Kent Nerburn

Those of you who have read this blog for awhile know that we lost our dog, Sadie, when she made an unfortunate decision to attack a truck — a decision that came out distinctly in the truck’s favor. It was a sad moment. The death of an animal always is. But, as with all deaths, the pain slowly subsides as life goes forward.

Recently, we got another dog — another “pound hound” — who looks much like a less portly version of her predecessor, though she has a very different personality. Sadie was in love with people and food; Lucie, our new dog, is much more thoughtful and reserved, deals with strangers cautiously but affably, and is more interested in the chase than the food bowl. I’ve taken to running her along side the car on country roads while she runs for miles with a wide dog grin on her face. Give her a chance to run and she becomes the embodiment of joy.

Since she and I are home alone together all day, we have become fast friends. She sleeps beside me while I write, wheezing and blubbering in her dog dreams. She follows me wherever I go, looks to me for approval, comes to me when she wants to go out, goes scuttling off to her dog bed when I chastise her for some real or perceived transgression. She is, as dogs often are, my physical and emotional shadow.

I am fond of saying that when people talk to God, they are really talking to a reflection of their own conscience. When we talk to our dogs, we are very often talking to a projection of our own emotional needs. Lucie fits the bill admirably, and she offers me a mirror of what is best and least guarded in me. I’ll sing to her, create ridiculous names for her, make a fool of myself around her in a way I would never do around people. And, if earnest attention constitutes approval, she gives every indication of holding me in high regard no matter how absurd or irrational my actions may be. In her presence I feel no embarrassment, and in her eyes I can do no wrong.

In exchange, she asks only that I treat her with fairness and kindness. She does not like harsh words or angry attitudes. I sense some physical abuse in her background: quick movements or raised hands frighten her and make her cower.

As I write this, she is out running the neighborhood. Given that we live in the country, this is not as bad as if we were city dwellers. And it is only 6 in the morning. But still, there are neighbors to upset, cars to dodge, and trouble to find. She may return covered in offal or mud. Or we may get a call saying she has consumed a chicken or knocked over a garbage can or otherwise violated the legitimate sense of order that others in the neighborhood have established.

I know there is a selfishness in this dog raising approach of mine. But it is a selfishness in regard to the accepted social order, not in relation to the dog herself. As with my own children, I want her to explore, make her own mistakes, find an honest relationship to the people and places around her, and live a life that is fulfilled and fulfilling. I do not want her to live her life on a chain.

This is the risk we take — with our animals and our children. Do we train them on a short leash, and hope they do not get stunted? Or do we let them move freely and hope they find an internal discipline? In either case, the goal is the same: a happy, healthy, well-adjusted being with a sense of responsibility to the world around it.

By and large, Lucie is doing well. I only have to hope that she returns before sun up, and that she has neither been hit by a car nor excavated a neighbor’s garbage can.

Perhaps I should have kept her in. She would be safer and I would be less nervous and concerned. She could have been warm and comfortable, lying by the side of my bed, blubbering in her sleep. But she would have been dreaming of running free.

Some days the world is large; some days the world is small. It all depends on where you place your vision.

This is one of the most challenging aspects of human interaction and relationships.

If you are one who finds meaning in focusing on the small and everyday, you very often seem naive and limited to those who watch the larger movements of the world around them. If you are one who focuses on the large picture, the shape of the world, the big issues, you often seem distant and cold to those who feel the immediate warmth of the small pleasures that shape the everyday.

We all have a little bit of both in us, and move from one to the other as circumstances permit.

The key, it seems to me, is to acknowledge the reality of both ways to see the world, and to recognize that both points of view contribute to the good of the planet, and that each offers a viable way to live one’s life.

When I look at the small and the human, and I’m feeling of good heart, life is much warmer and more full of love. Yet, when I look at the large sweep of issues and ideas, though I am filled with more righteous anger, I feel more responsible for my fellow human beings. Maybe that’s the distinction: in the first case, I feel more responsible TO my fellow human beings; in the second, I feel more responsible FOR them.

Fine distinctions, all. But the truth may well lie in the words of Chuang Tzu: “It is the wise person who sees near and far as the same, and does not despise the small or value the great.” A thought worth pondering as we wander off into the mystery and magic of another day.

It is so sad. We need leadership, leadership, leadership in this country, especially now in the sunset days of our current confused and misdirected despot. But the Democrats are failing once again. Or, at least, so it would seem so early on in their moment in the congressional sun.

For years the Republicans have realized that the way to deal with the fragmented, all-inclusive Democrats, so prone to infighting and multiple agendas, is to set a hard position on something singular, then lure the Democrats into an argument about it. Right now it is Iraq. “We’re going to add troops — make a Big Surge.”

Do the Democrats redirect the issue, or at least link it to something real? Do they say, “Surge against global warming instead,” or “Surge against an unworkable health care system” or “Surge against Katrina’s devastation”? Of course not. Instead, they argue the size of the surge, the legitimacy of the surge, the concept of the surge itself.

How hard is it to unify yourselves and say, “A billion dollars for jobs to rebuild Iraq? How much are we committing to jobs for folks to rebuild New Orleans?” How hard is it to stand up and say, “We’ll deal with Iraq, Mr. President. And we’re listening to what you have to say. But we have bigger issues as a country than just a war that you invented, a country you destroyed, and a region that you destabilized. We have a nation to run.”?

But this has been the Democrat’s Achilles heel for years: no willingness to establish a Big Picture agenda that informs and shapes the smaller component elements. The most classic recent example is the prescription drug debacle. We need health care reform in the worst way. But the Republicans redirected the issue to the small scale issue of prescription drug reform, got the Democrats into an argument over it, and created a debacle that neither your frightened grandmother or your confused pharmacist can understand, much less survive.

