9 January

When Your House Is For Sale

by Jon Katz
When Your House Is For Sale

 

Bedlam Farm has been for sale for three weeks now, and having your house for sale does change perspective. We often think of ourselves in the new farm we are hoping to buy about 15 minutes away. It is smaller, with great funky barns for the donkeys and for Maria and her studio and art gallery. As soon as Bedlam Farm sells, we’ll go after it.

The visible changes are people cruising by slowly. People often cruise by the farm after they’ve read some of my books, but potential home buyers are different. They come by slowly, stick cameras out of their car windows and look carefully at the barns, house, fences and pastures. Everyone we’ve talked to says the farm will sell because it’s infrastructure is good and the barns have all been restored. I think that is right. We picture people who love animals and want to live with some, probably from New York or some other city. They might want to make some goat cheese or do some kind of organic farming.

We picture them with small children, and I definitely see them riding their horse down the path into the woods. We think more about the new house than the old one now, and having your home for sale transports you to an in between place, not quite here, not quite there. Bedlam Farm is a magical place, and I can’t wait to meet the people who decide to live here. We thought about leaving them the barn cats, but it seems clear they would like to be with us. So they are coming, too. I love this farm, and my blood is literally in it. I sometimes get nostalgic about leaving the farm, and Rose here too, but it time.  I am eager to see someone else love it as well.

9 January

Integrated Self: The Two Halves Of Us. Fearful and Strong

by Jon Katz
Integrated Self: The Two Halves Of Us

 

Anna Freud wrote that for many people, the struggle is two integrated the different parts of ourselves. Many of us feel much fear, but also possess a great deal of strength. It is almost never one thing or the other.  I was shaped to a great degree as a fearful little boy, beset by terrors real and imagined. But a part of me is strong, creative, determined, and resilient.  Like so many fearful people, I have accomplished a great deal, things that require strength. For me, much of my work as an adult – and as a writer – has been introducing these two parts of me – the fearful and the strong – to one another.

Anna Freud says this integration of the self is often the most important work we have to do as adults learning to live in the world. One can choose to succumb to the culture of fear and disaster that increasingly shapes the world around us, or we can set out on our own to choose a different way and recognize the creative, strong and powerful parts of ourselves. This, in itself, requires great strength. Sometimes, in meditation, the older man meets the little boy, hiding in his room in the dark, shivering in fear.

He puts his arm around the boy and he tells the boy what he so desperately wants to hear: “it’s all right, you are good, you are strong, you will make your way in the world, find what you love, what you need. It’s all right. I promise you, I am there.” And the boy sobs with relief, and then sleeps deeply and in a nourishing way. In a sense, the spiritual life is the search for the integrated self. For these different parts of us to meet and embrace, and become one.

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