steve was opposed to divorce, and also sex out of marriage. I was in the process getting divorced, and determined to have sex often. He said he had to try.

He also said I was a good Christian in many ways, better than many of the churchgoers that he tended to.

We were curious friends, but the friendship seemed deep and valuable to me. I think I have always been drawn to friends who are  not like me.

When I got married and moved to Cambridge, we drifted apart.

I was no longer living in a panic, and Steve had souls to save. He often told me that we were all sinners awaiting salvation. The Presbyterians around here are tough and they are not kidding.

Sometimes I would invite Steve along on my hospice runs, especially if people wanted to be baptized as they approached the end of their lives. Steve would come and question the seekers closely about their faith, if he didn’t hear real conviction, or were just looking to be safe, he would politely decline the baptism and recommend someone else.

Steve told me once that the strength and conviction I was looking for was inside of me, and could not be found outside.

He said the answers I was looking for could never come until I was able to live from my center, and not from my head, or the beliefs of other people. For all of his fundamentalism, he talked often of the new spirituality – mediation, solitude, Zen, even Yoga.

He told me he was convinced that I was profoundly sincere in seeking to live a spiritual life. He told me that I would come soon to discover my own idea of God, and he even blessed that journey in a prayer we said together in his office one winter morning when I felt I just could not get through another day.

He asked me to remember that God was a gentle breeze by which he would make his presence known to me, and that I would feel this in my center, not my head.

I’m still looking for God, but I have found many gentle breezes, they always seem holy to me. The recent troubles and tensions in our country have inspired me to embrace a spiritual life, one it seems that will always be outside of an organized faith or religion.

The best response to discord and controversy is to ignore it, and go to the center, and live a good life.

I envy Steve his absolute conviction, I am a creature of grays and hues, I always look to step in the shoes of others. In the past two years, I have turned inward to the call of an inner life  during a time in which social problems are so pressing.

This is not political work for me, I have absolutely no interest in politics as it is practiced in our country now.

I seek to relate to myself and others in a creative way and to live from the center of my existence. I hope to be a gentle breeze that can touch and help others.

I think of Steve often, and of the great gift he gave me that I use almost  every day now. He called me to guide myself and hopefully some others to go beyond myself in a  search for meaning without losing my own home.

More than anything else, this means not being distracted by the trivia of argument and judgement and hate and  frustration. Easier said than done. I’m on it, though.

My new British Partner’s desk arrived today, it is a heavy, serious, beautiful old wooden desk, and I took to it right away. The minute I sat down it felt like my desk.

Maria is never happier than when she is  re-imagining a part of my house, and while she can be scary sometimes, I am grateful. I hadn’t really touched or cleaned out my study since we moved into the farmhouse, I write every day and am wary of disruptions.

This was a big one. I was writing on an old farm kitchen table surrounded by two more old farm tables. Every surfaced was covered with books, papers, cables, camera equipment. We removed two large piece of furniture from the study, the old Victorian sofa that Lenore took over, and a farm table Maria requisitioned for her studio.

We hauled out numerous camera bags, book I don’t use, garbage bags, old papers. In the new arrangement, the big desk sits at the end of the room, flanked by a farm table on one side (my former writing desk) and two old bookcases on the other.

It took hours to get this far, and we have hours to go tomorrow. I was freaked out by the process, when my writing system is shut down I feel like a man on oxygen with the tank turned off. More later. We are tired.