I wanted to mention that tomorrow morning, I’m heading for some medical stuff that will hopefully put an end to a month or some pain and confusion. There was – is – an infection in my jaw that has confounded some dentists, taken on a life of its own, swelled up repeatedly, puffed up my body, and been painful, but I think it has been sorted out and tomorrow morning an oral surgeon will perhaps rearrange my big mouth, I might come home without a tooth. Maria says this will give me a sort of sexy up-country look, I like the idea, it will go with my Jewish Pirate Tattoo.
I have been on antibiotics for a good long time, and been uncomfortable longer than that. I was determined, of course, to get through the Open House. Strong antibiotics have always wreaked havoc with me, and I’m not too wild about pain either. I am happy to say I do not believe it has affected my writing or photo-taking or life with my former girlfriend, she will do everything if allowed. And we are both a bit wrecked from the weekend, so this will give me at least a few hours of rest. I am pleased I was not too woozy or dopey, but then, I can’t really see myself through other people’s eyes.
I expect to have some surgery early tomorrow morning, I don’t know how much, how long, or precisely how I will be feeling. It is not a huge big deal and I will post as soon as I stop drooling or slurring my words. I expect to be home before lunch and spouting off by late morning or early afternoon unless they succeed in knocking me out and rendering me even more confused than usual. You will be hearing from me shortly.
When we held the first Bedlam Farm Open House nearly three years ago, I noticed a number of cell phone photographers and a handful of photographers with large format digital cameras. This weekend, I saw something very different, the very visible manifestation of a new age of image-making, cameras were not something to be used shyly and tentataively in the background, they were large, expensive and ubiquitous, in everyone’s face. That was true of no one more than me.
It was a marked change for me, I am used to controlling the images in my life and on my farm and with my animals, I have been watching the last few days as images of me, Maria, the dogs and sheep and donkeys, Flo and the farm have popped up all over Facebook, on many blogs and social media sites.
I have never been so conscious of being photographed or of taking photographs. When I went into the Round House Cafe with Red to greet some visitors over breakfast, about a half-dozen cameras came out, some cell phones also, and by the time I got home, images of the visit were online.
It was a striking change, a very pronounced one, I decided right away to get my large portrait lens, I decided not to take overview and general shots of the Open House, there were scores of people doing it, there was nothing i could add. I decided to focus on portraits and faces. So did many other people. The quality of the photography was astounding, the range of color and imagery, the captures of the feeling and moment were often quite brilliant. I take photos every day, I have sold thousands of them, shown many more, yet my images were so often surpassed by the Canon’s and Nikon’s that dangled from a hundred shoulders and waists.
Photography is, I think, becoming a female art, women are more emotionally connected to images and feelings, I think, just as they are more emotionally open to animals. I was conscious this weekend of so many serious and accomplished photographers who were women. In fact, i was enveloped by serious photographers with very good equipment and a strong sense of how and when to use it. I didn’t see anyone asking too many questions about their cameras, they were fast and ready.
If anything make me uncomfortable about all of this, including myself, it that it seemed there were no boundaries around it, everyone was on the stage every minute,we were so busy recording the events we sometimes lost the sense of them, the feeling of them. When I got up this morning to write, there was nothing to add to the outpouring of images and reports that had long preceded me. It was a radical and fascinating new experience, I had lost control of my own story, a new thing, an exciting thing, a challenging thing. And I cannot remember it ever happening before. What I have been doing to others for so much of my life was being done to me.
It seemed as if every time a dog or cute kid walked by, a dozen camera were up and pointed and clicking away. I don’t ever see much advantage in being where everybody is, I did what George Forss always tells me to do, slow down and think about my shots. It worked. But still, there was no moment that was not captured or preserved, not much to report later, the story was already told. You didn’t really even need to be here, you got the best view in the house. Something gained, something lost, the tragedy of technology.
