Saving Simon (24 page)

This was a wonderful new dimension to our lives with them. They heard us get up in the morning, and Simon would bray whenever he heard me walking around the house. This was unnerving at times, but I got used to it. Without thinking, I would call out, “Hello, Simon,” and I would see him peering in the window by my office, or sometimes outside of the bathroom when I got up in the middle of the night.

He is a sweet soul, Simon, as loyal to me as he is to his ladies.

One night, I wrote him a poem and read it to him:

I see more clearly now that Simon is a magical helper, a spirit guide sent to guide me on my hero journey, to help me on my way. He is a teacher who appeared in the form of a donkey. So many animals teach us important lessons if we let them.

And what did he teach me?

To open up, not just to him, not just to animals, but to the human experience. To love, to risk, to friendship. He helped me come so much closer to an understanding of mercy and compassion, something I had been pursuing my whole life.

We are in so many ways a vengeful culture; we are quick to punish wrongdoers and slow to empathize. Simon helped me to see that the farmer was just as piteous as he was, just as damaged.
He helped me to open my life up to Red. He brought me closer to Maria, who shared the powerful experience of healing him. He helped me to see that compassion for animals does not mean only keeping them alive but sometimes means letting them go.

He reminded me that mercy and compassion are not only for good people, but also for people who horrify us, upset us, and challenge our notions of humanity. He softened me and my sense of judgment, of righteousness.

Saving a creature is a powerful experience, as so many people who love and support animals know. But the act is most powerful for me when I remember that it is about the animal and not about me. Simon did not ask to be saved, nor does he even understand what that concept means. I do not believe he was grateful to me—he would hardly have driven Rocky into the fence posts if he were—nor does he have any reason to be. By opening myself up to him, I saved myself, taught myself, and challenged myself to think about my life and my world.

Simon’s story is not rare; it is all too common. The history of the donkey is rich in cruelty, abandonment, abuse, and neglect. Donkeys are nearly disposable in so many countries, sacrificed to overwork, heat, the lack of food and fresh water. There is something long-suffering about them. Even as I write this, I know that thousands of donkeys have been abandoned in the United States because farmers and others can’t afford to care for them. The unusual thing about Simon’s story is that he is alive, not that he was mistreated. His great suffering seems so long ago. He is so grounded in his life and at ease here, the king of our little hill.

Simon and I talk once or twice a week now, and we are old soul mates together. He knows what I will do before I do it—he holds his head up to receive the halter when I present it—and I
know what he will do before he does it. I pause by the leafy maple trees on our walks so he can eat some leaves.

Red joins us on all of our walks. The two are now as comfortable with each other now as Red was with Rocky. And so the circle of my little triad has closed again in its own way.

I tell Simon of my triumphs and disappointments, and we observe the world together. How ironic, I told him on one recent walk, that I—a boy who grew up reading about strange men walking around with donkeys—should have become one of them.

Simon was not impressed. He was transfixed by a giant white butterfly who rose out of the maple tree and circled around and around over his head.

TWENTY
 

They came from so
many different places to see Simon, more than two thousand of them, from California and Canada, Mexico and Maine, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Colorado. They came in their big cars, trucks, and minivans, in their work boots and fancy shoes.

They lined up by the hundreds outside of the big barn to come inside and touch Simon, hug him, give him carrots and cookies, and pepper me with questions about him. For two days I never left the barn. I would ferry one group in to see him and another would form at the gate. Simon, I told him, you are a rock star.

It was humbling to see the wonder, adoration, and affection in their faces, to see the elderly women pushed into the barn in wheelchairs, young and wide-eyed children from New York City and Toronto and Chicago step nervously toward Simon only to discover that he loved every single one of them, loved being touched, hugged, handed cookies and carrots.

His gentleness, especially with children, was poignant. He
never grabbed at an apple or carrot, never frightened anyone, never nipped a hand or backed away from being touched or rubbed.

He was the sweetest thing. He was the biggest ham.

For almost all of my eight years there, I had refused visitors at Bedlam Farm. A therapist told me the farm had become a fort, a place to seal off the world. I did not permit visits. I did not welcome the steady stream of cars driving up and down the road, pausing to stare in at the farmhouse, to ooh and aah at the dogs and take photos.

I fully subscribed to the writerly notion of isolation and withdrawal. You wrote your book in peace, came down off of your mountain to do some readings and sign some books, and then you returned. No, I said, this isn’t an amusement park. It’s a workspace, a private home; we do not permit visitors. It upsets the people, and it upsets the animals. I thought it was rude to be stared at, invaded.

Our first open house had changed all that, and Simon had been the inspiration for it. This was where the opening up that had begun a year earlier in the very barn where Simon was now greeting his adoring fans had led, widening and deepening and altering my life.

