Day: January 22, 2013

When it comes to fighting fear, I like to think of myself as Churchillian, but if I’m being honest I’d have to say I’m more like the boxer Joe Lewis. Since I realized five or six years ago just how much fear I have been living in and how much damage it had done to myself and other people, I decided to fight it with body and soul and since then I have been throwing everything – the kitchen sink, too – right at it, trying club it senseless even when I couldn’t quite understand it. I’ve been to therapists, analysts, MD’s, naturopaths, spiritual counselors, Tarot Card readers, shamans, meditated, gone on hikes, retreats, Zen gatherings, read manuals and self-help books, adopted postures, given fear names, tried breathing exercises, visualizations,  mantras and incense, candles and herbs,  studied Thomas Merton, Aquinas, the Kabbalah, the Bible, Hannah Arendt and countless philosophers and spiritual texts.

Maria has witnessed this colossal struggle between a willful man and the terror that lived inside of him like some awful demon.  She agrees that I am willful if nothing else. I’m at a new point with fear and panic, feeling less of it than I ever have, even as I face some serious challenges in life. I think I have backed fear into a corner – literally. I used to stay awake all night, now I go to sleep. I used to wake up in terror at 1 a.m., not I wake up in terror at 4 a.m., and even then, only sometimes. When I wake up, I am another person, terrified, trapped, overwhelmed, I am not myself. But I realized this week that I have beaten fear up pretty good, thrown it off balance, backed it into a corner.

I call it the island of terror, the time between 4 or 5 a.m. and daylight. This is where my fear has retreated, this is when it appears, this is when it paralyzes me. But the very good news is that this is the smallest space fear has ever occupied in my life. It is not making my decisions any more, or choosing my relationships. I am no longer surrounded by people who do not love me, but by people who do. I am no longer walled off from the world, but am opening up to it.

It has not been pretty and not been easy, but I think I am clubbing my fear pretty thoroughly. I chip away one piece at a time. It is not a short exercise, but a long march. It takes patience and discipline, two traits I have been lacking in my life.  I have it pinned down now, stuck in a small corner of my life, my night.  I will keep on swinging, chipping away, encircling it, throwing every thing I have at it.  In a few more rounds I might just chase it right out of the ring. I’ve got it in a corner.

When Frieda first saw Lenore at Bedlam Farm, she showed her teeth and roared and lunged at her. Lenore does not comprehend either hostility or rejection, she just rolled over on her back and wagged her tail. As the snarling Frieda approached her, Lenore reached up and licked her on the nose, and Frieda, astonished, stepped back, tilting her head at this curious and loving thing. From that moment on, Lenore and Frieda have been the best of pals. On a cold day, both of them head by the light coming into the living room with the morning sun. They are almost always together in the house.

Lenore showed Frieda how to relax, I think, how to play, how to be less intense and serious and ferocious. Frieda started to loosen up around her, and I took Lenore on all of the training sessions with Frieda. I think Lenore taught Frieda how to love.

Went out to water the animals on this bitterly cold day and a sudden windy and thick snow squall hit us. The sheep spooked in the high wind and red came after them to bring them back. Just before they ran over me and knocked me down, I did get a shot of it. One of the interesting things is that I have really learned how to fall and protect the camera. I hold it up, and then roll under neath it. It falls on me when I hit the ground. Works every time.

Photographers become scholars of light and I know that on a crisp cold day – it was – 4 degrees when I drove by this farmhouse and the wind was rushing past, and it was twilight, just after 4 p.m., and I pulled the car over and stood for a few minutes until my fingers ached, and then the setting sun hit this empty old farmhouse right when I put the camera up and my wide angle 14 mm lens swept the grounds of the old farm, not orphaned, a ghost in the middle of a bunch of residences outside of Cambridge, N.Y.

I call it the Old Red Ghost Farmhouse. I have no idea if it has any ghosts inside, but I think it is itself a ghost.

Before the highways, many farm had gates marking the entryway to the farmhouses. Now the gates remain closed, and there are approaches to the farmhouses off of the roads. This gate still stands guard, a graceful echo of a different time.