No one stood up and said, “This is not about prescription drug reform. It is about health care reform. And I’m not going to let you forget it.”

Instead, the Democrats let the Republicans sell fear once again — fear of big government, fear of elephantine bureaucracy, fear of something. And the Democrats bit.

Now it is this hellish, invented war in Iraq. Tragic and frightening though it is, it is also a perfect metaphor for the Republican modus operandi: drop a bomb somewhere, and watch the Democrats come running.

I hope I’m wrong. And I’m certainly premature in my judgment. But the earmarks of the Same Old Game are everywhere. And what are the Democrats doing? Jockeying for position for the next presidential nomination. The media goes crazy — personalities, that’s what we want. So, it’s Barack versus Hilary, Biden versus Edwards. The WWF of politics; American Idol for political wonks.

Meanwhile, the world heats up, New Orleans moulders, our elders live in fear of losing what little they have, and none of us dares to get sick or move from a job or a place where we have health care.

It’s the Surge, baby. And jockeying for post position in the Democratic horse race.

This is not the way to run a country.

This winter is very disconcerting to me. The very essence of living in northern Minnesota is what we who endure it call, with only half-jest, the “death spike” of early January, when the temperature routinely goes to -30 and seldom gets above 0 for weeks at a time. Cars break down, heating systems implode or explode, travelers die, the ice on the lakes thunders and groans as the frigid temperatures cause it to shift and contract.

Horrible though it is in many regards, something indelible is imprinted on the psyche when you step outside into the ghostly silence of thirty below and stare up into a midnight sky filled with stars as white and lifeless as crystals of ice. The crunch of a boot on snow becomes as loud as a rifle shot, and everything seems at once impossibly close and hopelessly distant. We are transported to an unknown place, and all bear common witness to an undeniable and inescapable truth.

Not so, this year.

I go outside in my tee shirt. I look at ground only thinly covered with snow. My car starts easily, I drive to a town where shoppers’ minds are on the next purchase rather than on the great, looming cold and the shapeless winter. We, as a community, bear witness to nothing in common other than the strangeness of the weather we are experiencing.

And this story is being repeated everywhere.

Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, I’m afraid we do know what it is. And I’m afraid it is happening so quickly that we may not be able to stop it. For reasons that elude me, there continue to be people out there who are more angry at those who call attention to this change than at the causes of the change itself. I hear right wing talk shows with their legion of angry white males screaming about left wing conspiracies and natural temperature variations and doomsayers. I see people who are so myopic as to celebrate the warm winter because it allows them to play golf all year around.

Meanwhile, the branches on the trees that frame our dirt road are beginning to bud. Birds that should not be here are hopping and pecking at the earth. Their internal clocks are confused, and they will die when a cold snap hits.

Last summer, the water in our lake went down to unheard of levels. With little snow and little ice, it will be even lower this year. There were almost no mosquitoes, meaning there was little food for the creatures that depend upon them for sustenance. All up and down the chain of life there are small shocks that will too soon reach critical mass.

I am deeply and profoundly bothered by all of this. This is our world, this is what we are passing on to our children. I am neither the first nor the last to say it, but some great national, even international, will must be discovered to redirect our thinking and galvanize our energies.

This is not about politics. This is about our responsibility to the seventh generation.

It is strange and unnerving to be facing a day when I will walk outside in shirtsleeves, fearful of seeing a green shoot poking through the ground.

Technorati : angry white males, climate change, global warming, right wing, talk shows, weather

I received an interesting email today. It was from a young man named Hayden who lives in Oregon. He is in the fifth grade and is doing a presentation on Chief Joseph. He wanted to know if I had any photos or stories or other materials I could give him.

Such requests are a challenge, because you cannot fulfill them all, but you do not want to turn away good hearted people who see something of value in making contact with you. And when the person reaching out to you is a fifth grader, you have a chance to touch his life in a significant way.

I still have a short note sent to me by Norman Mailer back in the early seventies when I wrote him from Stanford asking if I could come and work with him. It seems so breathtakingly naive now; what I would have done with him, I don’t know. But I was a young man in turmoil, and for reasons I cannot remember, he was the person to whom I reached out in hopes of some escape from a life that seemed to be strangling something inside of me.

His note was brief. But I still remember his last line. “Write more than you have been writing.” I’m sure it was just a way to finish the response. But to me, so desperate for meaning and direction, it became something of a creative beacon: if Norman Mailer said I should be writing more than I had been writing, then I should be writing more than I had been writing.

And I did. His words became the rudder in the choppy seas of my confused twenty-something life.

I never forgot him.

It is a humbling experience to have a young person reach out to you for advice or assistance, whatever your role or status in life. It means they are open to your wisdom and your counsel. In that brief encounter, you can shape a life.

We all get these opportunities, though not frequently. When they do come, they often do so in a clumsy or inarticulate fashion, because the young person who is reaching out has invested so much in the reaching that he or she does not do it with grace. Fumbling words, inappropriate requests, too constant a presence, a transparent attempt to seem worldly or knowledgeable — these are only a few of the ways this hopeful reaching for help and insight can express itself.

We need to see past these clumsy efforts when a young person reaches out to us for assistance. We need to stop what we’re doing, open our hearts and ears, and hear what a hungry heart is asking of us.

Young Hayden has in no fashion been clumsy and inappropriate. In fact, he has been mature beyond his years. But it would be easy for me to pass him by in the rush of my own life if I don’t acknowledge that this, like my reaching out to Norman Mailer, is a gesture of hope and respect, and a request for direction.

I hope I can do something of value for young Hayden. I will do my best.

This is my moment, and the memory of Norman Mailer’s kind response echoes in my heart.

Technorati : Chief Joseph, Norman Mailer, letter