Saving Simon (15 page)

When I looked at the news, I saw little compassion mirrored back at me. In fact, whenever I looked at news from Washington, I saw none. Our world is not very compassionate. I wonder sometimes if anyone apart from the Dalai Lama can be deeply and consistently compassionate. And even he often says, in his speeches and memoirs, that he is not nearly as patient or compassionate as he would like to be.

Is compassion some ephemeral and unachievable goal for people, or is it really possible?

Many of our leaders do not seem able to put themselves in another’s shoes; instead they relentlessly attack and demonize the people standing in front of them. Religion often seems riddled with conflict and judgment to me—at least until Pope Francis appeared and seemed to touch a deep global need for compassion and empathy.

If the people leading the world didn’t feel much compassion, what hope was there for me? Okay, I saved a donkey, but that will not necessarily alter the nature of the world. Or will it?

Standing in the pasture, waiting for Simon to bray to me and come down to get his morning apple, maybe get some balm rubbed on his wounds, I think I understood that compassion was a powerful and important goal, like spirituality: perhaps a path that never ended, a journey that was never over.

Humans have a need for compassion, but they also have a lot of anger, envy, frustration, and resentment, all the enemies of compassion.

I liked Merton’s call to awareness. For me the process
had begun. I was aware of compassion, of its ubiquity and interdependence. A donkey in trouble had begun the process for me, and I had absolutely no idea how far I would go with it, or even should.

Merton’s idea—the interdependence of all things—was something I found in Saint Francis, Einstein, and in almost all of the great writings about compassion. “In the first step toward a compassionate heart,” wrote the Dalai Lama, “we must develop our empathy or closeness to others.… The closer we are to a person, the more unbearable we find that person’s suffering.” It is not, says the Dalai Lama, a question of physical proximity; it is a feeling of responsibility.

We are not alone. We are all connected. Me, Simon, the farmer, the state police, all of the donkeys and people of the world, we are one thing. I love this idea. It is powerful and stirring, yet it is not what I feel inside of my head, not what I see in the outside world, not what is on the news, in all those arguments and press conferences out of Washington, in all those pious and often angry declarations I hear from people who call themselves religious.

I wonder how Saint Thomas Aquinas might have dealt with one of the dominant ideas of our time, the Facebook idea, the notion of interconnectedness, of one family, of interdependence taken to an almost unimaginable level—a billion people connected to each other. Is a connected medium the same as a compassionate one? I don’t think so.

Soon after Simon came to the farm, I was invited to do a Q & A with an animal rescue site on Facebook. The page had two hundred thousand likes and it was teeming with photos, videos, and commentary about animal rescue, and almost all of it was enraged, furious. It seemed to me to be a hive of angry bees.

Although a number of people thanked me for saving Simon, most of the comments on the page offered horror stories of animals abused, mistreated, neglected, or abandoned, and there was nothing but rage and contempt for the human beings of the world presumably responsible for all of this cruelty.

I asked myself a question: Can you love an animal and hate people and be compassionate?

If we are all one, part of the same interconnected system, why do we feel so much for the animal who is mistreated but so little for the human beings who mistreat them?

Looking at Simon, I could not help but wonder about his farmer. I was shocked at the concern I felt for him. I had intuitively done just what the Dalai Lama was suggesting. I recognized the gravity of his misery, the suffering that must have occurred for him to lose his humanity in this way.

Perhaps I was able to do this because I had a farm. I am a writer, not a farmer, but I have many friends who are farmers, and I have seen up close the grinding brutality of their lives, the constant struggle, the filth, disease, mechanical and money issues, the wrestling with bureaucracies and regulations, all the things that make their lives such a challenge.

For several years, I have photographed farmers in their struggles, and so I possessed the physical and emotional closeness the Dalai Lama is talking about when it comes to compassion.

I could almost feel Simon’s farmer’s struggle to survive, day after day, year after year, to the point that his exhaustion and frustration might have simply drained his soul of energy and reason.

I shared these thoughts on the rescue website, and the response was fast, furious, and merciless. The farmer was an
animal, a monster; he should be jailed, punished, tortured, even killed. No one offered a single line of compassion or understanding or concern for him, or for his son, who had bravely helped Simon when he was starving.

The hatred and fury were shocking to me, disturbing; this idea of rescue was not compassionate for me. I withdrew from it; it wasn’t where Simon’s experience was taking me. Something inside of me has always rebelled at the idea that loving animals justifies hating people.

With Simon, I had taken a big step toward a compassionate heart. I saw, in my mind, felt in my heart, this idea of interdependence, this sense of my experience with Simon being connected to the wider world.

As we treat one creature, we treat all creatures. As we free ourselves of judgment, we learn what compassion is and how to feel it.

Our task, wrote Einstein, is to liberate ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

I loved this idea. This was where I wanted to go, where Simon was meant to lead me. Perhaps this is why he had come, and why I had accepted him so eagerly into my life and embraced his healing so passionately. Perhaps this is why he opened me up.

But it was also humbling for me. My spirit was not remotely ready to stretch to so vast and all-encompassing an embrace. It would require as much change as anything I had ever attempted in my life.

