Sometime next week, a new Facebook Group At Bedlam Farm – “The Loving Animals Group” will be up and running on my Facebook page. This will be the second Open Group I’ve started, this one has it’s own unique history. The first Open Group, a great creative success is focused on creativity – photos, blogs, writing, painting, sketching, fiber arts. Many people were disappointed it was not more focused on animals, and that, of course, turned into a pitched battle for some for a few weeks.
It is natural, of course, for people coming to my sites to care about animals – I sure do – and I have long explored subjects relating to our love of them: attachment theory, emotional connections, therapy work, grieving, and the feelings we evoke in them. I’ve also talked about the dangers of loving animals too much – emotionalizing, anthropomorphising, projecting too much of our thoughts and feelings onto them. It is wonderful to love animals, and yes, I believe it is possible to love them too much, and not always a healthy thing for them. The Open Group for Loving Animals will be limited to 100 people at first – please do not e-mail or message me about it now. To join, you just click on the name on the left of my home page (it won’t be there for a week or so) and you will be admitted in order of application. I’ll make an announcement when it’s up and running.
I made a major mistake in the first group, I underestimated the number of people interested and underestimated the great work being produced, the content was overwhelming and communicating individually was impossible, so I reduced the group by several hundred members. Many people accepted this graciously, many did not, so to avoid this drama this round the group will evolve slowly. Eventually, I can see it growing to five or six hundred members, even more. But that will be done slowly and gradually and over time. So be patient, if you apply, it may be awhile. I will be looking for one or two co-administrators to help oversee the site, so keep that in mind.
I do consider membership a privilege, not a right, and I will ask for people to follow certain guidelines. No hostility or arguments, I feel strongly about the textual violence online, I won’t tolerate any of it. I am looking for a group that explores animal love, not simply and uncritically proclaims it. The Open Arts Group has become an exciting and creative place, mostly because there are guidelines and I learned that some people on the Internet believe they do not have to submit to guidelines, they feel they are entitled to post whatever they want. Not so. I feel very strongly that a good and successful site sometimes needs direction and in applying you are submitting to that idea and accepting it. If you feel no one can ever tell you what to write on a site, take a pass. We will be offering positive and constructive feedback.
I am not much for censorship but this could be a wonderful contribution to the study of animal love, and I want this to be a thoughtful and enlightening place, not just another place to post sweet photos (although they are welcome.) If people are uncomfortable with these suggestions, best they not apply at all.
Lots of experts and behaviorists talk about loving animals, but I’ve never seen a group of actual animal lovers talk about it in a way that is meaning to others. It could be an amazing place, I am sure it will be.
My wish for the page is that it lovingly and thoughtfully explore all parts of loving animals – what is good, what is sad, what is happy, what is bad. It is not going be a “cute” only page, or primarily a place to grieve and seek sympathy and mourn. If you can’t bear to hear about an animal dying, this may not be the place for you, although mostly I think the stories will be happy and uplifting. There will be honest explorations, stories about loving real animals in the real world, not just cuddly fur babies at home. There is a great divide in America between people who live with animals and people who live with pets and I hope both groups are drawn to this new group to share their love and experiences. A photo of a dog or cat with the words “I love Cocoa” is not a thoughtful post, it is a statement, I am urging members to be thoughtful and self-aware about their posts. Otherwise, I will get out of the way, except as a fellow poster. Hope to meet you next week at the “Loving Animals Group At Bedlam Farm.”
I’m going to do a regulars on my work to preserve my space in the face of enormous challenges to privacy, dignity, patience and self-determination. We live on a world of obsessive messaging, arguments, intrusions and warnings. There is no concept left of privacy, of space, of boundaries. So I am going to work on that, I have to figure it out if I am going to be the writer, the lover, the photographer and the person I want and need to be.
Technology and social media are the two most pressing sources of pressure on my space, my inner self. They test my patience, my energy, my focus, they are the greatest threat to my good work even as I learn to use them more. I have learned to share these challenges, to be open about them, I have always found I’m not the only one, that others are sharing this problem, from panic to depression to diabetes.
How do I stay patient in the face of constant provocation? How do I make decisions and choices and share them without surrendering them? How do I protect my space, the inner part of myself that needs to be calm, loving, centered and creative.
My photography is one way, when I go out in the morning and see an image like this and capture it, I stop and l look at my loving wife, her great love for me and for our animals, and I take a deep breath and close my eyes, and I say this is what is important, this is the image in my head, this is the mood I want for my work and life. I look for more moments in a day, this is the real message I want to hear, my own “like”, the best comment. Step one, I think, it is an antidote to the invasion of self that passes for communications in our world. Is is spiritual, nourishing, silent and healing.
I am beginning to get a grip on this idea, I think of it as an anti-biotic, an antidote, a balance.
I have a lot of weaknesses, and some are these – I just hate whining, struggle stories, people who presume to tell me who I am and what I need, unwanted advice, alarms and warnings, drama, nasty people who post nasty messages from digital distances, the self-righteous and the angry swarming mobs of the political and animal world. Why is this a problem?
Because the Internet, e-mail and social media bring each of these things to me every single day. Because I am increasingly coming to think my soul is struggling for relief, calling to me for help.
As the blog has grown, more people come in all of the time, and this is good for me, it something I seek and encourage. I tout my Facebook likes all the time and encourage subscriptions to pay for my work. I have expanded my work on various social media, in podcasts and Instagrams, Tweets and Pinterest Boards.
