Day: October 25, 2015

A number of people sent me a link to a New York Times story earlier this week about Lady Gaga And The Life Of Passion. When five or six people send me the same link and say they feel it would be of interest to me, I tend to pay attention to it, they are seeing something in someone else’s ideas that they see in me.

The piece was about a tribute to Lada Gaga who was receiving an award from a group called Americans For The Arts and she was being celebrated as a person of passion living a life of passion. She told the group she always wanted to be a constant reminder to the universe of what passion looks like. What it sounds like and feels like.

The writer of the piece, David Brooks, wrote elegantly that he supposed that “people who live with passion start out with an especially intense desire to complete themselves. We are the only animals who are naturally unfinished. Who have to bring ourselves to fulfillment, to integration, and to coherence.”

They construct themselves inwardly, he wrote, by expressing themselves outwardly. A life of passion happens when an emotional nature meets a consuming vocation. People of passion  have high levels both of vulnerability and courage.

Brooks said something else of importance, I thought: “To be passionate is to put yourself in danger.” It asks us to defy the very nature of life and belief all around us. Living with this danger requires a courage that takes two forms. First, people with passion must have the courage to dig down and explore and expose the issues and struggles that shape their lives. Secondly, people with passion have the courage to be themselves with abandon. To be authentic.

We all have a theory of ourselves, many of us  are taught by a society that celebrates conformity and safety, not individuality and risk. We are told from our very first day in school that our theories are neither important nor interesting. Our system of politics does not care much what we think and believe, a source of so much rage for so many.

From the pilgrims in Salem to CEO’s In New York to the blockheads in Congress, we are warned again and again not to stray too far from convention, it is bad for the system. It can cost you your head. The world, we are told, is ruled by a left and a right, and if you choose another path, there is nowhere for you to walk, no one to listen.

Maria and I seek a life of passion. Our emotional natures have met work that we love. We are constructed inwardly to express ourselves outwardly.

I have written more than one best-selling book and it was almost always a shock to me that anyone outside of my own small circle would be much interested in what I do or believe. Every book I write, every blog post, every photograph puts me in danger, I chose to expose myself to a wide and sometimes unfriendly world. For someone with my troubles, that is almost the definition of vulnerability. But the irony is that I have never felt safer.

There is great reward as well as risk in a life of passion.  I try to draw the courage to be myself, to live in my skin, to fend off the anger, judgments and challenges of the wider world. Being authentic is the safest place for me, because if you are honest about your life, your fears, your flaws, then you need not ever fear exposure or discovery. If there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear, there is nothing to find. There is almost nothing anyone could say about me that I haven’t said first, and often.

I was once a child of many secrets, I am now a man of none. What you see here is what there is, God help us all.

People tell me I am too hard on myself, but perhaps there is some calculated security in being one’s own toughest critic. You can beat all the others to the punch. Unlike so many people, I do believe in the subconscious, sometimes I feel like a deepwater submarine, trawling the depths of my soul.

Sharing my life and work on the blog has given me the greatest strength and grounding I have ever had. I might fear many things, but I do not have to fear the tyranny of the mob, of other people’s opinions. I stand or fall on my own. The worst is passed, I think, I am no longer trying to walk in a whirlwind. I am beginning to understand my own skin and living in it.

At the awards ceremony, Lady Gaga was praised for being her own unique self, she acknowledges her own contradictions and throws them before the world. She makes herself the work of art. Our culture lives in fear and faux obligations – we must make so much money in order to have so many things, smother our passions or hide them from the world. Many scramble to acquire a shallow notion of security that they don’t need or ultimately don’t even want. One of the many lessons of my hospice work comes from encountering so many people who have dedicated their entire lives to ending up in a place and a life they never meant to be and don’t want.

They gave up a life of passion for fear. Do not, ever, I am reminded again and again, live a life centered on making enough to achieve an existencedictated by people who wish to profit from it.

A life of passion is not ever a life of fear. This is the very question I asked myself a few years ago, when I felt my life was spiraling out of control and into a dark well with no way out. I asked myself what might I be and what might I do if I weren’t so afraid?

And I have been doing it ever since.

 

So I went up to bed the other night, and I thought Fate was in her crate for the night, where she usually sleeps and Maria usually puts her. I got almost to the top of the stairs when a white blur came up behind me and sailed into the bedroom and hopped up easily onto our bed. When I got into the room she was curled up in a little ball at the end of the bed, closing her eyes.

So we agreed to let her stay there, it was a cold and windy night. She didn’t move a muscle all night, no dummy she, and when the sun came into the room around 6:30 a.m., she got up stretched, crawled between Maria and me, licked Maria on the nose and then started to chew on my ear lobe.

