In my professional practice I do not send out the printed Season’s Greeting cards. I think they are hideous and cold. Do the people who send them really think the client thinks they are being remembered? I was an anthropologist. A major subject in the study of cultures is the Rite of Passage. Some people think that occurs only upon reaching your culture’s maturity. Ask a Tibetan Buddhist if death isn’t a Rite of Passage. I note Births and Deaths with a personal note. Especially the passing of a beloved pet. For many years I have included the quote below with those cards. I still cannot read it out loud to someone without getting choked up.
The Outermost House is a book by naturalist writer Henry Beston. It chronicles a season spent living on the dunes of Cape Cod. Beston’s “Fo’castle,” the 20×16 beach cottage which served as the setting for the book The Outermost House, was built in June 1925, and claimed by the sea in February 1978. Beston (born Henry Beston Sheahan in 1888; died 1968) named the cottage “the Fo’castle” because its ten windows and its commanding presence on top of a dune overlooking the open Atlantic Ocean gave him the feeling of being aboard a ship. Over time, the structure also came to be known as “The Outermost House.”
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
from The Outermost House by Henry Beston; Holt, 1928
