There’s no room here for Honey, so she sits alone on a nearby rock, scanning the riverbed below like the wild animal she is. I keep one eye on little Chico, wandering nearby, sniffing the brush. I must remember to put some kind of deterrent around his neck, so I don’t have this constant background worry that a coyote will eat him. When he strays too far, I put him on a leash.

Day after day, the current of life sucks me in. These are the days of elder care for my parents, squeezed in between animal care, teaching yoga, and all the daily life chores one does to keep one’s ship afloat.

At the end of the day Honey lets me know that she’s had enough of waiting. There’s no escaping her begging and pleading. It’s no use resisting her psychic pull. I can hear her telepathically, saying, “Come on, Suza. The sun is setting. Let’s go!”

Honey’s life force is a thousand times stronger than mine. She’s the ultimate unrelenting personal trainer. She carries the exuberance of youth, and she demands her dose of freedom. Yet every day I resist. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have her. I just want to write, do yoga, clean house, or socialize, uninterrupted. But with rare exceptions, she always wears my resistance down. Thanks to Honey, I abandon everything . . . And that’s why it says in my journal: “There’s nothing you have to do that is so earth shaking that you should miss the last rays of sunlight . . .”

After we wander the riverbed, I bring Honey and Chico back to the house and leave, guilt-free, to check on my parents.

My mom is alone in the front yard without her walker. She’s making her way by hanging on to the front porch railing and then bracing herself against an outdoor chair. I can see that she’s wondering why part of the yard is dug up and why there’s a new stack of bricks near by.

“Where’s your walker?” I ask.

“It walked away,” she says, laughing. And then she orders me to move the rake and other tools because, “someone might trip and fall.”

I escort her up the steps and into the house. As usual, my dad is dozing in his easy chair. He’s not hungry, but he wants to make sure my mom has her dinner. My mom insists she has no appetite either, but I know that if I get her to sit down with me she’ll eat if I’m eating.

I warm up the dinner my youngest sister made earlier in the day. Potatoes, carrots, peas, sauteed onions, all mixed together with a pat of organic butter, the Dutch way. Sure enough, Mom eats a hearty bowl full.

During every visit, and usually while we eat, my mom asks me the same thing as if for the first time. “How much do you weigh?”

“Too much,” I always reply. And each time we find this terribly funny!

Tonight, looking across the room at my dad, she asks, “Who is that man over there?”

“I don’t know,” I joke, “Who do you think it is?”

“Oh, that’s my husband,” she replies, catching this momentary lapse in memory.

While we eat, my mom and I dig deep into our memory banks. I can remember every detail of childhood happiness—mostly centered around food. She likes it when I describe how well I remember the delicious things she fed me in Holland. I would be in my soft flannel nightgown or pajamas, and she would bring my middle sister and me, each a bowl containing a “Holland Rusk,” a unique round, crunchy toast-like biscuit. The Holland Rusk would be submerged in hot milk, to which would be added a pat of butter, melting in the hot milk, and a sprinkling of brown sugar. The hot milk would soften the crisp biscuit so that you could slowly savor the warm buttery sweetness and then slurp it all down.

This was our special Dutch childhood treat, usually served after supper, before we went to bed.

My mom and I find it hilarious to speak only in Dutch, exaggerating all the unique Dutch pronunciations. Tonight I asked her to tell me again the story of when I was born. At first she looked at me, very amused. “Oh, that was so long ago, I can’t remember. How old are you now?” But then somehow it all comes back and she remembers being in labor, making her way down a flight of stairs, catching a taxi, spreading her raincoat on the seat of the taxi so it wouldn’t get it wet, and arriving at the hospital, where she was told to wait to push, to hold me back till they could get her into the delivery room . . . It’s uncanny how she remembers almost everything from long ago.

But she can’t remember things from moment to moment. Yesterday I noticed her partial was missing again. We looked everywhere, and she couldn’t remember what we were looking for, let alone where she’d left her top teeth. I swear we went through every purse, pocket, dresser drawer, medicine cabinet, windowsill, under the bed, in the fridge, trash, cereal boxes. . . Later in the day, after I gave up, my youngest sister told me that she prayed and then found them safe inside a small purse.

After dinner it’s time for a foot bath. This takes place in the kitchen, where it’s easy to fill the plastic tub with warm water. I take off my mom’s shoes, and for the thousandth time tell her she must go barefoot–she must air out her feet and expose them to the sunlight. My barefoot Indonesian dad agrees and echoes my sentiments. While Mom soaks her feet, I wash her shoes.

