The farm was quiet for a year or so, but not now, not really. We have a sweet morning ritual after breakfast. Maria and I go outside, and when Simon spots us – even if he is way up in the pasture – he lets loose with a rousing bray. The chickens come running and follow Maria closely into the barn. Then we all get together for some carrots, apples, brushing and feed.
Come and see donkeys braying, chickens running.
I admit to being tired and grumpy this week, after a month-long book tour. I always get tired after book tours, (today caps the official Book Tour, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.) and I always forget that I get tired, and just think I’m wearing out. I’m getting a cold, and got some tick bites that are uncomfortable. Ticks are all over the dogs this week, and us.
Maria took charge and persuaded me – strongly – to spend the morning in bed, where I dozed a bit and read. She brought me tea and soup and yelled at me when I moved around. Lenore stayed with me. Maria is sweet but Sicilian, and when she gets worked up, I obey. I got permission to get up to have lunch with my friend the writer Jenna Woiginrich, who publishes one of the world’s great blogs from nearby Cold Antler Farm. It was her turn to pay and we went to the Burger Den in Salem, where they have at least 400 things on the menu, all but a handful frozen. I am a cheap date, as she conceded.
Jenna, who is barely out of diapers, and I have an odd history. She e-mailed me a few years back, seeking advice from a fellow shepherd, and she did not know that I was in the midst of cracking up, and was besieged by stalkers after HBO decided to make a movie out of “A Dog Year.” I told her I wasn’t into mentoring and I didn’t say so, but clearly hoped she would get lost. At the time, I was modeling Bedlam Farm from Attica.
Last year, it was me who e-mailed her, as I was blown away by the writing I saw in her blog and one of the books – “Chick Days,” “Made From Scratch” – that she has already published about her life as a homesteader, farmer, Dystopian-Utopian, Animal and Border Collie Loving, Workshop-Sponsoring, Chicken-Slaughtering, Homesteading Eco- Survivalist. She forgave my earlier brush-off, although she did not forget it, and brought her sweet border collie Gibson over to work sheep with Rose this summer. Jenna and I became good friends right away. After all, how many crazy and willful blogger/writers with farms and animals live around here? Or anywhere? We share the same appreciation of corporatism, and devote much of our lives to avoiding it, and also a love of individualism. Not to mention writing books.
Jenna is very impressive. She is young, brave, bursting with ideas, workshops, ideas, and determination to keep her farm. She writes beautifully and vividly, works hard, managed to get a farm mortgage, sells ads, barters for woodstoves and greenhouses, grows much of her own food. She is living a self-determined life when so many people live to pay their bills and be safe, and she has a book coming out soon – Barnheart – about her passion to get a farm and live there. It’s interesting, because I always saw myself as a writer who had a farm, and she insisted she was a farmer, but not a writer. Oh, well, I was right. I appreciate having her as a friend.
Jenna got herself a hot NYC literary agent recently and you will be hearing a lot of noise from her in the next few years, trust me.
Maria says she means for me to take it easy the next couple of days, and agree. I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Tale” and a new biography of John Brown. Plus Vol. 4 of the Zohar, (the Kabbalah). I’m also going to try and see the new Clint Eastwood movie “J. Edgar.” I’ll file a report on that. Happy to report that my Iphone, Ipad2, Macs are humming along.
It is not uncommon to see birds clean the backs of livestock – cows, Rhinos, sheep, and now, donkeys. Animals live in a symbiotic world. Donkeys can be skittish, but when Meg hops up on their backs, they stay perfectly still, and the process scratches their backs and cleans off mud and insects. Meg hops up every morning, and the donkeys seem to almost expect it. It is a very natural behavior.
Got up early, 4 a.m., to blog to drive with Maria and see the sunrise, to catch a shot of this milkhouse on Route 30 when the mist began to clear. Fed the animals, saw the donkeys, going to rest this morning. Cold coming on. Did a communication this morning with Jeannie Lindheim with Orson, and will write about it later. Jeannie is a valued addition to my life, and my life with animals. She has, I believe, the gift of telepathy.
Barn cats. Rouse farm, Jackson, N.Y.
It occurred to me a few years ago when I was falling to pieces under a wave of pills, panic attacks, terror and disorder, that I might need to think about change. I was ready to be less fearful, for sure, but somehow it did not occur to me that to accomplish this, I would have to change many of the things in my life. Many things. I just wanted the fear to go away, but the idea that I would have to do something to accomplish had eluded me, until one night on a book tour in Texas, when I was throwing up in the bathroom at 3 a.m, sweating and gasping for breath and trying not wake up Maria by calling her, yet again. (She is a Pagan, and mostly told me to breathe.)
I heard a voice in the night which said, “yo, dude. This will not work. You have to change for things to change.” Wow, I thought, that is perhaps true. So I did. I had no idea how high the price of change would be, both literally, in terms of money, and metaphorically, in terms of my life. I got divorced, I found myself disconnected from friends, family, my own daughter, I nearly lost the farm, I underwent several years of intensive therapy, trials with medication, was sometimes unable to write or think,and I unleashed on myself a wave of terror and dysfunction that nearly took my life. It is nice to be able to write that in the past tense., and I am grateful for that. It was nothing but a gift.
And I am not complaining. It was the best choice I ever made. It led to Maria, my photography, a different tone and style for my work, an opening up – more honesty and emotion – in my writing, thinking, my blog, and my life, including the spiritual life I have been seeking since “Running To The Mountain,” and before. In that process, I wrote “Rose In A Storm” “Going Home,” “Dancing Dogs,” my short story collection, due out next year, and “Frieda And Me: Second Chances,” due out in 2013.
Change was the toll, the price, the access ramp to the road back. I had to change the way I think, the way I acted,what I spent and my ideas about money and responsibility, my approach to news, health, spirituality, work. I learned to be more honest, with myself and others, and I gave up medications, conventional health care, struggle stories, confrontations, and surrender to fear. I stopped seeing aging as a chance to talk to my doctor about Viagra and diapers, and saw instead that it was a wonderful opportunity to be creative, and evolve into a mature, generous and loving human being. Wow indeed. And yes, even sex.
You cannot be with someone like Maria, if you are not willing to open up, hard thing for many men. So I did. And it is good. Good things keep coming into my life, from the photos to the blog to Simon and my quite wonderful dogs. Every time fear appeared, I took it on, accepted it, moved through it, even came to love it. It started out as a battle, but is evolving into a life.
And this process is by no means over. Fear is like a stink that gets into your pores and your clothes, your neural system. I don’t know that it ever quite goes away, or that the process of change ever quite ends. A work in progress.
So the point is this. Coping with fear has a price. You just may have to actually change.
