I stood in this field and saw the grace of the seasons, the cut field, the four symbols of the seasons, the soft meadow, the dying leaves saying goodbye with glory, it is often a place I stand and meditate with the dogs, and I did that this morning. I thought about the power of community, and the Common Good.
The underlying principle of the idea of the Common Good is respect for the human person, each endowed with inalienable rights and gifts and called by the angels and the givers of life to his or her development and fulfillment. The call to life. The creative spark is the holy gift, the inner spirit that lights the soul. The community is the basic cell of society, the community promotes security and encouragement for all those who wish to hear the call and always – always – treats one another with respect. In the Kabbalah, God warns his people that the only thing they have to fear from him is failure to heed the spark.
I’ve not been a photographer too long, I don’t recall ever taking a photograph until somewhere around the time I met Maria. I paid people to take my photos, and it dawned on me one day that I might take my own. I couldn’t tell you why I never did, I think what you photograph reflects what you see and feel. And there was so much of the world that I could not see.
Taking pictures has changed my life and radically altered the way I see the world. Everywhere I go, I see images I want to photograph and tuck them away somewhere in my consciousness. I always carry a camera, I regret it every time I don’t.
We often go to Williamstown to have dinner or to see a movie at the independent theater there – we saw Tangerine today, a very poignant and compelling story of a friendship between two transsexuals in Los Angeles – and I passed one of my favorite barns, it was in Pownal, Vermont.
I’ve been driving past this beautiful old barn for several years, but it never worked out. The sun wasn’t on it, I didn’t have the right lens, I had forgotten to bring my camera, it was late or raining or snowing, or there were people out front. When this happens, I make a date with the image, I have learned to be patient. There is always another day, another photo.
So today, my date was to be. We drove through just as the afternoon sun came out from behind a cloud and hit the barn head on, I had my wide angle lens to capture the feel of the tilting barn and the curving old tree, they probably grew up together. I didn’t even see the man back in the woods on the left, he came out and glowered at me suspiciously – everybody thinks my big camera is suspicious – but said I could take the photo.
So I had a good date with a barn in Pownal, Vt. It isn’t what the camera sees, it’s what you see.
Five days from her surgery, Fate is slowly returning to work (stitches out Tuesday). I’m using Red to pin the sheep so that Fate can test them by using her eye and connecting with them. The trainers call it testing the sheep, our trainer/friend Jim McRae suggested it for Fate. It is working beautifully. No running or turning, but a lot of practice with her eye. More and more, she is backing the sheep up. When she is ready to return to work full-time next week, I think she will be strong and ready. Side by side, these two are pretty potent.
A month ago, I got an e-mail from Mary Jean. “You don’t know me,” she wrote, “but I work at Tractor Supply and I’m the one who knows where everything is. I’d like to take your writing class.” I invited her to join us today, and she dd, and she will fit in perfectly with this quite remarkable group of writers.
She has a farm, she calls herself a farmer of “useless animals,” she has battled the secret informers of the animal police and the challenges of living with animals and paying for them. She wants to write about the real life of real farms. Can’t wait to see her stuff. She has a transsexual rooster.
My writer’s group focuses on how to tell their stories to the world, to find their subjects and voices. It is an extraordinary class, full of depth, ideas, energy and support for one another. It is safe place, a place to risk opening up and experimenting. There is no right or wrong in my classes, just figuring out what we want to say and how we want to say it.
Writing classes ought not to be about what we do wrong, but what we do right. From the first day we set food in a classroom, we are told we are not spelling right, using grammar correctly, forming proper sentence structure, that our spelling is poor. Writing too often becomes frightening and wrought.
We meet every Saturday morning for two hours.
In my class, we talk about what people are doing right. I guess you could call it positive reinforcement teaching, although we are open and honest with one another, we give precious feedback.
We are shooting past everyone’s fears and phobias about writing in my class. We do not speak poorly of our work. Not them, not me. Today, beautiful stories about medicine, health care, idiosyncratic people in our lives, some poems, memories of loss and grief, tales of teacher struggle in the classroom. Beautiful times, we are making stories for a book we hope to publish next year.
Today Jen, a physician, talks about the difficulties doctors face caught in the tangle of modern health care, cost and insurance limits. Karen, a nurse-practitioner, talks about the frustrations of seeing smoking patients go on to get cancer. Cheryl is writing about the agony of a dedicated teacher trying to get help for a neglected child, Carol writes about the awful beauty of October, the month she fell in love, the month her great love died.
Stories of life, stories of our time. I am lucky to have students like this, lucky to get to teach them and try to help them, lucky to be gathering at Pompanuck Farm. A class like this is magic, and I hope to tell the story of it in photos.