Thanks to the photographs and stories on the blog, Simon had a powerful new story. He was alive and well and thriving. He had walked back from the edge of death and was living life happily and fully. He had me, Maria, Lulu and Fanny, pastures to roam, and people all over the world who loved him.

Six months after we moved, we held another open house at our new farm. Maria organized an art show in her studio, as she had done at the first farm. Simon had long lines of people once more, many of them repeat visitors. He was happy holding court, but the surprise was that I was just as happy. I love showing
him off, telling his story and that of all of the donkeys in the world.

With Rocky gone, Simon’s reign was complete and unchallenged, his journey a triumph of determination, courage, and the power of love to heal. The creature who had run a blind pony into a fence would stand quietly over children as they kissed him, smacked his nose, and pulled his hair. Compassion takes many forms and shapes, some of them unrecognizable.

Simon’s days are filled with ritual and opportunity. He has a pole barn to keep him and his girls, Lulu and Fanny, out of the sun, rain, and snow. He has three pastures filled with the brush, apple trees, streams, and ravines that donkeys love to wander in and explore. We visit him several times a day. Maria brushes him and sings to him in the morning. I bring him equine cookies, apples, carrots, bread, and pasta, which he loves. Every morning, Lulu or Fanny—sometimes both—kick him in one side of the head or the other; it doesn’t seem to bother him. He has gotten over his difficulties with Ken Norman, and submits to having his hooves trimmed.

Simon’s twisted legs are the only remaining sign of his many injuries. I think cold weather is hard on his legs, and I sometimes see him lie down in reluctant resignation, something healthy donkeys rarely do.

Although he is best known and well known for his mistreatment, there is no sign that he recollects it in any way, or carries any behavioral scars. There is no type of human—man, woman, old, young—that he fears or shies away from. I can only assume his mistreatment was episodic, not chronic; he has no wariness or mistrust of people.

I will never forget the long lines of people who traveled from all across the country to see Simon. They helped me understand
the power of animals to touch our hearts and change our lives.

Saint Thomas Aquinas got it right, I think, and my experience with Simon taught me that compassion is not an easy or a pretty thing—not in animals, not in people.

Simon did not save me, I saved him, but he did teach me what compassion is all about. How hard compassion is, and how easy it is to withhold it from people I don’t like, or who do cruel or offensive things. The true pilgrim, the real seeker of compassion, learns to cross such bridges; each one is different and leads us to a different place.

Simon touches the deepest parts of me; it is such a joy to give him the life he deserves. He lovingly accepts the person I am. He challenges me to become the person I want to be.

EPILOGUE
 

In the spring of
2013, I began studying Tai Chi, the Chinese practice of movement and meditation. One day when I was feeling particularly unsettled, I walked through the pasture, into the barn, stood still and began my movements there.

Simon, attuned to me as always, came over and stood quietly by my side. As I moved my arms in a circle and looked up at the sky, I felt a gentle pressure in my back. Simon had pressed his head against my spine, and for the next ten minutes, I leaned back against him, practicing my movements, feeling his support and connection.

It was a profoundly spiritual moment, an experience that showed me just how close an animal can be to a human he knows and feels safe around. I felt that Simon completely understood what I was doing in my practice, and helped me to achieve the calm and peacefulness I was seeking. Perhaps it helped him as well.

The news of the world is filled with cruelty and violence; we are forced to confront it all day, almost every day. Troubling stories are no longer compartmentalized in the morning paper or on the evening
news. They permeate our lives, our homes, our work spaces, the very air we breathe. They are no longer occasional disturbances, but now part of the ether.

It is difficult to feel compassion for the people we see and read and hear about doing the most awful things. Our civic life is filled with strife and argument rather than comfort and guidance.

Every day, we are called upon to forgive and understand behavior that is sometimes beyond our comprehension and challenges our ideas about compassion.

Jesus, Thomas Merton, Albert Schweitzer, and the Dalai Lama can say what they want about compassion; most people do not accept their messages, do not believe we are all one and the same. Most of our institutions are not built on empathy. Compassion is tricky, dangerous, volatile. It is easy to talk about it, but another thing to practice it. Simon had taught me that. But he also taught me not to give up on it.

The Lincolns, Gandhis, Martin Luther Kings, and Nelson Mandelas of the world are much admired, but if you look at their mostly common fates—we tend to either kill or exile them—their practice of compassion was perceived to be dangerous. Why would any normal human being choose that fate?

Donkeys have always represented the best and worst of the human experience, loved, celebrated in great art, revered, reviled, abandoned, and mistreated. They have always walked with human beings in the theater of chance, as Simon was walking with me.