Lenore and Frieda have taken to sharing the same dog bed, something that would cost most dogs dearly. Lenore and Frieda are buds, and Lenore can do no wrong by Frieda. The Hound of Love has power.
This week. Functional, highly affordable art. Selling Bedlam Farm Spring notecards on Redux. Maria is selling potholders, Sparky Bags and other bags on her site. Mary Kellogg is selling her new book “Whistling Woman” on tbmbooks.com. Story-telling workshop at LARAC in Glens Falls Thursday. Small dinner party at Bedlam Farm Wednesday night. Raining and raining. Warm weather coming. Wedding plans underway.
I am appearing at the Empire State Book Festival (the first) in Albany on April 10. Panel of dog and animal writers.
My daughter Emma returns for a joint reading with her proud father at Northshire Books, May 8, 7 p.m. From what I saw at her first reading, the dog and baseball obsessives have a lot in common.
I’ve learned that good friends are happy for you when you are.
Depletion occurs when you give too much of yourself away. When people take too much. When you give other people too much power over you, and when you are around people who drain you, don’t know you, are self-absorbed, angry, narcissistic. When you deny the voices inside of you that want to create, tell your story.
Depletion feels awful. I’ve come to see it as something like oil or water draining out of a tank until it’s empty. You have to fill the tank up, all the time. With people who support you. Who don’t take things from you. With people who care about you and know you. Or by creative experience. Or the satisfaction that comes with challenge and growth. Love fills the tank pretty well. Work you love. The natural world. Animals sometimes.
I am becoming conscious of depletion. Of fighting people or things that deplete me. And finding things that fill me up.
March 30, 2010- I’ve made a lot of announcements on this blog in the four years it’s been up and running, but none have been more important to me, or made me happier to write than this one.
Maria and I are getting married. We have decided on a Quaker wedding in a Friend’s Meeting House.
There, we will exchange our vows in the company of friends and family. It’s difficult to write about my feelings for Maria, most of which can and should remain private. Sometimes it felt as if we were two shipwrecked people afloat in a big and stormy sea. In a way, we have grown up together and learned the meaning of pain, trust and love.
I love her, of course, and am grateful to her. She opened my heart and soul and suffused my life with love and goodness. She changed, in some ways, saved my life. She is supportive and encouraging. She is dear and creative.
As a story-teller, I am abashed to be somewhat at a loss to describe the soul connection we have, except I thought of it clearly the other night when we drove around on a beautiful, windy, sunny afternoon, and she sketched while I crawled around stone walls. I worried that she would grow impatient, but she was as happy and content as I was.
She was my closest friend for some years, and now my lover and partner, and I never in all of my life imagined the joy and connection that we experience together every day.
The blog is important to me. It has become more than a blog – the record of a life, and its struggles and failures, and joys and triumphs. This is a joy and triumph. So it must be recorded her. Maria didn’t want me to mention this here until she had told her friends and family. I was impatient, of course, to put it up.
I can hardly believe Maria would want to marry me, but I am resolved that this marriage will be loving, gentle and affirming to the end of my days. Good relationships, like anything else, take work, and I am determined to work hard in this marriage.
And so, later in life, my soul has opened itself up, to remind me that our days are short and must be lived well, and that our stories are important. Maria and I are now one of the most glorious and important stories in my life. I believe in marriage, and I wish to do it properly. My daughter Emma Span, has agreed to be my Best Man. Lenore will be the flower girl. Izzy will do the greeting.
My favorite writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that there is no greater glory than to die for love.
I think barns, like stone walls, have ghosts. If you stand by them, you can hear them rustling around. Like walls, they have a lot of stories too, and I see so many barns toppling over and falling down, they better tell their stories soon.
At the moment, it seems like Maria and I are staying on at Bedlam Farm. I don’t really know how this decision was made, it just seemed to reveal itself. We are both happy and productive her, and I am writing novels about the place, short stories inspired in part by the farm, taking photos,and writing children’s books.
When I met Maria, she had virtually given up on the idea of herself as an artist. Now, she is churning lovely works out every day in the Studio Barn – quilts, potholders, bags and selling them all over the world. We have both found this place to be our center, the source of much of our creativity and productivity. Our history together. I am considering bringing a small number of animals back to the farm, because we both love animals, and I love to write about them, and we have these pastures and barns. I guess getting the place under control was just something I needed to prove to myself I could do.
I have to say we also think a lot about the dogs. Frieda could not live just anywhere – Izzy and Lenore could – and neither could Rose. We love these dogs dearly and they deserve to be considered. At some point, somebody might browse by here and offer me a ton of money for the place, and we’ll think about it.
In the meantime we have other decisions to make, other stuff to do. Stay tuned. Announcements coming.