While I dry her feet, she reminds me for the thousandth time not to waste water. “Pour the water in a bucket, and save it to flush the toilet.” Whenever she goes on about not wasting water, I remember how, as a teenager, if I was in the shower too long she would simply turn the hot water heater dial to “Off” so that a blast of cold water would flush me out of the bathroom. . .

And now I’m back in my writing hut, happy to be in my own sweet home.

I needed $500, a small fortune at the time. As a single mom with a five-year-old son, I did not have that kind of cash lying around. So I placed a small ad in the Ojai Valley News right by my weekly health column (the editor, Fred Volz, allowed this appeal), stating that if someone would lend me $500 for teacher training I would come back to Ojai to teach. Miraculously, a reader of my weekly health column called the paper and delivered a check.

When I got to the Institute for Yoga Teacher Education, (via hitching a ride in the back of a friend’s camper) I asked the director if I could skip Asana I and II and go directly to Asana III because I had been teaching a year or two (out of Richard Hittleman and Lilias Folan books). More important, I could afford to stay only for one semester. She laughed at my naive assumptions and insisted I had to start at the beginning like everyone else.

I thought I was flexible, but my memory of that first Iyengar asana class is that, when it came time for seated forward bends, the teacher had me sit on a stack of books or some primitive hard wood block (professional yoga blocks had not yet been invented), put a strap around my feet, and instructed me to feel if my vertebrae were poking out. It was all overwhelming, classes were three hours long, and when they finally laid us to rest in Savasana, for reasons beyond my understanding silent tears flowed like a river down my cheeks.

By the end of the first semester I knew enough to realize I needed more training and for the next five years I found ways to make trips back and forth to the Bay Area until I had enough credits to graduate from the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco. Those early, basic, step-by-step beginning-yoga classes gave me a strong foundation and planted the seed of yoga deep in my core.

Last night, as I hung upside down to decompress my spine and replenish my energy reserves, I felt so lucky all over again to have this great holistic health resource in my life.

As I sat, a flock of birds flew overhead. They swooped and darted like bats—dozens of dancing black silhouettes etched against the twilight sky. I had to come here and see the sweet yellow mustard once more, for myself, before it all dries up.

It’s Sunday night, it’s June, and here I am with Honey, Nubio, and Chico. After I let them run wild they sit still, close by. I feel their animal consciousness. I watch their heads turn side to side, ears alert. I see their eyes staring . . . whatever it is, I want to see it, too. And all the while the sky grows darker and the clouds, the mist, rolls in.

The river of life has washed me ashore here. Life is not done with me yet, and I’m not done with life. But without my nature refuge the fatigue is overwhelming. I feel ready for the long sleep. I want to be a hermit. I want to hole up and write and clear my head, but I had a wake-up call. The doctor was going to open up my young niece’s crooked spine and fuse her vertebrae. It gave me a jolt and pushed me back into the teaching game. The commercial world is pulling yoga apart. I want to hide till this phase passes, but humans need to know their bodies from the inside out. So I’ll keep teaching, even if insurance doesn’t pay for it.

Now the wind is blowing. The night is falling so sweetly. The dry marsh is full of birds—more and more birds gathering for the night. Their symphony is enchanting. As the ears open you hear them calling back and forth. We are so quiet; as the land grows still, we grow even more still. We are so silent I half expect a coyote or bear to emerge from the marsh, but the very presence of my pack keeps them at bay.

Nature is releasing her secrets. The beauty is so intense it’s a tonic for all the horrors I learned of this week. My heart is still recovering from the story of the little girl who didn’t survive her “wedding night” to the tribal chief. And the harsh truths I just learned about horse racing. Man’s cruelty and perversion knows no bounds.

On this night I stayed till all the daylight was gone. It was like death—a good death. I stayed till the night grew cold, till cold winds blew over the dark landscape and pushed me back to my nice warm nest.

The beauty of the early evening was so intense that it quickly cleared my head. You have to walk and walk in nature, and learn to walk away from it all, or the psyche can’t bear it any more.

So many things in life have become like a strange, long-ago dream. The whole sexual drama ebbs and flows with the cycle of the moon. All my little glimmers of hope—false hope—are so quickly dashed now. It’s a painless, peaceful, mystical time. It might not last, but it’s here now.

I’ve so earned the gift of being alone. Of reveling in solitude. The light of dusk—-the in-between-world vibe—lifts the landscape into the realm of the eternal, the land where time stands still. At this hour, for just a little window of time, every step on the dirt path takes me closer to the lightness of childhood—the Garden of Eden.

