Rilke To The Rescue

Some days the most exciting thing that happens around here is that a chickadee takes a bath. A bathing chickadee is a cheerful sight. After checking carefully for owls and hawks, he wades into the birdbath and does a kind of shimmy, dipping his head, fluffing his feathers, slapping his wings, and sending up sprays of shiny droplets. 

Other than that, there’s not much going on, so it’s not surprising that many of us are treating this period of seclusion as a time set apart—a pause, a break during which the clock stops ticking. A time in detention, or in suspended animation, or in hibernation. A chunk of life held between parentheses that will melt away when things get better and we go back to normal.

 I remember my two pregnancies, when my entire being was focused on the resolution of that exceptional state, and daily events seemed not to matter as, like an accomplished meditator, I turned my focus over and over to the coming baby. But those two nine-month waits were joyous times, unlike the last nine months, during which I’ve often felt that, like Rosemary, the season was pregnant with the devil.

 Yet every day spent in this waiting is subtracted from the number of days that remain in my one and only passage through this world. I am like the bird that flies out of the darkness of nonbeing into a great lighted hall, and heads straight towards the window that is open to the darkness on the other side. My wings are beating faster; the window into the waiting night is getting closer; and the goings-on inside the hall grow more perilous by the moment. Will everything explode before I’ve gone?

 I’ve been waiting for the explosion since 2016. Surely, I’ve been saying along with millions of others, this cannot go on. It will not last. Things will go back to the imperfect but tolerable way they used to be. So let’s hold our breath and take a nap and think of something else. Something positive. Let us smile though our heart is breaking, because surely the sun will come out again, tomorrow.

 And then the universe, or the Goddess, or the Holy Spirit flung this at me, from Rilke:

 …How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

seasons of us,

our winter-enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.* 

Winter is coming, in more ways than one, and it would be a waste to spend it hankering for spring.  Instead, let us find refuge in our inborn landscape, and feel at home.

 *The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982).

 

Zen Master Dog

He still wags his tail hard enough to knock wine glasses off the coffee table and small children off their feet.  He still gets excited at the prospect of going for a walk, and rushes barking into the woods when I let him out at night.

But he's not the dog he used to be.

He has lost his stamina, that turbo-charged oomph that he seemed to never run out of.  Part of it is age--Wolfie is six now, and for a German Shepherd that is no longer young.  But neither is it old.

A couple of years ago, when he had so much energy that I thought he could win the Iditarod all by himself, on one of our walks in the woods or in the field a tick bit him and gave him anaplasmosis.

Despite tick meds, tick collars and scrupulous owners, most of the Vermont dogs I know have Lyme disease.  But they get a course of antibiotics and, though they may continue to test positive, they get better.  Antibiotics are also used against anaplasmosis, but despite repeated treatments, Wolfie has never fully recovered.

His coat is shiny, and his appetite is excellent.  When his anaplamosis limp shows up, I give him an aspirin or two and he's soon back to normal.  The new normal, that is, of not going after balls for more than a few throws;  of trotting rather than running down the steep driveway;  of walking rather than trotting on the way up.  I used to take him to herding lessons, for which he had a certain talent, but we've had to give those up.  And I wouldn't dream of taking up agility again with him, much though he enjoyed it when he was a puppy.

In many ways he reminds me of myself, bitten by CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) in my prime, back when I was running my own Iditarod equivalents.  I too have healthy-looking hair and an excellent appetite.  But I am not who I used to be, and it's not because of the passing years.

But here is where Wolfie and I are different:  he is not a depressed or a worried dog.  When he's tired, he rests.  When his leg hurts, he takes the aspirin I give him in a dollop of peanut butter and waits for it to get better.  And when it does, he runs in the grass and chases Bisou without wondering how long this relief is going to last, or when the next relapse might hit.
He lives in and for the moment.

Of course he does--he's a dog.  I am not, more's the pity, and since living in the moment is the only possible approach to surviving CFS--because you never know how you are going to feel the next day, or even the next hour--I have to work hard at doing what Wolfie does so naturally.

