My Gentle Barn (14 page)

Scott lowered the footrest on the recliner and sat forward. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. This is where I’m going to put my foot down.” And he literally put his foot, or rather both feet, down on the floor and stood up. “You are not getting a cow.”

All through my childhood I’d been told I could not save animals. Those I did bring home were sent back out into the cold to die. One obstacle after another had been thrown in my path as I’d tried to help the only beings in my world who cared about me. But I wasn’t a little girl anymore, and I was no longer willing to forsake the animals who needed my help.

“Here’s the problem,” I said, and I put my feet down too and stood up. “I
am
getting a cow.”

“It’s the cow or me,” Scott said, and there was a finality to it that I’d never heard in his voice before.

The cow arrived the following week.

The Gentle Barn’s new resident was a year old and—not yet full-grown—was about hip-high. She was a miniature Hereford, with a red-and-white coat and a broad face. Having been raised as livestock, she had never been given a name. But as the man had said on the phone, she was as docile as a dog. And she took to the barnyard as easily as if she had lived there her whole young life. I sat down on a bench in the barnyard that first day and watched her grazing the alfalfa and thought,
What do I call you?
As soon as I’d had that thought, the little cow moseyed clear across the barnyard toward me, as though she’d heard me thinking.

Peaches
, I thought, looking at her.
You look like a Peaches. It would be perfect for your coloring
. At that moment the cow stopped, very close to me, and stared right at me with her big brown eyes, and I heard something inside my head.

“Buddha.”

Ever since childhood I’d heard lots of little whispers from the animal world, but they had never been in actual words. It was just a knowing deep inside me. So I had no reason to think the word “Buddha” had come from anywhere but my own head. And yet, it was not the type of name I would ever come up with. Why on earth would I call a cow Buddha—especially a girl cow?
That’s ridiculous
, I told myself.
That’s not a name for a cow
.

I let my mind wander over other possible names—
Daisy, Betty—
back to
Peaches
. And again I heard
“Buddha”
inside my head. I tried to dismiss it and return to my naming endeavor, but the name Buddha kept forcing its way back into my thoughts. This went on for quite some time; I was arguing with myself over what to call this cow. And
all the while the cow stood right smack in front of me, staring me down, until finally I stared right back at her big cow eyes and said, “Is that
you
telling me that?”

She just kept staring at me, a foot from my face, chewing the alfalfa she’d been grazing.

“Well, if it is,” I said, “that is the dumbest cow name I have ever heard. I am not calling you Buddha.”

Now I was arguing with a cow.

“Look at you,” I said. “You’re so pretty. You look like a
Peaches
. You’re red; it’s a perfect name.
Peaches
.”

But once again, with even more force, I heard,
“Buddha!”

Half of me still doubting that it really was the cow I was arguing with, rather than my own thoughts, and the whole thing finally just wore me down.

“Fine!” I said to her. “I’ll call you Buddha!” At which point she licked her lips and walked away.

Buddha settled right in, getting along with everyone in the barnyard, and all the animals accepted her right back. I’d never seen an animal need no adjustment period whatsoever. And it didn’t take long before I had the chance to witness just how wise the little cow was. On that first Sunday following Buddha’s arrival I got to see how she did when she was surrounded by large groups of people. Each time I adopted an animal, I never knew until the first Sunday after their arrival how they would be with crowds. Some animals who were perfectly fine with me or with a small group would withdraw or retreat behind the barn when there were too many people around.

Buddha not only didn’t withdraw, Buddha did something I’d never seen any of our animals do. She held perfectly still. Within ten minutes of opening our doors, all the kids had gravitated to our new little cow. A sea of children surrounded Buddha, and she lay down right in the
middle of them and let them pet and brush and hug her, and the entire time Buddha didn’t move a muscle. Not one twitch until the children had finished and walked away.

I sat back and watched in awe. This was no ordinary cow. Clearly Buddha was going to be a big celebrity at the Gentle Barn, a true ambassador for the animals, modeling just how intelligent and sensitive farm animals were.

That first Sunday evening after Buddha’s visitor-day debut, I went into the barn, where Buddha was lying down. I kneeled beside her and put my arms around her neck. “You were awesome,” I said. “Thank you so much.” She swung her head around, which made her neck into a
U
shape, and that
U
perfectly embraced my back. I’d never felt anything quite like it. Encircled by her neck, I was captured in a cow hug, and her warmth seeped deep into my body. But there was something else, too, some energy that felt both foreign and as familiar as my own breath. In that moment I felt so at peace, so totally accepted by this animal. It reminded me a lot of being covered in butterflies.

