Tag: destructive

Undigestible Waste

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest. 
~Charles Moore

I beg to differ.
I’m here to say on Earth Day: humans aren’t the only guilty parties.

Over the decades, we have bought various styles of buckets and tubs to water our horses. Thanks to a destructive horse or two, we have a water bucket graveyard on our farm. Buckets, tubs, barrels, you name it – if it once had water in it, it is no longer functional and therefore is not only merely dead, it is really most sincerely dead.

We discovered early on that Haflingers do have a variety of creative techniques for letting me know it is feeding time. Over the years, we’ve had the gamut: the noisy neigher, the mane tosser, the foot stomper, the stall door striker, the play with your lips in the water and splash everything, and most irritating of all, the teeth raked across the woven wire front of the stall.

A few Haflingers do wait patiently for their turn, without fussing or furor, sometimes nickering a low “huhuhuhuhuh” of greeting. That is truly blissful in comparison.

We raised one filly whose chosen method of bringing attention to herself was to bump her belly up against her hanging rubber water buckets, making them bounce wildly about, spraying water everywhere, drenching her, and her stall in the process. She loved it. It was sport for her to see if she could tip the buckets to the point of emptying them and then knock them off their hooks so she could boot them around the stall, destroying a few in the process. Nothing made her happier.

Our current bucket destroyer is intent on making the kill rather than making noise for attention. I estimate he has gone through over a hundred buckets in 17 years. Nature does not digest this residue of his misbehavior.

Now when I buy a new bucket, I’m reminded:

I need to quit stomping and knocking doors in my impatience, as well as quit hollering when a quiet greeting is far more welcome and appropriate. I need to quit soaking everyone else with my splashing drama – after all, it yields me nothing more than empty broken buckets. Eventually, when I destroy every bucket in the place, I will get very thirsty and wish I hadn’t been so foolish and brash.

So if my horses are potentially trainable to have better manners, so am I. In fact, over the years, my horses have been busy teaching me a thing or two.

Now I need to find a recycle use for dead buckets.

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To Revel in Rays of Light

barnstormingblog2 Comments

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter.
I feel no obligation to deal with politics.
I do feel a responsibility to society.
A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy;
true, not false; lively, not dull;
accurate, not full of error.
He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world;
he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge.
Much writing today strikes me
as deprecating, destructive, and angry.
There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger.
But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion,
their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad:
one role of the writer today is to sound the alarm.
The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late,
and not much is being done.
Instead of carting rocks from the moon,
we should be carting the feces out of Lake Erie.
…I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer
if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle,
to accept the warming rays of the sun,
and to report them, whenever,
and if ever, they happen to strike me.
~E.B. White 1969 (on writing)

It becomes tiresome always feeling angry
about what it is happening in the world,
feeling that everything, even a virus,
has been made political.
I’m done with reading and writing nothing but words of frustration,
but will rail against the meanness that surrounds us,
and push back the bully
to seek out a balance of perspective and insight.

When I need to feel something other than mad,
I’ll walk as far as I can go,
look up, revel in the gift of rays of light
and bask in their warmth and promise.

I will accept what the sun has to offer
and tell about it
so that my anger drains away
like so much waste flushed down a pipe,
never to be seen again.