Category Archives: animals

Dream

Remembering more dreams lately, a flurry of them in recent nights, as my imagination seemingly tries to recharge itself in the face of objectively dispiriting circumstances that call for heroic feats of imagining.  

At the end of last night’s I was, for the first time in years, back in that phantom second apartment of mine, the large space connected to my own cramped apartment where I stumble from time to time, wondering that I never use those rooms.   In the bathroom of the second apartment there was a dark blur of movement and a rustle behind the towel hanging on the rack.  It was a brown cat, at first afraid and then reassured by my quiet and calmness.  I kneeled and it came over, affectionate.  Petted the cat as I thought of the unused resources in my life and the sometimes terrible burden of our personal histories.

History can, and often does, repeat itself, but it is a mistake to feel that parallels between things happening now and things that happened in the past make the same outcome inevitable.  Dream and continue to breathe, sleep, eat well and exercise, only time will tell.

Reminder to Be More Careful

“HEEEEEET-Lah-ree-yoos!” howled the monkey with glee, a little too enthusiastic about my minor visual joke.

I’ve got to be more careful about what I say in front of him, I thought.  I’m his fucking role model.  I haven’t really been able impress on him that ‘hitlerious’ is only appropriate and/or semi-clever in certain very specific situations.   He’d latched on to it as an all purpose howl and I was getting a little sick of it.

I’ve spoken once really well, outside of a few isolated moments of deadpan eloquence in seedy courtrooms.  I wish the monkey had been there to see me at my best.  It was at my mother’s memorial service.  I killed, as the comedians say.

“YOO keeled at your mother’s memorial!  HEEE-TLAH-ree-yoos!” yapped the monkey.

I’ve got to figure this out, how to get him off that stinking throw away.  It reminded me of when I taught a friend guitar years ago and got to hear every one of my worst musical tics played over and over and over.  At least then it forced me to learn some new musical tics, but it was painful.

“Better musical tics!  Adolflutely Hitlerious!” barked the monkey, embellishing now, I noticed– not without chagrin.

“Listen, lice picker,” I said to my pet, “if you live a good life, and are a loving person, or monkey, or whatever, then perhaps when you die someone will memorialize you the way I memorialized my mother in that nice chapel in Peekskill.  A guy in a suit will stand up there and talk from the heart, and one last time people will see you in your best light, and laugh, and be somber, and recall that you were a unique character, endearing and tough, and that you lived and left a range of colors and flavors that people can consider after you’re gone.”

“Colors and flavors!” howled my monkey, by now completely out of control, “oh, stop it, please, you’re Goering to kill me!”  Pleased with his joke, the tiny fascist scrunched up his face again and shrieked “Heeet-lah-lah-LAH-ree-yoos!”

Clearly, I will have to do something about this.

The Kind of Dog Dog Kickers Kick

People who kick dogs are cowards, let’s face it.   Unless the dog is attacking you or a loved one, or a helpless person nearby, in which case you are within your rights to kick the dog.

It is the kind of dogs people usually kick that shows best what such people are made of.   Do you think Mastiffs are often kicked?   The only people who kick large, powerful dogs are those cowards so filled with rage and hatred that they have a powerful, large caliber gun in the other hand as they kick the dog.  The same “equalizer” the overseer always had at hand when whipping slaves on the rich guy’s plantation.

The typical dog kicker’s dog?  A small, sad-eyed dog who cannot fight back.  A little terrier, a Chihuahua, a toy poodle.

 

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I’ve taken a vow of nonviolence.  It is a hard vow to keep in a violent world filled with enraged acting-out cowards.  That worm who kicked me on the train the other day– if he did it out of clumsiness, why not say “sorry”?   If too oblivious or enraged to have second thoughts after solidly kicking a sleeping man’s ankle, the best remedy for such behavior is a quick tug on the kicker’s head and a sudden jerk of the face to the subway door.  Bam!

This will possibly deter the man the next time, make him think twice before booting a man thirty years his senior (perhaps I reminded him of the father he always hated).   More likely it will only cause him to seek smaller dogs to kick, maybe even blind ones.

The cycle of rage and violence cannot be corrected by violence, of course, though it is the only language spoken by many in a violent society like ours.  True mildness, coupled with unfailing directness, is a better corrective– though very fucking hard to practice.

Missing Kitten

We’ve named him Underfoot, this affectionate feral kitten who appears a few times a day in the backyard for a feed.  Poignantly, more than a feed, the young cat wants contact and affection.   He rubs against Sekhnet’s pant legs as she shoos him off, lest Skaynes get a whiff of the young male cat marking Skaynes’ woman.  As she works in the garden he tangles himself under her feet.  He lets people pick him up, he’s happy to be hugged and carried around.

“He’s dying to be somebody’s pet,” Sekhnet commented.  And it’s true.  He’d be a great pet.

Haven’t seen him the last few days.  Could mean a little boy or girl picked him up and said “daddy, can we keep him?  Can we?  Daddy, can we keep him?  I want to keep him.  Look, daddy….” and daddy seeing the adorable, cuddly pair smiles and nods, reaching for his camera phone, and the kid screams in delight and waves the kitten in the air.