If that isn’t enough, I am committed to be open (mostly) about my life. When I go on insulin, I write about it, along with my life with animals, my bouts with fear and depression and anger, my struggles to become a fully developed human being, a journey-in-progress. All of this puts me in direct conflict with the outside world every day, as the notion of boundaries, privacy, self-determination and space has been increasingly obliterated online by social media messagers and corporations who keep invading my space and telling me it is for my own convenience and self-interest. I think many days of what good old Henry David Thoreau would have done had he been on Facebook at Walden Pond, barraged with alarms, environment and animal activists, people offering advice on eating squirrels, wood stoves and canoe safety, suggesting he was self-absorbed, weak-minded, incompetent, or just out there for the money, reminding him he was cooking frogs in the wrong way, telling him how brother Herb patched their roofs.
Thoreau was a poet and chronicler of space and I am a great lover of space, it is the essence of me, I valued it before the concept became a social media site and people felt the need to post their trips to the bathroom. As I get older, I am increasingly wary of getting grumpy, yet this week I found myself once again writing grumpy messages in replies to messages that abused and violated my space. One woman saying I had no one but myself to blame for not selling Bedlam Farm, I was posing ridiculous boundaries by wanting people to have money enough to pay the rent or caring what they did with the place. There was a veritable avalanche of whining and lament because we had to reduce the number of people on the Open Group to a manageable size. “You hurt me,” wrote one ex-member, “I am really a good person,” as if I were making individual character evaluations.
Struggle stories abound on social media – dead dogs, sick moms and dads, illnesses and travails. Somehow, this has become a medium for trading pain and suffering. And getting a lot of sympathy. I don’t seek sympathy when I share my life, I seek authenticity and hopefully, can relate something that may be useful. And the social media world encourages the idea that we are all intimate buddies, that we are available all day to chat with one another and trade stories and tales. As a writer, I believe in inter-activity, I have preached it for years, but I also see that increasingly it demands more boundaries and discipline that writers have ever had to muster. And I see that new technology is an addiction and obsession for many people. That will not be me, I have had enough addictions and obsessions in my life, I know them when I see them, I am not going there.
I knew when I wrote about diabetes that my very personal medical space and boundaries would be trampled and I was not wrong. Maria began getting messages about the need for me to wear white socks (there is not any need for that), other people sent me a stream of Facebook messages offering books, grisly amputation testimonies, tales of their mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, the telephone number of their doctors or, in some cases, the doctors themselves. I am starting a new Open Group this week – this one on the love of animals, and people have asked me why I would bother to do this, and the answer is because it is worth it, all of it. I love my blog, I love my life. I just have to figure how how to preserve my space.
I admit I am struggling to preserve this inner space, my soul really, from this invasion that I have, in so many ways, invited. I am not sure how to do it. Every day, some bank, media company, business or credit card company or person finds a new way to invade my space with information I do not want or need, with advice I do not want, with presumptions that are not true.
Some first steps:
– Facebook messaging and notifications are the worse source of abuse, invasions of privacy and space, lack of boundaries. It is very important for me to solve this in a reasoned and practical way. I am not interesting in spending a lot of time learning who likes my likes, shared my photo, commented on my comments, likes anybody else’s comments. I am talking to a tech adviser today on ways to limit these messages or eliminate them entirely. I am also going ahead and planning a new Open Group – and this is my dilemma, I want to move forward, I want to move back. The conundrum of our times.
– I have expanded my walking, time with the animals, reading books, walking with dogs, things that take me out of this system. This morning, Red and I had a beautiful walk, he is learning to be on the road with me and handle whizzing trucks and cars, hard for him and many border collies, he wants to herd them. This is nourishing for my space, it heals and expands it. I’m looking for other things, counter-balancing things.
– I am meditating twice a day now, a half-hour in the morning, a half-hour in the evening. Taking photos in the morning, then again in the afternoon, pursuing photographer’s light, thinking about and expanding my photographic work.
– I will reinforce my conviction and practice that my life is not an argument, I see that has slipped somewhat for me, some of the comments are so outrageous and inaccurate it is difficult not to answer them, it requires great discipline. On Facebook, people are used to sending messages, listening is not so simple. My blog is monologue, not a dialogue and this is a noxious habit it is easy to slip into, this defending oneself and draining one’s energy in eternal arguments. This is the dark hole of media, the political world, social media.
– I am trying to put together – with Maria – a kind of Sabbath, a Saturday or Sunday when I disconnect from this world, turn off all of my devices, devote my time to loving Maria, to the animals, to my reading and thinking and photography. This idea has really grown on me.
– I am disconnecting from this world in the late afternoon or early, returning to blog at night, a custom and tradition I love.
This is an important, not a trivial issue and I have been consistent about it until recently, when all sorts of newcomers have come onto the site and I am attempting to do more things. A meaning life is not a survey or debate of beliefs, it is about decisions taken and owned. I am not seeking advice, not willing to argue my beliefs in this system of contention and disconnection.
Arguments, grumpiness or annoyance are traits that undermine creativity, violate my space and damage mental and physical health. They are the antithesis of spirituality, of a calm and centered self. And they will affect the quality of my thought and work. And I don’t want to forget that most of the messages are nice and often quite interesting, even if I can’t respond to them.
If I want to be in this world, and I do, and I want to write in this world and share my work – I do – then it is up to me to take responsibility for preserving my space and creative sense of self – not benefited by argument and whining or nastiness. My space is my center, my grounding, my creative soul, it is crying out for some relief from these intrusions and assaults, and this is a call I will heed. As always, I’ll share the process. It is, I see a difficult thing, a complex thing. It will not be simple. I’ve dealt with worse.