Before she left for home, I signaled my friend Lisa to cross the street with me and take some photos of the afternoon light in the meadow. She came across the street with me. Several people leaving the farm took photos of us crossing the street, and standing in the meadow, they lovely photographs. They next morning, I saw those and added my own, and Lisa added hers. People out in the world saw the event as it happened, in several dimensions -theirs and ours, the drivers, the photographers, the resulting work.
Such a thing has never been possible before. But I sometimes wonder, have we lost control of all of the events in our own lives? Have we been drawn once again into powerful new technologies without really thinking about how they affect us? Is something lost when we can never tell our story for the first time, or in our own time. Or when we are too busy focusing to see what is in front of us? Is it a loss when we never get the chance to reflect on our stories and put them in perspective? These are questions, I don’t have the answers. I take photos all the time, everywhere, I can’t imagine what a pain in the ass I must be to people. Or maybe I can.
Sometimes I worry that photography is getting to be a bit like Facebook messaging, if you don’t set boundaries on it, it will eat you up. It has never been easier or more rewarding to take a photo, it is never easy to take a really good one. I saw many of the photographers – myself included – winced at being photographed, yet how can we say no? We do it all the time. There must have been thousands of photos taken of our Open House.
When Maria came out of her studio and we put our arms around one another, there was a score at least of clicks and sunlight gleaming off of lenses, I felt like a Royal couple stepping out of a plane. We were startled, we looked at one another in surprise. I understand how technology works, this image thing is a revolution, I am part of it and everyone else is welcome. It is striking to say that almost all of us did really good work, no event of mine has ever been captured so skillfully and lovingly, I am, I think, a bystander at my own wedding. I sometimes consciously manipulated this, I have always wanted a photo of me and George Forss together, we put our arms around one another and a dozen cameras took the shot. I will get one of them on my wall.
By the end of each day, I told myself to put the camera down, and sit and talk with the people who had come to see us, see the animals. I found these were in some ways, the sweetest and finest moments of the day. It was as if I was seeing these people for the first time, connecting with them, understanding them. Before that, I wasn’t sure who everybody was. When I put the camera down, then I knew. There is a message in that. The next morning, I did not bring my camera to breakfast, and I had the same feeling. I could really grasp who some of these people were and get to know them. I remember those times clearly, the rest was often a blur.
The message for me is to keep taking my photos, and I hope everyone will keep taking theirs. But I think at the next Open House I’ll declare the last three hours of each day camera-free times (except for Red herding, of course, that would be cruel.) So we can really get to see one another and feel the stories in our lives.
I saw a wonderful thing Sunday, two strong and gifted and creative women At the Open House, each impaired or challenged in the way in which they communicate with the world. They met for the first time at the farm, they began talking easily and comfortably, but then got stuck and had to find a way around a word.
This photo captures that moment of connection and revelation. And friendship.
The woman on the left is Donna Wynbrandt, an artist and friend and the photographer George Forss’s partner in life.
Donna has a schizo-effective disorder, she has cognitive difficulties distinguishing fact from fiction and sometimes experiences manic mood swings and depression. For many years, Donna was a street person, living outside in New York and other cities. She says she loved that life, she gave it up when she could not run any longer.
She and George are powerfully connected to one another, theirs is a soul and creative connection, they are an inspiration to many and a constant source of support for one another. Donna does pencil and ink drawings, Maria included her work in the Open House Art Show. We love Donna’s drawings, there are many in our home. Donna is a natural communicator, she is highly educated, articulate and intelligent. She is extremely self-aware, but also can be difficult to understand at times, her moods can be unpredictable, her conversation sometimes deliberate and even circular.
Deborah Glessner, on the right, is a member of the Open Group At Bedlam Farm, she is also a friend and a retired librarian who worked and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is an animal lover, especially dogs and horses, and is now a very talented and serious professional photographer. Her work was also part of the Open House Art Show and was offered for sale in the Studio Barn. We have a bunch of her photos in the house also. Deborah has had a profound hearing loss almost all of her life. Like other hearing impaired people I have known, Deborah brings an exquisite sensitivity to her work, she sees and hears things almost everyone else misses, she feels the world in a deep way.