I am not the Dalai Lama, not Merton, and surely no Einstein. The voice in my head was small and soft: “What’s the big deal? He’s just a donkey.”

It is fashionable to quote brilliant people and ignore
what they say. Reading Merton’s call to compassion, I wondered if Simon and I were too small to quite grasp it, let alone live it.

Pressed by the details of ordinary life—work, money, family, friends, health—my consciousness is rarely large enough to encounter the entire universe of beings. I am touched by the call to recognize that we are all one, but I am hard-pressed to keep such a huge concept in the forefront of my brain as I go about my life, which is filled with small things. And I was discouraged by the hard reality of what I saw in the exterior world, the one beyond Simon and me.

THIRTEEN
 

If Simon began teaching
me the meaning of compassion, Rocky, a small blind pony, was to be one of my biggest and most challenging lessons.

In the winter of 2010, the blizzards came week after week, dumping so much snow in parts of the Northeast that the plows had no place to put it. All of the farmers I knew were worried about their barns, and for good reason.

Most barns are old, built by friends and neighbors long ago, with thin rafters and slate or shingle roofs. Many of these barns were made from cedar planks, because the farmers had a tool called an adze that split cedar trees easily. Typically, barn roofs are slanted so that the snow will slide off onto the ground, but this winter, the heavy snow was wet and, thanks to climate change, the temperatures varied wildly. It snowed, then warmed up a bit, then froze. Then more snow came and piled on. You could see it driving by: huge amounts of snow piled up on barn roofs, no easy or safe way to get it off.

It was the worst possible combination for the barn roofs in
my area. You could almost hear the barns and rooftops groaning under all of the weight.

It was a rough winter on my farm, and we checked the barns almost every day. Our slate roofs held, although when the snow did slide off, it was so heavy it was dangerous to be near when it fell, and many of the slate tiles came with it.

Several times a week, I drove down Route 22 in Washington County to go shopping, visit friends, get to the hardware store.

I love old barns and have taken thousands of photos of them. When I walk into a barn, the farmers usually nod and wave to me, and when I ask permission to take a photo, they all say, “Sure, help yourself.” No farmer has ever asked me what I am doing with the photos or even why I am taking them.

So it was wrenching when the barns started falling. By February and early March, it was impossible to go more than a few miles without seeing a big old beautiful barn toppled over.

And these, we all knew, were not temporary losses. Nobody built big cedar barns any longer. The wood was too expensive, insurance was too high, and many of them were on properties that were no longer farms but second homes or country residences. When farmers needed new barns, they used aluminum or other metal structures or even plastic tarpaulins.

I drove by a beautiful old farmhouse on Route 22 and saw that one of its two barns had collapsed. Most of these old barns were filled with junk. If the farmers were lucky, scrappers came by to take the metal inside in exchange for hauling off the wood. Some carpenters love using old barn wood for their restoration projects and will sometimes pay for a collapsed barn’s demolition.

But most of the barns just began rotting where they fell, and most of them are there still, ghosts from another world.

I must have driven by that old white farmhouse a hundred times without ever really looking at it. In the spring of 2011, after Simon had been with us for a few months, I was driving northbound on Route 22 and I looked over at the fallen barn—it framed the old farmhouse in an evocative way, making a statement about what I perceived to be the abandonment of rural life by the country’s political and economic system.

It was surprising to me, but when I looked this time, I was startled to see Simon standing in front of the barn, head down, grazing on the new grass coming up.

I couldn’t imagine what he might be doing there, how he got there, or how a donkey that looked so much like him could be in that pasture and I never saw or noticed him before.

I wondered if I was tired or woozy. I pulled over to the side of the road and then pulled into the driveway in front of the old farmhouse. It was curious. There were no cars, no signs of life. When I got out of my car, I saw that the donkey was not a donkey, but a pony, an old Appaloosa pony. I remember that moment so clearly. It was compassion I felt looking out at that scene, the same compassion I felt for Simon. This feeling was to alter my life.

There was something both poignant and powerful about the image; the horse must have been there all winter, and for many winters before that, and yet I had never noticed him. Why did I see him now? And why would I see Simon standing there, when the pony looked nothing like Simon? The pony’s long coat was a yellowish white. I could see even from that distance—about one hundred yards—that he was covered in burrs, and his fur was matted. Perhaps this was his barn that had fallen? I wondered if he had any other shelter. A second barn was standing to the left of the pony, weathered but intact.

Simon had sensitized me to the plight of animals on farms.
No one had noticed him, either, lying nearly dead in his pen, and if someone hadn’t finally called the police, he would not be alive.

Looking more closely, I saw that the pony was very old, and that he appeared well fed. I called out to him, “Hey, pony,” and he looked back and forth, as if he could not quite locate me.

I went to the front door and knocked. I saw lights on inside and thought I heard a radio playing. I knocked a few times and waited about five minutes. I wanted to take a photo of that old pony standing in front of his collapsed barn. It was a metaphor for rural life, I thought. It was an emotional image, and timeless, and it touched my heart. But I wanted to ask permission. Even when it appeared that nobody was home, I never went on anybody’s property without asking permission. I had never been denied it, but I still wanted to ask.