I was walking Simon down toward the path one afternoon when a minivan pulled past and slowed. A woman rolled her window down and looked at Simon, and asked me “Is that a mule?” No, I said, mules are hybrids between horses and donkeys; this is a donkey.
“What does it do?” she asked. I was uncharacteristically at a loss. Simon gawked at her, hoping, as he often does with strangers, for a carrot or an apple, or even a scratch on his nose. His ears went straight up at her high-pitched voice, his eyes wide.
It goes on walks with me, I said. Disappointed and puzzled, she rolled up her window and drove off. “You are a ghost,” I said to Simon, “a myth, you don’t really exist for most people in America.”
What does it do? I kept wondering what a good answer might have been. A good question, it requires a thoughtful answer. A few years earlier, I might well have asked it myself.
We kept on walking, the donkey and the wanderer, two of the oldest clichés in the world. This is what he does, I thought. This is what donkeys have always done.
I can’t blame people for not knowing much about donkeys. Why would they? It is a commentary on our time that few people have ever seen a donkey walking around, as they do in so much of the world and have for so many thousands of years. We don’t love our history; we are too busy coping with now.
Simon’s ancient ancestor is the African wild ass, Equus africanus asinus; the “Equus” signaling that donkeys belong to the horse family. Domesticated in Egypt or Mesopotamia circa 3,000 B.C., they’ve been working animals ever since. A male donkey is called a jack; a female is a jenny, and today there are more than forty million donkeys worldwide.
In their book Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus, authors Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison point out that artists have long viewed donkeys as “spiritual companions in an ethereal realm of life and death; the donkey equals man in the theater of chance and is equally a part of that divine force in the universe.” The idea of this equality, this partnership, speaks to the very particular place donkeys have held in our imagination. “The theater of chance” is an apt term for the donkey’s dramatic, arduous, and adventurous journeys with men. The theater of chance is nothing more or less than life itself, erratic and unpredictable, filled with love, hope, opportunity, disaster, illness, war, and uncertainty. Every day, we enter the theater. Every day we learn what is in store for us.
There are many representations of donkeys in our collective cultural history, but few set the tone more than the legend of Jesus Christ and his small and ungainly donkey. How much of the story is true? Jesus was known to ride a donkey on his travels through the Holy Land, but as for the rest, I have no way of knowing. I do know that this legend changed the lives of donkeys for all time.
The story of Jesus and his donkey is perhaps the first recorded rescue of an animal by a human. Thousands of years old, passed down largely by word of mouth, the story has shaped some of our deepest feelings about the care of animals, and created a template for the bond between animals and humans that still exists today.
A poor farmer outside of the city of Jerusalem owned a sickly donkey too weak and small to do much work at all. Few farmers could afford to keep animals that do not work for them or earn money. Over time, he grew increasingly angry at his donkey, telling his family he couldn’t afford to feed such a worthless creature, as the donkey could do him no good at all and was not worth the feed it took to keep him alive. He was thinking of killing him, he announced.
His children, who dearly loved the little donkey, begged their father to keep the donkey alive. But the farmer held his ground. “It’s wrong,” he told his children, “to sell an animal that can’t do a good day’s work.”
The farmer’s oldest daughter came up with a suggestion. “Father,” she said, “let’s tie the donkey to a tree on the road to town, and say that whoever wants him can take him for nothing.” The farmer agreed. The next morning, he walked the little donkey out to the road in front of their home and tied him to a tree. He could not, he said, imagine anyone wanting to take such a worthless animal, even for free.
Many people passed the little donkey and walked away. It seemed as if no one wanted him. Then two young men appeared. They looked at the donkey and, without hesitation, asked if they could have him. The farmer, an honest man, told them the truth: “He can carry almost nothing,” he warned.
“Jesus of Nazareth has need of it,” replied one of the men. The farmer had heard of Jesus, the great teacher, and he could not imagine what need of the donkey he might have, but with relief, he turned the animal over to the two men.
They took the donkey to Jesus, who stroked the grateful animal’s face and then mounted it and rode away. So it was that on the day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus led his followers into the city of Jerusalem riding on the back of a small, quite ordinary little donkey.
The donkey loved his master and devoted himself to him, carrying him everywhere, following him everywhere he went, even to Calvary.
When Jesus was nailed to the cross, the legend goes, the donkey repeatedly tried to approach him, as if to carry him away to safety. At the sight of his master crying out in agony, the donkey brayed and rushed toward him, but was brutally beaten back by soldiers and by people in the cheering crowd.
The donkey was poked and prodded by spears and swords and pelted with stones and rocks. Grief-stricken at the sight of Jesus on the cross, the donkey tried again and again to come closer, but was driven back each time.
The donkey turned away and hid in a nearby alley but would not leave. It was then, says the legend, that the shadow of the cross fell upon the shoulders and back of the donkey, and there it stayed for all time, imprinted on the backs of donkeys to this day.
It is this story that seems to have first cast the donkey as the spiritual and long-suffering companion of human beings.
