I appreciate my visits to the Sugar House at Pompanuck Farm. Scott is a gracious host, he gives me warm maple water, and today, hot toddies, a delicious blend of syrup and whiskey. As the afternoon wore on, the conversation just glowed, and I felt like a barn cat sitting in front of a wood stove. Once in awhile, I got up to stir the foam in the boiling syrup tank, but mostly, I had nothing much to but yak with Scott and drink my toddies. Men in my life have rarely taken the time to do this with one another, I suppose this is a Man Cave, even though women are very welcome and often present.
I doubt I will ever have a Sugar House – too expensive and complicated for me to deal with. There are men who build sugar houses and there are men who sit in them and drink hot toddies. I know who I am.
Maria and I share a passionate belief that there is really little or no distinction between our art and our life. Our art is our life, our life is our art. There is no distinction between my writing and my life, there is no distinction between Maria’s art and her life.
We are both fiercely committed to staying with our dream, which is the fulfillment of our creative destiny, for better or worse. I visited my friend Scott Carrino in his sugar house.
Scott has had an exhausting year or two, starting his much loved and wonderful cafe. He is struggling to make room for his creative life.
Scott is trying to stay with his dreams, all in the face of running a seven-day-a-week cafe and dealing with money and bills and staff and food and regulations and brutish hours and pressure – the travails of the new business, his Round House Cafe.
It is sugar season, and the sap is really gushing in the winter that wasn’t. Scott has retreated to his sugar house, where he is making gallons of his very popular brand of maple syrup. And thinking on his life.
He is also working on his writing and his music, two critical elements of his life that sometimes get lost in the hard business of making the cafe prosper. For all history, creatives have been confronted with this choice: how to do out work, how to pay our bills.
As the sap boiled and bubbled, Scott read me the first two verses if a new song he is writing, Like I Used To.. It touched me and made me think of the dream, and how we must never lose touch with it.
“I would love to feel like I used to – young, vibrant and immortal.
A youthful body that could go and go and serve me well.
I’d like to fee just like I used to, young, happy and free.
I’d like to feel just like I used to – impetuous at times,
At other times, thoughtful, I want to feel creative and passionate.
I’d love to feel the wonder of the world – like I used to.”
Scott very much feels the wonder of the world, and so do I, I love his song and am eager to see him finish it and perform it, perhaps in his own cafe. It comes to a very good place.
Wonder is an important part of our friendship. I know so many people who were not able to stay with their dreams, they got worried, tired, broke, discouraged. They live substitute lives. I hope to never give up on my dream or the wonder of the world.
A friend sent us this quote by Rilke about the great sculptor Auguste Rodin:
“…You see, Rodin has lived nothing that is not in his work. Thus it grew around him. Thus he did not lose himself; even in the years when lack of money forced him to unworthy work, he did not lose himself, because what he experienced did not remain a plan, because in the evenings he immediately made real what he had wanted during the day. Thus everything always became real. That is the principal thing – not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things. As Rodin did.”
This is what I wanted to tell Scott, that there is nothing in life that is not in our work. We can never lose ourselves, no matter how hard life gets, or how drained and overwhelmed we sometimes feel, because in our own time and place we can always make real what we had dreamed during the day. If he were young, happy and free, he could never have written those lyrics, or made such wonderful syrup.
In that way, understanding that we live nothing that is not in our work, everything becomes real. We may not always be able to stay in the dream, to be-in-the-mood, but we can always convert the dream into our lives, and our lives into the dream. Perhaps that is what creativity really is.
In that way, I will always feel young and vibrant and immortal, because in that way, it will always be true. The wonder of the world lives in our hearts and spirits, not our bodies and our struggles. It can never be taken from us or wither in the true course of life.
I was in Maria’s studio this afternoon, the door was left open a crack and I saw Fate’s Pirate Eye peering in. Fate needs to know everything that is happen, she wants to be in the absolute center of all activity. I love her pirate eye.
I’m happy to report that “Jane, The Goddess Of Perpetual Life,” the latest wall hanging manifestation of the art of my feminist/pagan/witch wife, has been completed and is for sale. Details on Maria’s website. $150. Maria is especially fond of this one.
I think it is only in retrospect, only in looking back, that I have come to see clearly what it is that animals have done for me. When I was a small boy, I got up on a freezing cold morning and walked to school in the dark to be the first in line to get a free puppy.
I had to fight an older kid, who knocked me to the ground – my first fight, and only the janitor’s intervention saved me and got the puppy, who I named Lucky. I was a bedwetter and a frightened boy, especially lonely at night, and Lucky took up the task of so many dogs, keeping me company, loving me, comforting me.
Lucky was not lucky himself, he died of distemper a couple of months after I got him, my father took me out for ice cream and told me that Lucky was sick and was going to live on a farm in Massachusetts where sick dogs go to get better. I knew the minute he opened his mouth that Lucky was dead, and that was my first lesson in the folly of lying to children.
I also learned from Lucky that I could be loved, that the things I love could die and go away, and that I could find other things to love, especially dogs. Lucky taught me more than he could ever have imagined.
I got my Labs Julius and Stanley, on an impulse. I had just become a writer, my wife then bought a desk and put it in the bedroom and urged me to write my first book, which was a novel. Writing is a lonely life, a solitary life, especially at the beginning when it is mostly about longing and rejection..
Julius and Stanley defined the experience, they walked with me in the morning, when I needed to think, they lay by my feet when I wrote. They seemed to think it would all work out and I decided to believe them. They came with me on my year along in the country, a powerful harbinger of things to come. I think the year would have been unbearably lonely and strange without them. I don’t think I could have survived it by myself.
When I moved to the Bedlam Farm 1.0, Rose came with me, and Orson. Rose went to work up there, she helped me manage that beautiful place and gave me the courage to slug it out. She watched my back, saved my life, protected the farm. Orson came with me too, he taught me something else, that having a dog is an awful responsibility which sometimes asks us to truly decide what kind of people we are. When he bit and harmed three different people, including a child riding down the hill on a bike, I stopped spending money on behaviorists, trainers, holistic healers and shamans and put him down. The decision, which caused many people to despise me, was a good and important one.
It was the beginning of my search for an ethical life, for an understanding of what it means to do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. That is a huge gift to get from a dog. Because I loved Orson so much, killing him was the most important decision I ever made. Loving dogs, I saw, did not encompass the harming of human life, at least not for me.
Simon the donkey just opened me up like a can of beans, the process of healing him, earning his trust, loving him, transformed me, I took a giant step in love, I opened up to new experience. When Maria came with Frieda, this remarkable dog opened me up to love. Izzy became my first hospice dog, he helped me understand mortality and compassion.
Red arrived as my soulmate, he is simply my partner in new experience. And Fate has come, the Joy Dog, to remind me what it means to love life and live it.
The list is longer of course, Winston the Rooster, Mother the Barn Cat, Chloe the pony, the sheep, the barn cats. I remember when a dog trainer told me a few years ago that if I wanted to have great dogs, I had to be a better human. She was so right. Each animal I have lived with has enriched me, challenged me to be more open, more loving, to learn about myself, my frustration, my fear and anger.
Each animal has, in fact, made me better. I am grateful to Lucky, he lived a short while but did a great deal of good. An inspiration for me. When I look back on my life, I see animals marking my passage, challenging me to understand who I am and who I wish to be.