As I left the barn that night, I knew I would be getting one of those hugs every day for the rest of this cow’s life. I also knew I had to introduce this hug to others; I was not going to keep all that goodness to myself. I would start with the people who needed it most—my at-risk kids. Many of those kids had never experienced a hug of any kind. Everything in their environment was harsh. They’d learned to survive that environment by never letting their guard down. To be vulnerable for them was to risk abuse or even death. And yet the irony was that the healing they so desperately needed was not ever going to happen within the tough, guarded behavior that had helped them survive. The healing could only happen in the opposite, in vulnerability. There was no way to hug this cow—really hug her—without being vulnerable. Hugging Buddha was soft and warm and slow and still—the antithesis of any touch they’d ever received.

“That’s not a real hug,” I said playfully when the very first boy attempted
to embrace Buddha. He’d barely touched her with his hands, his arms floating a foot above her fur, his face nowhere near her neck. “Like this,” I said, and I laid my face down on Buddha’s neck, closed my eyes, and inhaled her sweet, warm scent.

He tried again, but still it was more of a
hover
than a hug. The other boys did a little better, but not by much. I wasn’t going to give up, though. From that point forward, every group of kids was going to start off their visit by hugging Buddha. It would be my one rule at the Gentle Barn from then on. It was in this hug—I was sure of it—that they would begin to shed their survival armor and start to heal.

My next group of at-risk girls did better. One of the girls lingered for a long while with her face nuzzled into Buddha’s soft fur, and Buddha swung her head around and encircled the girl in her cow hug. I saw the glint of tears in the girl’s eyes afterward, and I knew she got it. I made sure to tell her before she left that day how proud I was of her. If these kids could start there, by accepting love from a cow, maybe they then could accept love from other human beings, and just maybe one day learn to love themselves.

Most of my sessions with the kids left me elated and overflowing with joy, as though I’d just fallen in love. Unfortunately, this was not an energy reflected in my own home. When I’d stood my ground about getting the cow, I had hoped Scott’s ultimatum was a bluff. But the day after Buddha arrived, Scott moved out of our bedroom and into the guest room. He was only staying under the same roof, he said, because he wanted to be there for our son. We both tried to put on a happy front for Jesse, who—still so young—didn’t seem to be bothered by his parents’ new sleeping arrangements.

A full month had passed and Scott and I were still in separate bedrooms, and there was an awkwardness and heaviness to our minimal interactions. Some days I blamed him, feeling frustrated with what felt to me like a silent temper tantrum, and I wanted him to just get over
it and come back to me already. Just as Scott hadn’t believed I would ever really start the Gentle Barn, I hadn’t believed he would ever really stay away. But I was also beginning to get fleeting glimpses into what I had done to contribute to our separation. I knew I could be headstrong and single-minded in my pursuit of righting a wrong. I often didn’t get how others could miss the injustice of a situation, or why they wouldn’t want to help change it. I expected others to see the world the way I saw it, and I guess I thought Scott would come around when he saw that what I was doing was right and necessary.

But Scott didn’t seem to be coming around. And it was too late to change the course of what was unfolding in the barnyard. I simply turned my gaze away from the disaster of my personal life, as one would when passing an accident on the freeway, and I buried myself in my work with the animals and the at-risk kids. This was what I was destined to do, and if that scared men off, then so be it. I knew how to make my own way. I’d done it most of my life. So I tucked away my loneliness and my feelings of rejection and failure and pressed forward with the Gentle Barn. What I couldn’t see at the time was that this very behavior—this air of self-sufficiency—was pushing Scott further and further out of my life.

As I failed at love in my home, I learned daily about love from the animals. The interspecies family that was growing in the barnyard was like a net that caught me as I fell through the holes torn in my marriage. These animals loved me as much as I loved them, and they cared for and supported one another, as well. I saw one story after another unfold in my own backyard, stories that told of a love so much bigger than the box we usually try to put it in.

Many stories reached across the species divide, such as the one about Katie the horse and the baby black goat, Zoe. Katie whinnied for an hour one morning, starting at six a.m. I ignored her, thinking she
was asking for food a good hour earlier than her usual breakfast time, but when I finally got out to the barnyard, I was surprised to find Katie nowhere near her hay bin. Instead she was standing next to the pigs’ mud hole, and in the mud hole was Zoe. The tiny goat was up to her chest in muddy water and every time she attempted to step up and out of the mud hole, she slid back down into the brown water. Katie, the once-irascible horse, had been calling for help for a baby goat.

There was also Olaf the rooster, who insisted on sleeping atop our huge pig, Duncan, every night (despite my urging otherwise for his own safety). And there was Daisy the hen, who chased after me when I took her eggs (I wanted to rescue lives, not create new ones). She so desperately wanted to be a mother, she hid one of her eggs until it hatched, bringing her son Owl into the world as a new member of our barnyard. When I first glimpsed the little chick, Daisy held her head high, and looked at me dead-on.
“Ha!”
I could just imagine the triumphant hen saying.