There will always be a mischievous teenager living inside of me. But tonight, for just a moment, I had the eerie sensation of being maiden-mother-crone, all at once. I could feel the maiden-mother-crone archetype imprinted on my cells—but also like a ghost walking beside me. The crone, the crowning glory . . . I can feel her within reach.

When the night feels this soft and beautiful, I always have a fantasy of not turning around, not coming back. To just keep walking deeper into the creek bed, into the mountains, to sleep like an animal in the bushes, or in some small shelter . . . When I’m very old, I don’t want to sleep in a nursing home with scheduled meals, a TV blaring endless entertainment, and a wrist band in case I wander off. I hope my legs stay strong so I can walk the land like a witch, like an old gypsy woman, and disappear . . .

Note:

Update, June 12, 2013: The river of life has swept me away —but am aware I haven’t finished this! Will post photos soon!

Update, May 14, 2013: Still working on Part Two. By the time I got home yesterday the heat was so oppressive that I threw in the towel and passed out.

Update, May 25, 2013: The river of life carried me away from my personal writing back to yoga writing, which I’ll post on this blog in the coming days. I also took a four-day focused journal writing workshop at the Krotona Institute in Ojai with playwright and screenwriter Cathrine Ann Jones. The notes for Part Two still sit on my desk,  patiently waiting their turn to be posted, as promised.

There has to be a first time for everything and yesterday was the first time I ever asked a group of people at my Journal Writing for Self-Awareness workshop to actually write. I gave them a few prompts, like “The thing I’m most worried or mad about is . . . ” and assured them that if their hand froze up they could doodle or make a To-Do-List to keep the pen moving.

Much to my amazement and utter delight —thrill of thrills–when I looked around, everyone (about 35 people) was intently looking down at their paper and their pens were moving!

I arrived at the Krishnamurti Retreat around 9:30 a.m., (now renamed The Krishnamurti Educational Center) and unloaded all my books to sell, books to read from, big yoga bolster, mat, blankets, and other props, binder full of notes, my purse, etc., into my old lady shopping cart, so I wouldn’t have to make three trips back-and-forth. Craig Walker, one of the organizers of the event, was sitting nearby under a Pepper Tree, possibly the same tree Krishnamurti meditated under for many years. When Craig spotted me he offered to help schlep everything up the path that led to the Pepper Tree Retreat garden area, where I would be speaking.

I was almost an hour early, just as I had planned, because I wanted to absorb the peaceful atmosphere and get the lay of the land. When I saw that Craig had in mind that I would be speaking at a spot under the canopy with some bushes right behind me, I asked if we could reconfigure the chairs so participants would face out to the lawn area, to the open space, where they could better see the sky, mountains, and tall pine trees. And where I could freely move around and demonstrate the poses I often practice before gluing myself to the chair.

After arranging my books and notes on the table, I got out my yoga props. The lawn was still wet so I spread out a blanket instead of my mat. Then I laid down on my bolster with the soles of my feet together in the Goddess Pose, and closed my eyes. I noticed my heart was beating fast–maybe from the exertion of pulling a cart loaded with forty books slightly uphill, plus the anticipation of doing something new and maybe a bit of anxiety of speaking to an unknown audience. And, to be honest, it was no small feat to extricate myself out of the river bottom, feed and water Honey, Chico, and the cats, clean the kitty litter, shower, get dressed (my friend Sholom says he’s starting to freak out because I always wear the same thing) load up the borrowed car, run back into the house for a banana, and say good bye to Honey all over again . . . etc.

So, lying on my old familiar bolster, I smoothed out my breathing and felt my heart slow down. When I opened my eyes I looked straight up at the branches of the trees and the sky. It just happened that for these few moments all the people were elsewhere on the premises and pretty soon I noticed a bird coming closer and closer to the bolster. Relaxing on the bolster brought me in touch with the sweetness of my surroundings. I stopped worrying about the workshop and by the time people started to sit down around the tables under the canopy I was enjoying a heart opening supported backbend on the yoga chair I’d thrown into the backseat at the last minute

At the end of the workshop I promised participants that I’d describe how the workshop unfolded, the material we covered, including a list of the writing books I read from, which I’ll do later today.

But I will add this:

To set the tone for the workshop, I opened my talk on journal writing with this quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti, from The Book of Life: Daily Meditations

Igniting the Flame of Self-Awareness

“If you find it difficult to be aware, then experiment with writing down every thought and feeling that arises throughout the day; write down your reactions of jealousy, envy, vanity, sensuality, the intentions behind your words, and so on.

