in a pig’s eye

Find something you love, a service you can do that you really love. It’ll change your life in ways you cannot imagine.

I went up to the Green Chimneys’ farm on Friday, like I usually do, but yesterday when I woke up, my heart wasn’t in it. I went anyway, I’d made a commitment and I knew what would happen once I was there. GC is a residential school for kids with emotional and behavioral problems, it’s also a farm and wildlife sanctuary. The kids help the animals & the animals help the kids. It’s been working just fine for 63 years, before people even started talking about the human-animal bond.

Yesterday was Copper’s first Birthday. He’s grown up on the Green Chimney’s farm since he was a little bitty piglet and one day in the not to distant future he will be a big, a very big pig. But for now he’s cuddly and happy to sit on command if it means food, which it usually does. We brought him inside so he could have a party with balloons & cards & gifts of blueberries, carrots, apples, oranges and grapes and lots & lots of visitors of all ages. Happy Birthday was sung more than once.

It was that perfect fall day, sunny, dry & cool and the trees just starting to turn. The guinea fowl were riled up and tribbling like crazy. Every time I turned around I’d run right into them chasing each other down a path here or there. The cows, Quarter & Sylvester were a bit bothered by the sheep we’d moved to makeshift pasture beside to them.  Dottie, our giant pig, was none to happy to have the sheep next to her either. The sheep, however were delightfully confused at new spot with all this fresh green grass to devour and paid no notice to the dissatisfaction of their neighbors.

If I was to even begin to describe the perfection of the sun, the grandeur of the vultures, the silliness of the guinea hens, the tenderness of the senior sheep (I love Phoebe, she has the face of an angel), the giddiness of the baby goats, the absolute joy of the children who came in & out all day to share their day and their fruit with Copper, if I was even to begin to describe it, we’d be here all night, or I’d be writing a book, which is not a bad idea to be considered later.

At the end of the day, when everyone was fed, watered, groomed, barn floor blown clean and the doors pulled shut we sat and the Farm Director joined us in the quiet. He’d gotten a call from a former student, a boy who’d left in 1997. The boy was writing about healing & the human animal bond & the work Green Chimney’s does for his application to medical school (Medical school people! These are kids that struggled with plain old public schools.). He didn’t remember the staff, but he remembered a young sheep who he’d worked with. “Hazel’s probably dead by now,” he said. “She’s not, she’s old, but she’s still here”, he was told, and the boy started to cry on the phone. I cried just hearing the story.

My barn manager told us she’d heard from another boy’s mom. D had just left Green Chimneys after being a resident for a long, long time. He’d worked in the barn on a regular basis. This semester he went back to a regular school. D’s mom called to say he’d came home from that first week of school with a list of phone numbers from new friends, was getting ready to go to his first dance, was acting like a regular high school kid. That was not the boy that showed up a few years ago. She’d called to say thank you, she was crying when she said it. I, of course, cried just listening to the story.

It’s an amazing place I get to work, it’s a privilege to be there every week. Yesterday I started the day not wanting to get out of bed, wanting to pull the covers over my head and throw a pity party for myself for no good reason. Instead, I went to a pig’s birthday party and had my heart wrenched open to the perfection of every moment of the day.

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does Anything weird,
But the God who knows only 4 words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come Dance with Me , come dance.” – Hafiz

Find something you love, a service you can do that you really love. Then go, go dance with God.