When I first met her, she advised me that I didn’t need to shout – “people are always yelling at me,” she offered with a smile – I just needed to look at her and let hear see my lips move, she said. She described herself as a person with “profound” hearing loss, but adds “I always hope people see me as Debbie – as a normal person with, oh, by the way, a hearing challenge.”
Deborah is a very skilled lip reader, but there are some words it is hard for her to make out. I learned to be careful to look directly at her when I was speaking to her, not simple for a mumbler like me. When these two met, neither was aware of the others condition or impairment.
I saw the two of them communicating at the pasture gate and I heard Donna raise her voice a bit, and then she began spelling out a word. I asked Deborah what the word was, what had happened at that moment:
“I was telling her about a horse that would unlock the stall doors and let all the other horses in the barn out. And one day the owner came out and all the horses were gone! Donna said the horse “wanted” his friends, and I wasn’t getting “wanted.” So she spelled it and then the light shone — it was a revelation. We finally and successfully communicated.”
Donna could not remember the context of the word, but she remembered the same moment of revelation, “the moment I knew we were good friends and were delighted with one another.”
The photo, one of a dozen I shot in rapid sequence, caught the precise moment of intimate connection and revelation, you could see it in their faces.
Donna spelled out each word with her hands, and the two then connected in a very visible and powerful way, they both connected with one another and became instant friends. This was such a beautiful thing to see, two human beings breaking through difficult barriers through good will, faith, honesty and patience, this is the great and often unrealized power of human beings to talk to one another and be understood.
I will never understand how and why it is possible for these two determined and loving – and impaired – women to make this kind of connection, but not possible for most of the leaders of the world, or our political leaders to find a way to communicate with one another. I think of Washington politics, or violent conflict, or the wrenching drama of the New York carriage horses where people simply cannot find a way to talk or listen to one another. Donna and Deborah remind me of the hope and promise that lives in the soul of every human being, it is a gift for any photographer to stumble across a moment like this, and to capture it.
New thing at Bedlam Farm. Every morning, Ma gets her butt scratched, she seems to love it. Ma seems fully recovered from her birthing struggles, the butt scratching seems to agree with her.
When Jesus lay suffering on the cross in Jerusalem, his father could not bear to witness his son’s pain. He heard Jesus beg him not to forsake him, and he responded. God left a body on the Cross but transported his son far ahead in time and space, to New York City in 2014 A.D.. There, he told his only son, “you will be safe from harm.” He sent Jesus’s beloved little donkey along with him, he told him that any man with a donkey or a horse will have good work to do, earn an honest and secure living.
A working animal, his father said again and again, was worth more than gold.
God decreed that this journey always be a secret, even from the prophets writing the Bible.
Jesus was bewildered at first by the chaotic life he found in New York City, he could not believe the rents or the price of bread, but he was not as shocked as one might think. The streets of Jerusalem were filthier and much more dangerous and crowded than New York with horses, donkeys, carts, goats and sheep, wild dogs, raw sewage, farmers and peasants and Roman soldiers.
Jesus found himself Central Park with his beloved donkey, his father had told him to look for the horses, they would guide him. His father told him this was not like the Roman Empire, it was a free place with no Kings or Emperors, people were free to live as they choose as long as they abided by the laws. The drivers of the horses knew him as one of theirs,a free spirit, perhaps a troublemaker, a lover of animals. They took him in instantly, he felt at home with them.
According to the legend of the donkeys’ cross, as recounted in “The Donkey Companion,” by Sue Weaver, a poor farmer near Jerusalem had owned this donkey of Jesus, he was far too small to do much work. He told his family he was going to kill the little donkey – in those days, as in these, animals who did not work did not live long – but his children, who loved the donkey, begged him to sell it.
It was wrong, they told their father, to give away or harm a donkey just because he might not be able to work hard. They believed in the right of animals to survive. The farmer tied his donkey to a tree down the road and soon, two men approached and asked if they could have the donkey. It can carry nothing, the farmer warned them.