I got up and let her and Red out. Fate will be sleeping in bed from now on,  I think. Maria said she might not have room to stretch her legs out, but I said she was a very short person and it shouldn’t be a problem. That didn’t sit too well, but I think Fate has made the fateful move. She acted as if she was born there. And whenever Fate is still for more than a few minutes, you know something important has occurred.

Other than making love to my wife, there is nothing in the world that makes me happier than to see a gifted, hard-working and worthy human being meet their dreams and find their purpose in life. Rachel Barlow has been working as hard as anyone I have ever known to be a full-time writer and artist. She has suffered debilitating fear and depression, she has fought through it every day, she has written beautifully about her bi-polar disorder.

She blogs, writes short stories, does cartoons, sketches, watercolors.

Sometimes, when I talked to Rachel on a dark winter’s day, I wondered (and she wondered) if she would make it through the night. I know now that she will always make it through the night, she is passionately determined to live out her live,  do what she lives, find her creative path and permit it to ground her and guide her and lead her through her life. She’s in a pretty good space right now.

Rachel has been a student of mine for nearly five years, and she is breaking through. She is selling her beautiful, touching and wonderfully written and illustrated paintings, watercolors, cartoons and sketches almost as quickly as she can make them. You can see them and buy them online, I’d hurry. She is hot.

She credits Maria with being an enormous inspiration to her, for helping her to see that it is possible to build a life of an artist if you stay with it, follow your heart and work hard every day. That seems to be a magic formula for almost anything worthwhile.

I have a wonderful Facebook-connected group called the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm, Rachel is one of the members. We have, of course, had some tensions on the group, especially about people called “lurkers,” an Internet term for people who come onto blogs and websites, but never post or reply to comments or  reveal themselves.

I am sometimes accused of being harsh, even cruel, for my impatience with the scores of lurkers who join the group but are too cautious and fearful to contribute. This is an old issue of mine, I have problems with people who are content to watch other people work while people like Rachel battle their fear and depression every single day of their lives and contribute almost every single day.

I believe in encouraging those who want to work, not those who can’t or won’t. They have to get there themselves, or find the right help, as I did. I created the group to encourage people who are often afraid but determined to create. Perhaps this frustration with the silent members of the group – I don’t ever toss them out,I just grumble about them from time to time –  is something I should grow out of, but to be honest, I don’t think I will. And to be even more honest, I don’t really want to.

We all deal with fear, every creative person on the earth, few people more so than me. Like  Rachel, I fought it every day for most of my life. I don’t fight with it much any more, thanks to a long line of shrinks, therapists, social workers and spiritual counselors. You can put Humpty Dumpty back to together again.  I am comfortable with who I am and what I believe. Rachel is an inspiration to me. She evokes Joseph Campbell’s definition of an artist: she completes work.

Rachel brought a big case of her soft and touching water colors to our Open House, she sold every one of them. Saturday, at the writing class at Pompanuck Farm, Rachel unveiled her newest idea – an Alphabet Book about parenting for adults. She showed us the first draft, the first sketch for her letter A: A is for All Nighter – Attending Ailing Anklebiters.

Her project for our class will be bringing the letters to us for guidance and feedback and encouragement. We are ready. I’m happy the share the very first rough  sketch for the book, as yet untitled. I can’t wait to cheer Rachel on as she brings this one home. Go take a look at her work for yourself.

We love having a horse, but they are a lot of work and can cost a lot of money. We take the responsibility of animals seriously here. Maria tends to the pony every day. She cleans the mud out of his hooves, trims mane and tail, brushes his coat. As willful as Chloe can be, she seems to love getting groomed. She seems to love Maria.

When I first went to New York City to look at the New York Carriage Horses, I was struck by how responsible the owners and drivers were when it came to caring for their horses. They are brushed and groomed daily, given fresh hay and water, their stables are cleaned frequently. They get treats, attention, good work to do.

Chloe and the other animals on the farm teach me that we need a broader understanding of animals than  simply  rescuing them and saving them from abusive people.That is too narrow a prism through which to understand animals. In some ways, it is too easy for people to acquire animals, in other ways it is too difficult.

Chloe has enriched our lives and given Maria strength and grounding. In return, she gets faithful and loving care, every day of her life. I think the same is true four our dogs and for all of our animals.

Chloe and Maria talk to one another all of the time, and in many different ways. Once in awhile, Maria gives her pony a kiss on the nose. When you talk to horse people about a mare poney – Chloe is  a Haflinger-Welsh – they are big working horse ponies, they roll their eyes. Oh well, they say, ponies…well, ponies are ponies. They are smart, temperamental, sweet and affectionate, willful, independent and unpredictable.

Hmm, that sounds a lot like my wife. I am learning a lot watching Maria and Chloe talk to each other. The are, when all is said and done, speaking the same language.