Right now, as I write, I'm o.k.  My brain does not feel like it's wrapped in cheesecloth;  my arms and legs don't have that floaty, twitchy feeling that heralds a relapse;  my shoulders do not feel that familiar mantle of lead.  Nothing hurts.  But in the back of my mind there's a list of the things I'd like to get done today:  pick blueberries, freeze chard, make pesto, clean the fish bowls, clip the dogs' nails, fold the laundry--small tasks, as you can see--and I'm already weighing and prioritizing and wondering how long my energy will hold out.

While I fret, Wolfie chills, his long body stretched at my feet.  Inside his big head I doubt that there is much more than a pleasant anticipation of dinner, and the hope of a walk.  Otherwise, he is all here, on the floor, in his body, relishing the miracle of a cool dry day.

Me too, Wolfie, me too.

Wattle Fence: The First Day

It was in the low thirties and sunny this morning, balmy for these latitudes, where the sap has been running and the bright blue tap lines festoon the maple trees along the side of the road. Sugaring season is getting an early start.

I thought I would get an early start on my wattle fence. Never having made one before, I spent this first session learning several things:

1. Thick sticks cover more space but break when you try to bend them--or else are too strong for me to bend them.

2. Thin sticks don't cover much space, but they are easy to bend, especially now that they are green.

3. Straight sticks are best. The curved ones don't stay put.

At the end of an hour's wattling, I was exhausted. Mostly this was from trudging back and forth to the stick piles through deep, crusted snow, the kind where you put your foot down, put your weight on it, sink down to your mid-calf; put your other foot down, put your weight on it, and sink down to your knee. Plus, each stick had to be pruned, and the prunings thrown over the fence into the chicken yard. I was also cold, despite the sun, from kneeling on the snow and from the constant wind, this being March, after all.

Before I picked up my pruning tools and went inside I assessed my progress. I had lightly "wattled" about a fourth of a panel of livestock wire fence. By "lightly" I mean that you can easily look through the sticks and say hello to the chickens inside the fence. The entire fence consists of seven panels. In 27 more hours of work I will have a lightly wattled fence, enough, I hope, to distract the eye from the offending wires. I expect that, when the snow melts, the work will go more quickly.

Still, I was amazed at how labor-intensive wattle fences are. As I worked, I kept seeing in my mind a 13th century peasant building just such a fence (minus the wire lining) around his sheepfold. He was probably not a bit bothered by how long it took. This was peanuts compared to building a gothic cathedral.

Once again, as with stone carving, fence wattling is going to take a Zen attitude. Lots of focus on the process. Nary a thought on outcomes. Soon the warming sun, the bolder birdsong, and the smell of earth will make it all a snap.

Zen and the Art of Leash Training

I am training Bisou to walk on a loose leash. This is no fancy trick with no relevance to the dog's well being. If Bisou learns to walk by my side without pulling, it guarantees that she will get to go a lot more places in her lifetime. It also means that she has accepted me as her leader. So it's an important thing to teach her, even though she only weighs 12 pounds and I can easily pick her up and put her wherever I want her.

The modern technique of leash training is as follows: place the puppy by your side and wait until she settles and relaxes her pull on the leash. The instant that happens, take one step forward. If the leash is still loose, take another step, and then another. But if the leash tightens, you must be quick as a hawk, and stop, and wait patiently until the puppy decides not to pull anymore. Then you can take another step.

I have been practicing this with Bisou, and we have not gotten very far--literally. She will sit calmly by my side, but the minute I take a step forward, she charges to the end of the leash (I keep the leash pretty short—three feet or so). I stop, and eventually she does too, and the leash loosens. I lift my foot to take another step, but before I can put the other foot down, she's at the end of the leash, pulling with all her might. So we stop. She settles. I lift one foot...and she's at the end of the leash. We stop again.

This morning, not being in a particular rush, I took her with me to the vet to pick up some flea medication. I let her out of the car, made her settle, took a step, she pulled, I stopped, she settled, I took a step, she pulled, I stopped. It took us about eighteen months to get from the parking lot to the office, and by then my arm was starting to hurt.