“Jesus of Nazareth has need of it,” replied one of the men, and the farmer handed the donkey over. They took him to Jesus, who stroked the poor creature, then mounted it and rode away. Jesus rode the donkey every day for the rest of his life, into Jerusalem and all around it. On the day called Palm Sunday, Jesus led his followers into the city riding on the back of his small donkey, who he came to love and who served him faithfully and well and who had no trouble carrying Jesus and his worldly goods.
The donkey so loved his master he followed him to Calvary. Grief-stricken by the sight of Jesus on the cross, the donkey turned away but would not leave. It was then that the shadow of the cross fell upon the shoulders and back of the donkey, and every donkey in the world carries the sign of the cross to this day.
Jesus was grateful to have his donkey in New York. An outsider, a free spirit, someone who loved nature and the outdoors, someone who loved giving pleasure to people, Jesus was drawn to the carriage trade, the long chosen work for the free spirits of New York, the sons and daughters of immigrants, the ones who could not live in tiny cubicles, who need to be with people and outdoors and who loved working with animals. Just like Jesus himself. And people loved the donkey. Children came over to touch him, young lovers wanted to ride in his cart, the people in the cubicles came out every day to touch the donkey and smile. Jesus put flowers all around his cart, a plume on his donkey’s forehead, bells on his collar.
The donkey was too small to pull many people in a carriage, that was the work of the big horses, but he could pull a cart filled with vegetables, he could give rides to children. Jesus put a sign on his cart that read: “King Of The Donkeys” and he went to work in the park every day, just like the carriage drivers did.
Jesus was different from the other food vendors in the park. He gave his sweet fruit and candy to children, and to the poor. Each morning, he met the disabled in the fountains of the park, and he and his donkey worked to heal them. He gave the homeless his cloak on cold nights and he sometimes went to beautiful hotels and museums and chastised the the rich, scolding them for ignoring the poor and destroying the natural beauty of the world, his own father’s creation.
Jesus was soon enough beloved by the ordinary people, the working people, the poor and the young. He continued his work begun in Jerusalem. He began to preach on behalf of the poor, provoked the rich for being selfish and heartless, challenged the greed of the real estate developers who were, he said just like the rich and lazy priests of the Old Temple. People called him a radical, a socialist, marked him as dangerous.
As loved as he was, Jesus was still Jesus, he was always an outsider brought into the world to give the poor reason for hope. His only friends were the carriage drivers, they were troublemakers too, for the most part. They did not care for the rich or powerful either.
Jesus was at peace. He knew his father was smiling down on him, gratified by his good heart and charity and good work in the park with his donkey.
When the demonstrators came, Jesus first thought they must be pilgrims seeking prayer. He went to greet them and offer them some fruit, but they spat on him and shouted at him and called him names like “murderer” and “abuser” and “cruel,” they yelled at him to go home, to stop abusing his donkey, they shouted at the children and the poor to stay away from him, they broke into his stable at night and set his donkey free, but his loyal donkey would not run away.
He turned to his donkey and said, “look, the pharisees are here too.” He well know the self-righteous, angry and hypocritical sects.
The police came, and told him his donkey could not work all day, could only carry a handful of apples, he could not give rides to children, it was cruel to the donkey. They said he must have a blanket and could not work in the rain or snow. They said he had to have five weeks of vacation a year, rest after every two hours of work, and Jesus was incredulous, he had never known a working animal to have more than a month off of work. In his world, it was the working animals who kept people alive.
But no one listened. The pharisees grew louder and angrier and more cruel. People drove by in cars and shouted false and hurtful names at him, they claimed they saw photos of his donkey working on something called Facebook, don’t you know, they shouted, that is cruel for animals to work? His donkey, they said, should be in the wild, roaming free in nature. They said his ribs were showing, he must be starving. They said his head was down, he must be said. They said he brayed in the morning, he must be lonely.
Jesus could hardly believe what he was hearing. He wanted to the other cheek, but the people confused him, made him a little crazy, although he tried not to be angry. “Have any of you ever seen a donkey before?,” he shouted before asking his father for forgiveness. The children begged him to start a blog, defend himself on Facebook, but he refused. Jesus kept his donkey in a horse stable, in a stall where he could be dry and warm and rest.