Spend some time before breakfast in writing them down, which may necessitate going to bed earlier and putting aside some social affair.

If you write these things down whenever you can, and in the evening before sleeping look over all that you have written during the day, study and examine it without judgment, without condemnation, you will begin to discover the hidden causes of your thoughts and feelings, desires and words.

Now, the important thing in this is to study with free intelligence what you have written down, and in studying it you will become aware of your own state.

In the flame of self-awareness, of self-knowledge, the causes of conflict are discovered and consumed.

You should continue to write down your thoughts and feelings, intentions and reactions, not once or twice, but for a considerable number of days until you are able to be aware of them instantly.

Meditation is not only constant self-awareness, but constant abandonment of the self. Out of right thinking there is meditation, from which there comes the tranquility of wisdom; and in that serenity the highest is realized.

Writing down what one thinks and feels, one’s desires and reactions, brings about an inward awareness, the cooperation of the unconscious with the conscious, and this in turn leads to integration and understanding.”

– J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Books quoted at the workshop and recommended reading:

The Book of Life: Daily Meditations by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal   by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg

If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland

Zen In the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury (Mine is an older edition. The subtitle has been changed in recent years.)

Writing Yoga: A Guide to Keeping a Practice Journal by Bruce Black

Fishing on Facebook: A Writing Yoga Memoir by Suza Francina

The Way of Story: The Craft and Soul of Writing, by Catherine Ann Jones

Note: This is a listing of books I brought to this workshop–not a complete list of all the writing books I recommend!

Photo credit: Carolyn Studer

(I demonstrated some of the heart-opening restorative poses I often practice before writing)

I’ll be reading some short passages from Krishnamurti’s journals (as well as my own) at my Journal Writing for Self-Awareness workshop this Saturday morning, May 11, from 10:30 till 12:15. This is a free event, part of the May Gathering at the Krishnamurti Pepper Tree Retreat, on McAndrew Road in Ojai.

I attended Krishnamurti’s talks at the Oak Grove, and also heard him in Saanen, Switzerland, one summer. Over the years I became friends with many of the people who came to Ojai to hear Krishnamurti, including Beatrice Wood, Alan and Helen Hooker of Ranch House fame, and Frank and Bennie Noyes, who started Live Oak School on Orange Road. There, while living in a tiny trailer on the edge of an orange orchard, I tutored, cleaned, cooked, and cared for my toddler son. Back then I had endless energy, and almost everything was great fun.

Alan Hooker used to walk into the kitchen, roll up his sleeves, and make multiple loaves of oat and prune bread. He would also show us hippie chicks how to grind and chop nuts, celery, carrots, onions, and mushrooms for nut burgers or nut loaf.

While I’ve been journaling for more than 40 years (50 if you count my high school and Haight-Ashbury diaries), I’m new at teaching journal writing to people who might feel inhibited when faced with a blank page. I’ll see if I can nudge them into putting their innermost random thoughts and observations on paper. I’m filled with a kind of joyful trepidation, along with curiosity about who will show up.

The nature descriptions in Krishnamurti’s journal, below, are so simple, timeless, and moving. The book consists of observations made between February 25, 1983, and March 30, 1984, toward the end of his life. We here in Ojai can walk the “little village” as well as the East End, Horn Canyon, and all the trails he took high up in the mountains, and see all the places that he described with such depth and sensitivity.

I remember now how many early evenings I would be in my garden on Thacher Road, picking zucchini squash or digging trenches for chicken wire in an endless battle to keep gophers at bay. Krishnamurti would walk by, and the neighbor’s little dog would come running out onto the street, yapping at his heels and threatening his companions. The dog would often follow them a little way down Thacher, and Krishnamurti would turn around, bend over, and, arms waving toward our driveway, tell the little nuisance dog, “Shoo . . . shoo . . . shoo. . .”

This gave me a bit more time to observe Krishnamurti, and sometimes I’d have to run to the street and scoop the dog up. Back then, at age twenty, I was still painfully shy, and never took the opportunity to say a friendly hello.

Today, Krishnamurti’s journals serve to remind me how journal writing not only makes us ever more aware of our automatic thought processes and responses, but strengthens our powers of observation and awareness of ourselves, other people, nature, and all the rest of life:

As you climbed, leaving the little village paths down below, the noise of the earth, the crickets, the quails, and other birds began their morning song, their chant, their rich worship, of the day. And as the sun rose you were part of that light and had left behind everything that thought had put together. You completely forgot yourself. The psyche was empty of its struggles and its pains. And as you walked, climbed, there was no sense of separateness, no sense of being even a human being . . .

From Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal

Krishnamurti’s last journal, spoken into a tape recorder at his home, Pine Cottage, in the Ojai Valley, brings the reader close to this renowned spiritual teacher. Dictated in the mornings, from his bed, undisturbed, Krishnamurti’s observations are captured here in all their immediacy and candor,…

Last Friday I walked into my bank. Way on the other side of the room I immediately spotted “Liz,” the character in my book who blew the whistle on “Adam.” If it hadn’t been for her revelation, who knows how much longer the charade would have played on.

I hadn’t seen Liz in more than two years, and for a second my mind went into a spin. She walked over to where I was filling out my deposit slip and we gave each other a hug.

“I see you got your book published,” she said, laughing.

“Yes, I did!” I replied. “Did you read it?”

“Yes, I did!” she said, with a knowing smile all over her face.

We just looked at each other and laughed as we each remembered the synchronicity of Adam arriving just as she was leaving my Sunday-morning yoga class, and the look on her face when she recognized him.

“I’ve lost all respect for him,” she confided as the teller credited my deposit. We laughed and chatted some more as Honey and Chico ate the biscuits the teller gave them.

“The good thing about writing that book,” I said, “was that I learned how to write dialogue. That book got me going on turning my journals into memoirs.”

Bumping into Liz at the bank made my day. I walked out of there feeling like a wealthy woman.

Health—including mental health—is wealth!

Fishing on Facebook: A Writing Yoga Memoir

A few years ago, after the publication of one of my annual columns questioning the ethics of sending 4-H animals to slaughter without showing the child who raised the animal the truth of what happens to their pig, lamb, or cow, (see video below) I received the following hand-written letter from a man who witnessed what I wish every meat-eating person could see.

In solidarity with today’s protest, am posting his letter here:

Dear Suza,

I have been reading your articles about 4-H kids. I understand why they should not send their animals to the slaughterhouse.
What I am about to tell you here are events that actually transpired, as accurate as my memory can recall. I could never in my life think up anything like this.

Several years ago I was living on a five-hundred acre ranch right in the middle of the Wind River Indian Reservation, a hundred miles east of the Grand Teton Park in Western Wyoming. I was trading my husbandry talents and the feeding and care of fifty horses and mules, plus summer time irrigating of all the pastures, in exchange for a nice ranch house and the use of any of the stock I wanted to ride. For me and my many dogs and cats, it was ideal.

The Wind River Mountains were in my backyard and the Wind River itself wound in and out of the property several times. I could swim and play any day I wanted to without anyone telling me what to do or where to go. I guess in retrospect, I should have never given up the place, but when I found out several of the horses were earmarked for slaughter and sales to the French meat market, I quit the very day I found out.

One summer afternoon, I saw activity at the small house across the dirt road that ran in front of my place. Curious, I walked across the pasture in front of my house and across the dirt road to see what was up. I lived down there all by myself and if neighbors were moving in, I wanted to meet them and find out what kind of people they were.

Standing in front of the old house and leaning up against the bent and rusted fender of an old Ford pickup was a red headed man smoking a cigarette and whistling along to a Waylon Jennings song. As I approached, he yelled out to his wife to bring up two beers. He introduced himself to me as “Red” Hollis and he handed me one of the beers. He said his wife’s name was “Twila” and he told me they were going to spend the summer in the house. Red was going to do odd jobs around the smaller ranch up the road and Twila was going to work as a bar waitress in the small bar half way between where we lived and the small mountain town of Dubois.

Red told me that they had moved out from Illinois where he worked in a slaughterhouse. He told me all he did was hogs. No cattle, no sheep, no chickens and no turkeys. Just hogs!

This revelation made me a little nervous as I don’t feel that comfortable around anyone in this line of business and, actually, I do not know anyone in the slaughter industry. I usually keep my personal feelings about eating mammal flesh to myself unless I’m pressed to defend my choice of what I eat and how I feel about the slaughter of these incredible animals.
But I was going to spend the summer living across the road from these folks and so I just made casual conversation with Red and Twila. (Great names, huh?)

Anyway, Red went on to explain what he did in the slaughterhouse. It seemed to me that he was quite happy with his odd career and he had absolutely no reservations about talking about it. He told me he was a “Knifer” in the hog section of a huge slaughter operation. The hogs were weighted and graded out in these enormous holding pens and then they were forced, single file, to shuffle into the openings in the sides of the five story cement building. He said the squealing was so deafening that it could be heard five miles away.