We went through the same drill on the way back to the car. Then I drove to the feed store, did my shopping, and took Bisou out for another tortured little stroll. Settle, step, dash, stop. Settle, step, dash, stop. On and on until my arm and my nerves gave out and I put her back in the car. But Bisou didn't give out, not one bit. She was as determined to charge ahead at the end of the walk as she had been on the way to the vet's office.

This is no fun. And, if you're actually trying to get somewhere, it's sheer hell. The only way to survive this process is to not attach to outcomes. So what if you only get three feet down the driveway? What's the hurry? Who says you have to reach a destination? Just be in the present: settle, step, dash, stop.

This reminds me of Zeno's Paradox. You know, where he proved that an arrow can never get from point A to point B because first it has to travel half the distance, and before that, half of that, and half of that again, ad infinitum. So the arrow never leaves the bow.

That's Bisou and me. We never actually make it out the front door. But by golly, she's not pulling on that leash.

October 8, 2008 "Zen Hen"

There is a Zen master living in our chicken house, and her name is Buffy. She is big and butter-colored, and as close to spherical in shape as a chicken ever gets. If Zen masters held competitions I would enter Buffy, for she is a champion sitter—or, in poultry parlance, “setter.” When she feels the call to sit (or set), she makes a beeline for the nearest nest, fluffs out her skirts, and turns to stone.

There don't even have to be any eggs in the nest for Buffy to sit, and if there are, they don't have to be fertile. Before the rooster Charlemagne joined our ten hens, Buffy would regularly “go broody” (a term of art meaning “the urge to incubate”) and sit on her celibate sisters' eggs. The fact that for three years not a single egg hatched did not dissuade her. Buffy is into process, and does not attach to outcomes.

Then Charlemagne arrived, and for a while the temptations of the flesh distracted Buffy from her practice. But one night when I went to collect eggs I found Buffy sitting on a nest like a golden Buddha, broody again.

She was sitting on twelve eggs. I calculated that, with any luck, that should yield six cockerels and six pullets. The pullets would reach puberty in the middle of winter—right when the older hens would be taking a break from laying. The cockerels (this is the part I didn't like to think about) would be slaughtered at ten weeks, and we would have tender, home-grown chicken to eat (this is the part I liked to think about).

Quietly I transferred Buffy and the eggs to a nest in an isolated corner of the coop. She was in such a deep trance she hardly noticed the move. I gave her her own little dishes of food and water and left her alone.

But she, and the chicks growing under her, were constantly on my mind, and I went often to check on her. She was always the same--fluffed out, immobile, her eyes open but wearing a fiercely inward, focused look. I never once saw her get up to eat or drink or take a break.

About halfway through Buffy's retreat, I started smelling something awful coming from her corner. I picked her up and saw that there were six broken eggs in the nest. The stench was unspeakable. I ran to the house and coated my upper lip with Vick's (as I'd seen detectives do on TV when they had to deal with a decomposing corpse), put on plastic gloves, and tried my best to clean up the mess without upsetting Buffy or letting the intact eggs get chilled.

Six eggs, I thought, is not too bad. With any luck three of them will be pullets...But days later there was the smell again, and I repeated the Vick's and gloves operation, thinking that surely this time Buffy would give up and walk away. But she persevered, even though there was just one egg left.

Still, I said to myself, an only-child chick will be adorable, and with any luck it will be a girl...

Day 21, hatching day, came and went. On Day 22 Buffy still sat, focusing on her breath. I picked her up and there on the straw was the broken, chick-less egg. I hustled Buffy off the nest, cleaned up the final mess, and went into the house to nurse my disappointment.

That evening, Buffy was back in the corner where her old nest had been, sitting as if nothing had happened.

It occurred to me that I, who had planned and connived and counted chickens before they hatched, was suffering from disappointment, frustration and self-pity, whereas Buffy was utterly contented and at peace. Why? Because, unlike me, she did not attach to outcomes. Was this chicken is trying to teach me something?

One of these mornings, at my usual meditation time, I'm going to take my mat into the chicken house and sit with Buffy, and be enlightened.