The temperature plunged this afternoon to well below zero – and there was a chilling wind. The donkeys didn’t need to be called into the barn, which is cold but shielded from the wind and snow. They came scooting down from the Pole Barn, where they had finally walked in Maria’s snowshoe steps. But the snow will be hard again tomorrow.
Got some health care this morning. Meditated, then saw a message therapist and talked with a spiritual counselor, and then bought ingredients for my new daily vegetable shake – celery, carrots, beets, spinach, an apple, grapes. Talk about wellness (I hate the word, along with “journey.”)
These two old barns survived a harsh winter and so many barns did not. They speak of change and promise, emotional things that call out to me to pay attention.
I went back to the shuttered Agway Feed Store window in Cambridge to try and catch the afternoon sun, and the sky opened up jsut as I got there and was rewarded for my troubles. I’ll go back. This is a window into a world.
For me, the first death is giving up on love. The second would be accepting the American idea of health – a life of expensive pills, tests and procedures to make me feel sick and prevent me from dying when my body is ready to leave the world. The third, and the one most on my mind, would be giving up on learning and growing. Grumping about change and the way kids do it these days.
This week I ventured out into the new world of video as a way to tell stories, and this is almost entirely due to a bright and patient young woman named Sara Friedman, who I met at Gallery 99 and who is starting an energetic new company called Socialmomentum.org. I have written about technology for some time, and I have been online almost from the inception of the Internet. I embrace new technology as a way of keeping my writing alive and in touch with the people who read and buy my books. I mean to stay a writer, and this blog and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which I am now on are seminal new tools for dealing with it.
There is this notion that savvy people can keep up with technology by themselves. I do not believe this is so. This technology is evolving, and I want to understand how to use it, and so I’ve hired Sara to come to the farm and help me use these tools more efficiently and knowledgeably. The video arose out of our first lesson. Since then, she is helping me to understand who is reading my blog, who is seeing it on Facebook, and how to use Imovie to edit my videos to make them better and more coherent. She is young enough to be my daughter, I suspect, and I would be proud to have her as a daughter, but she is also a great teacher. And every time she comes to the farm, I turn to Maria and say, “I am so lucky to have that woman in my life.” Sara got me onto YouTube and opened up a whole new dimension in my writing and in the marketing of books that writers need to learn. That is pretty exciting for me.
I love working with Sara. She and I argue a bit – like many geeks, she teaches more things than I think I really need to know. But she is the real deal. She has already taught me so much, and we have just begun to learn together. Learning is life, I think, in one sense, and when the mind closes, and we don’t want to learn anymore, for that is one of the first deaths.