As soon as the hogs got into the building, there were several men standing on the right side of the ramp with huge chains ending in sliding looped cables. As soon as each hog passed by, the men would reach down and pick up the right rear leg and slip the sliding cable over the leg and secure it. As soon as the cable was tight, the chain was mechanically pulled up and the hog was hoisted, up side down, into the air. This is where the squealing began to heighten. The terrified animals were actually screaming for their lives.

The next closed off room is where Red performed his macabre duties. As soon as the terrified hog entered the room, Red would reach up and slit its throat with his knife. He told me that he was pretty sure that he managed to successfully kill at least seventy five percent of all the hogs that came into his room. He also told me that by the end of his eight hour shift, the room was so filled with blood that it literally came up to his arm pits and that is why he wore rubberized fly fishing waders. He said that the killing of hogs went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year.

Double time for holidays!

He then told me that the hogs, always on the move above him, went from his room into the next room where they were dipped into huge vats of boiling water to remove any dirt, bugs and all the hair. If any of the hogs he had knifed were still alive, the boiling water ended their lives immediately. He also said that several times a day, several of the “Knifers” would yell out “live one coming in” when a still living hog came through the entrance to the boiling vats and everyone would laugh and yell when its squeals were hushed forever by the boiling cauldrons.

I asked him how he could live with himself after what he had done in the slaughterhouse. With an enormous smile on his face, he told me that he enjoyed, immensely, the fact that he held the life of so many animals in his hands and that he slept real good after a long day in the “Knifing Room” and a pork roast in his belly.

We talked for several minutes longer and then I made up some lame excuse that I had to get back to my feeding of the horses. When I got home, I hugged all my dogs and cats and began to cry.

I cried and cried and cried!!!

The 4-H and Future Farmers of America pretend to teach real values to young children in hopes of thoroughly brainwashing them into believing that the raising of farm animals for profit and slaughter is a sound, moral thing to do. These children raise each and every cow and pig and lamb and goat with tender loving care and talk to them in soothing voices telling them all along that everything will be all right. But sadly enough, the day after the fair auction is over, each of these cuddled animals are going to go off and meet the thousands of Red Hollis’s waiting in the dark of some slaughterhouse with sharpened knives in hand and murder in their hearts!

How many children would happily raise a pig, or lamb or goat after they got to spend a full eight-hour shift with Red Hollis in his house of horrors? I’m telling you, there would be no more 4-H or FFA except for those children who maim and torture animals anyway!

What kind of a message are these parents and organizations sending to our children? Are they telling them that it is perfectly okay to raise an animal in a loving environment and then willingly send them off to the horror of the kind of death that Red Hollis would give them? I said it to you on the phone and I will say it here: If these children are going to raise these animals, then by the Gods they had better go to the slaughterhouse and see exactly what happens to their sweet little furry friend the day after they relinquish their ownership of them. Otherwise, everything the 4-H or FFA teaches them about life on the farm will be in vain!

I hope this letter is not too disturbing to you Suza, but I feel if you are to make a serious stand against this most barbaric act, then you should have some real ammunition against it. This is first hand information taken from the very mouth of one Red Hollis, “Knifer” from Illinois and believe me, he knows!

What have we done to our children and what are we teaching them about how to love and respect the creatures we share this tiny planet with? Each and every time an animals is slaughtered, the Creator does hear its screams!!!
There was once serious spiritual connotations concerning the killing of an animal for food and leather, but today any spiritual connection to the slaughtered animal has been completely replaced by profit and greed. Most people today have absolutely no idea of the immense suffering that our animal friends are put through just for that “Big Mac” or that “Whopper” and the immense profits the sale of these items bring in. Hell, most people never even say grace before they sit down to eat anything!!!

Thank you again, Suza Francina, for your stand against this most disgusting act and the people and the organizations that perpetuate its continuation. Namely the 4-H clubs and the Future Farmers of America.

Stephen King, in his best writing style, could never, ever come up with as horrifying a tale as Red Hollis told me that day down by the Wind River. I still have nightmares about it.

Keep up the good fight!
Sincerely,
Dennis

* * *

The first step to “enlightenment” is to stop living in denial and see the era we live in with our eyes wide open, both the profound beauty and goodness in the world, and the immense, unspeakable horror.

Video of modern slaughterhouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvWt8gwa5zo&feature=share&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DHvWt8gwa5zo%26feature%3Dshare&has_verified=1