Could mean what has happened to several generations of feral cats we’ve known, fed, played with and watched grow up — a tiny body lying somewhere. These cats in the wild don’t seem to live more than a year or two, many of them don’t make it that long.  Hard life out there on the street.

(two hours later)

I saw the little scamp hop over the fence, from the top of the compost bin.  I went out and called him and he came bounding over, leaped another fence.   Did his dance around my feet until I picked him up.  He purred as I rubbed his face.  Then I opened a can of food and put it out in the chilly late afternoon, he ate a few bites and then was rubbing against my pant legs again.  Picked him up for another few pets, then left him to eat.  

Looking out the window just now I saw his food bowl almost untouched, then I saw him, by the garage next door, chowing down studiously on something the neighbor had put out for him.  Had the thought– only in America, where millions of children go to bed hungry every night,  do neighbors compete to feed doomed stray cats their favorite flavor of cat food.

And To Be Patient in An Emergency is A Terrible Trial

BILL MOYERS: When did you know you were free? And I ask that because of the poem you wrote, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

WENDELL BERRY: You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.

BILL MOYERS: Then read your own poem.

WENDELL BERRY: This….this was a long time ago. “The Peace of Wild Things.”

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

BILL MOYERS: The grace of the world, take that a little further for me.

WENDELL BERRY: I meant it in the religious sense. The people of, people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as…as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this. “No amount…” This is you. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it … can for long disguise its failure” to conserve the wealth and health of nature. “Eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up … thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.” That’s as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as I’ve ever read and surely if that’s happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say Wendell, please tell me what I can do?

WENDELL BERRY: All right. Well, you’ve put me in the place I’m always winding up in and…that is to say well we’ve acknowledged that the problems are big, now where’s the big solution? When you ask the question what is the big answer, then you’re implying that we can impose the answer. But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

Saving A Life

I was running late for the children’s animation workshop today.  The weather service had put the area on tornado watch, I heard on the radio.  We have tornadoes now in NYC.  One ripped through here a couple of years ago, tore hundreds of trees out by the roots.  There was talk of drenching rain.  I had a call, talked for a few minutes, looked at the clock, realized I just had time to make it, if I ran, and if I also got lucky.  I jumped into the shower when I should have already been on the train.

As the water began to hit the tub I saw a spider down near the drain trying to scurry away, but she couldn’t get any traction with the droplets gathering on the side of the tub.  I shut the water, with the thought that I was crazy, I was already late.  Reached for a piece of toilet paper, coaxed the spider on to it, put the spider and toilet paper on the sink.  Showered.  When I got out the spider was walking on the sink, kind of shaking the water off its legs.  I smiled, jumped into my clothes, put on the heavy back pack and ran down to the subway which I caught with 5 seconds to spare.

Rushing to the workshop, and arriving, dripping with sweat, four minutes before I had to start it, I didn’t stop to think that the ahimsa bit wouldn’t have worked out so well for me and my little friend if the critter at the bottom of the tub had been a cockroach.

A Walk in the Park

After six hours or so in the chair reading advice on marketing, watching videos on social media, networking, what makes a video viral (most often celebrities tweeting about them, surprisingly enough), fundraising, and getting updates from a friend who was putting in a hard day’s mostly futile research on behalf of my nonprofit, I took a walk.  

Balmy day, the nearby park was green and lovely, dotted with people out enjoying the summer afternoon.  As I came over the hill to the tidal basin by Spuyten Duyvil I saw that it was low tide.   The open metal sphere, a work of public art built in the middle of that usually watery expanse, was sitting on mud.   There was mud in every direction for a few hundred feet.   I made my way to the end of the little island that looks west, over the treacherous stretch of river the Dutch named “Spouting Devil”, to the cliffs across the Hudson.

I saw on the mud, each a few hundred feet from the water in the channel, two young women in bathing suits on landlocked water motorcycles, large jet ski type vehicles intended for slicing through water.  In the channel two men were in the water.   The tide had apparently gone out quickly, the boats had become stuck on wet, sticky land, and the men had somehow made it into the water while the women stayed on the large padded seats.

The men hailed some passing jet skis plowing through the channel and these bison-sized one passenger boats approached the shore, but were careful not to get too close.  “We have a rope!” called one of the men in the water.   He thought it was a great plan.   The jet skis backed up, like skittish horses, it was not hard to see their reasoning.   It was like watching a scene by the watering hole on the nature channel, the drinking animals lifting their heads in unison, the one in the water already doomed.

When I left the park an hour later I could see, from another angle, that the jet skis were still firmly on the mud, while others were skittering in the water nearby, but not getting too close.

Nobody likes getting stuck on the mud in low tide, I’ve noticed.

Aspiration

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When I state my desire to remain mild in the face of aggravation I express an aspiration.  That I’m often able to remain mild is a source of happiness to me.   When I am less than mild, I understand I need to do better.  It is an ongoing aspiration, difficult but well worth cultivating.

I have to believe that as I master remaining mild fewer people will feel compelled to test my resolve.  Like a yogi in the forest calmly regarding an approaching tiger.  Except, that comparing those who provoke to approaching tigers is an insult to a great cat.