“Do you know what it is like out there in the wild?,” he would ask the pharisees, but they would never listen or respond. They refused to speak with him, they treated him as if he were something other than human.
“My little donkey would be eaten by wolves or starve to death in the desert!,” he once shouted out loud. He was changing, he never grew angry in Jerusalem, never yelled at people.
A powerful political leader in New York named Stephen Weinstein-Gutierrez-Carrino- McDonough, who came from a tribe Jesus came to know as Brooklyn, came to the park every Sunday and shouted at him that his poor donkey was lonely, and need to socialize with other donkeys and have dinner with them every night. “Can’t you see?,” shouted the pharisees, “he is depressed, he is chained to your cart, it is his prison, his cell! He longs to be free in nature?” Where, Jesus wondered, has a donkey ever been kept, but tied to a cart, in a stall, in the history of the world? They made fun of Jesus’s beard, and his sandals, they laughed at his teeth, made up chants and songs to ridicule him.
“Have these people lost your minds?,” wondered Jesus, whose father had sent him all kinds of books when he moved to New York City. “DId Sancho Panza’s donkey Rucio have dinner with other donkeys and socialize with them?,” he would shout.”He rode all over Spain with his donkey, just as my donkey and I rode through Jerusalem and Platero rode all over Europe with Jose Jiminez and won a Noble Prize! And what about Shrek?” My donkey, he said, eats with me every night.
Every day the police came at the behest of the pharisees with new regulations, the number of protesters grew. People called reporters came to him, mocked him, asked him to defend his cruelty and abusive ways. They called him a thief, a cheat, a callous and unfeeling man, things Jesus had never been called in his life. They shouted at him to go home, never imagining where home really was. He could not imagine how working with a donkey could cause such trouble and hatred. It had never even happened in Jerusalem, where he was hated by many, where no one had ever complained about the donkey. There were thousands of them, they worked all day everywhere, everyone knew how much they loved to work, the donkeys and the horses were more precious than money.
Jesus grew wan and fretful, he lost weight. This world made little sense to him. He became anxious, angry, sometimes the pharisees came to stone him, the park was filled with angry pamphlets accusing him of crimes. They claimed he beat his donkey, starved him, overworked him to death, confined him in small spaces where he could not move or lie down. They said his donkey was dangerous, his waste was filled with germs, he could get frightened and kill a human at any time. The children were suddenly afraid to see him, the poor fled from him, the office workers were warned to stay away or they would become associated by him. He asked to speak to the pharisees, to the leaders and prophets and high priests of the city, but no one would talk with him or meet with him.
One day the protesters came and they were joyous, emboldened. The rich pharisees, the owners of land, the wealthy leaders of the city had chosen a new Emperor, and he said the first thing he would do when he began to rule would be to ban Jesus and the donkeys and the horses from the city. They would be banned forever.
In particular, he had asked that the man who called himself “The King Of The Donkeys” be brought to him at a place called City Hall, where his fate would be decided. This was all too familiar to Jesus.
The carriage drivers came to warn him that he was soon to be banished from the city, or worse, that his beloved donkey would be taken from him and sent to a farm where he would never be allowed to work with people again, see children, do anything but eat and drop manure. And the little donkey would never see Jesus again, no more fruits or vegetables, no more working with children and the poor, he could not choose his work or live his chosen life.
Was it true?, Jesus asked the carriage drivers, that Jerusalem was a freer place than New York City in 2014?
Jesus pondered this news, he and the donkey went to the quietest part of the park, he meet with the children, the lovers, the tourists and the poor and he knelt down in prayer and cried out aloud, “O Father, why have thou forsaken me? Get me out of here.”
And the trees shook and the sky turned dark and the birds were silent and the children and the poor and the people of the park heard a great booming voice asking “are you sure? Do you know the fate that awaits you?”
“Yes, father,” said Jesus, ” I do. I’ll take my chances with the Romans, father. There is more than one way to be crucified.”