Today, donkeys continue to labor, often thanklessly, on behalf of humans. They come in all shapes and sizes, and several different colors. They live in deserts, on mountaintops, in villages and on farms. While the classic image of the donkey in Renaissance paintings is sacred and powerful, the modern image of the donkey is less lofty. When we see images of donkeys at all, they are generally hauling freight around some overcrowded village.
The relatively few donkeys that live in America are either working as guard animals, protecting sheep and alpacas, or living as pets of “gentlemen farmers,” often keeping high-strung horses company.
Donkeys have a great reputation for stubbornness, but it seems to me this trait is misunderstood. Donkeys may owe their survival to their willfulness; they are believed to have a stronger prey drive than horses and a weaker connection with man. It is difficult, if not impossible, to force or frighten a donkey into doing something it perceives to be dangerous for whatever reason.
Some of this resistance can be eased or even eradicated by trust. Once a donkey gets to know and trust a human, it will often go along with reasonable requests. They are curious and eager to learn, but they seem to have seen enough of humans to be cautious around them. This is something many struggling species have not figured out, and it has probably saved many donkey lives.
I’m drawn to the Tao of the donkey, their inner and dominating spirit. There is something mystical about them. They are loyal, affectionate, intuitive, hardy, patient, stubborn. They are also unique among domesticated animals in that they work and live closely with humans, and become powerfully attached to them, but they never turn themselves completely over to us. There is a part of them that is beyond us, that they won’t surrender, a kind of dignity and independent spirit that most domestic pets have lost in order to survive.
There is no other animal I can think of that has been awarded such a spiritual aura by human beings. Donkeys are not just tied to Christianity; the donkey is also frequently portrayed as a loyal, wise, and enduring animal in the history of Judaism, in both the Old Testament and in the Kabbalah, the journals of the Hebrew mystics.
In the Kabbalah, donkeys are the wisest of living things; they often appear carrying prophets and mystics who challenged bewildered rabbis about the teachings of God. Often, the donkeys are overworked or mistreated and neglected by their masters, but they are important symbols of faith, suffering, wisdom, and commerce. Whenever they appear, ideas are exchanged; wise men and prophets are on the move. Donkeys are often used as stand-ins for the poor and unfortunate in the Kabbalah, and God and his prophets and angels are always exhorting people to treat them well.
Artists as diverse as Shakespeare, Chagall, and Orwell have all been drawn to the symbolism of the donkey and featured the animal in their work. Donkeys have been portrayed in famous paintings carrying Hannibal, Napoléon, and Queen Victoria on their backs. A donkey is the subject of the only novel in Latin that has survived complete from the era of the Roman empire. Asinus Aureus by Lucius Apuleius (born A.D. 124) features a protagonist who becomes a donkey and experiences the hardships and simple faith of that animal.
One of the most original literary works ever conceived, The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is also a great work of donkey literature. Published in the early seventeenth century, Don Quixote features animals who take political or moral positions; their actions speak to their nobility, weaknesses, and strengths. Like humans, they are imperfect creatures filled with contradictions.
In Cervantes’s work, animals are not background characters; they are significant protagonists. Two of the book’s four central characters are equines: Don Quixote’s old horse, Rocinante, and Sancho Panza’s beloved donkey, Dapple.
Without Rocinante and Dapple, Don Quixote is hardly a book at all. In the globe-trotting satiric commentary, the two equine companions are mirrors of the men who ride them into every imaginable predicament and misadventure. From battling giants who assume the form of windmills, being beaten by liberated prisoners, and falling for one Dulcinea after another, to wandering through wild and inhospitable mountain ranges, Rocinante and Dapple get them through.
Dapple’s donkey diaries are one of the most inventive creations in literature—a chronicle not only of Spain in the seventeenth century but also of human beings who reveal themselves to be the sum total of many lunacies, great dreams, lost loves, and weeping hearts. Dapple endures, loves, rises and falls, lives and dies with every twist of the human’s fortunes. It is the donkey who defines the man who rides him.
This then, is the theater of chance: man turning himself over to the loyal animal, trusting him through unimaginable challenges, confiding in him as a trusted soul mate.
When Sancho Panza thinks he had lost Dapple, he falls apart, giving way to endless doleful lamentations. He knows he had been diminished and does not believe he can make the journey alone.
I relate to this deeply—the story of Sancho Panza and Dapple. I believe that Simon came to define at least a part of me, and to reflect other parts. We were bouncing off each other, and still do, each touching a part of the other.
And that is one of the most powerful things about donkeys for me. You can communicate with them, even without words. They understand many things. Simon knows precisely when to approach me for a cookie, or when to press his forehead against my chest to offer me comfort. Through him I saw that I was closed and needed to open up. Through him, I found a powerful way for a man to understand nurture, something I previously thought came more naturally to women.
Through Simon, I discovered the power of healing and of selflessness, and I came to acknowledge the extraordinarily pure and powerful way in which a man can love an animal. This ancient idea of humans and animals journeying together through life is real. I experienced it, and I feel it still when I go to the pasture and Simon comes over to greet me. I rub his soft nose and tell him the story of my day. We are bound together.
I watched for the woman in the minivan, the woman on the road. I suspected she might come back. When she did, I would flag her down and answer her question “What does it do?” Simon, I would tell her, teaches me the meaning of compassion. That is what he does.