Day: March 13, 2016

I have a friend I rarely see but feel very close to, she is a deeply authentic and spiritual person, and has always supported me and my work and seemed to understand both in a way that is valuable to me.

She is a competent and strong, person, she wrote me a short but lovely note  today saying that “all of my life I thought I had the discipline and energy to take care of things; that’s not true now, and the gap is more visible than ever.”

She wrote me in response to my offer to help her, her husband of many years has been stricken with a serious illness, she is struggling to cope with caring for him. She said she couldn’t think of any help I could offer her, but I responded with a suggestion: that I be her writing coach and editor and she writes about her struggle suddenly to live in the gap between energy and discipline, trauma can often radically and suddenly expand that troubling space.

She said no one criticizes her for failing to meet her own sense of this overwhelming need but her, and this tells me she would benefit greatly from hearing of the experience of others and sharing hers. I can testify that this is a profound and transformative experience. I learn every day that everyone on the earth experiences this same feeling and many can see to the other side of it.

I have not heard back from her yet, I hope she considers the offer, I believe writing in challenging times is profoundly healing and also helpful, to the writer, to others. I learned this when I chose to write about my breakdown and subsequent depression around the time I began this blog. I was stunned by the help this writing seemed to give to so many people experiencing the same or worse. This experience taught me to be authentic, and to share my struggles as well as my triumphs.

People often tell me they do not have time to write in times of crisis and struggle, I always respond that they don’t have time not to.

It was hard for me to share my pain and great sense of failure, and is hard still, but is among the most important and healing things that I have done.

I remember walking along the beautiful path in the first Bedlam Farm and for six weeks my panic was so strong I took pills for six weeks to calm me down and keep my mind from spinning. I hated taking them and have not taken any since, but they did help me regain control of my perspective and my emotional meltdown.

On the path, I clearly heard a voice inside of my own head telling me, “Jon, You are not God, you cannot control the world or alter the nature of fate. Life will happen to  you, as it will happen to every living thing, you can only do the best you can in the short time you are here.”

I hope my friend writes about her struggle, I would be glad to help her if she needs it. Finding our voice is healing, when we share our deepest fears, they somehow become smaller and more comfortable to live with.

 

Fate’s idea of Meditation Day differed a bit from ours. We sat in the Round House at the Pompanuck Farm Institute we meditated, read, talked, rested in the most peaceful way. Fate jumped into the fish pond, chased chipmunks, and in the middle of our long walk in the nearby state forest, brought us rawhide she had hidden there months ago, she plunged happily into every mud puddle she could find.

Red, as always, watched in puzzlement. He would no sooner jump into a pond or chase a chipmunk than try to fly, these two are yin and yang. Fate was so cranked by the woods that I put her in her crate for awhile, she didn’t sleep much.

We had the most beautiful day, away from computers, news, cellphones, e-mails, Facebook and any kind of work. It was a blissful kind of time, we just didn’t stay there long enough. Solitude and privacy are essential to spirituality and self-awareness. Next time, we will spend a full and long day there in meditation and contemplation. We both reported that we felt as calm and peaceful and I also thought about how I would react to the disturbing political turmoil raging around the country in new and different ways.

I want to understand it, rather than argue about it or condemn things. There are plenty of people lining up to do both, I have nothing to contribute to either. As a former political reporter, I see, as  you do, that something important is happening, and from time to time, I hope to write about it in a thoughtful and helpful way.

My blog is not the news of the world it is, in many was, a  respite from the world, and I respect that and will continue it. I have no desire to join the angry din. Can’t quite ignore it either, so I’ll try once in awhile to be useful. Tall order.

It is so helpful to step out of the stream once in awhile and take a look at your own life and spirit. I have been anxious lately, especially at night, and I imagine it is the political news that is doing that, so I don’t wish to completely ignore it. There are many lessons and parables in the lives of animals, that is a major focus for me, a great teacher.

I brought an especially apt book with me to Pompanuck, “While There is TIme,” by Rick Bass, a brilliant writer who sets his books and stories in the environment, and did so long before it was fashionable. It would be short-changing him to say he was an environmental writer, he is an extraordinarily gifted writer. His stories remind us of the damage we humans are doing to the world, and the dwindling time that remains for us to try to fix it.

The mystical idea of the wild is disappearing rapidly, so is the wild within all of us. I could feel it at Pompanuck. The book is quite wonderful, I recommend it highly.

We walked for  hours in the beautiful and remote woods of Pompanuck and the nearby state forest, we walked through hundreds of spent gun shells and were visited by a truckload of men in camoflauge with big guns, which they fired off (illegally at this time of year) into the woods as soon as we began to walk away. Our walk back was accompanied by the sound of heavy gunfire, it rattled us and the dogs.

Otherwise, the walk in the woods was sylvan, the meditations purifying, our strong and wonderful connection to each other reaffirmed. We could not have been more comfortable or felt more at peace.

We are back in the world so the challenge to remain peaceful begins anew. Tonight, we are bringing pizza over to the Gulleys at their farm and sharing dinner with them as soon as they are done with the second milking. Todays’ Bejosh blog report is about the farm’s crippled chicken, Maddy.

H.L. Mencken wrote often of The Democratic Man, his noble, compassionate and decent citizen,  essential to the functioning of democracy. This man (or women) was rare in his time, and rare in our time. I was thinking this morning that the political news that bombards us daily now also challenges me to think about the Democratic man and the idea of liberty and to rise to the moment, in so far as I can.

The Democratic Man is a citizen of honor. He is honest, compassionate, rational. He  rejects cruelty and conflict. He is often lonely.

I read some Mencken and Jefferson this morning to refresh me, and to draw out my better self and I absorb the daily drama of the news. I want to vote with my life, not with my mouth. Politics is not an argument for me, but a way to be, a way to think. Freedom is not an abstract thing to me, but the very core of my life. Freedom is about everything we want and need to be fulfilled.

Liberty, in its truest sense, is a concept that lies beyond the reach of many of the people who talk the loudest about it. For some, freedom is the right to choose between weak and angry people, to shout for the angriest and most dishonest. Genuine liberty, said Jefferson, demands a particular kind of courage. The man who lives it, said Jefferson, must be willing to fight for it. Blood, he said, is its natural manure.

The free man or woman, I think,  has broken free of the mob, in our time called the “left” or the “right,” and has won a small and precious territory from the many forces seeking to tell us how to live and die what it will cost to be safe. The Democratic man knows his territory – for me, it is my small farm – and is prepared to defend it and to make it support him.

The Democratic Man does not watch the news and tremble and post angry messages on social media. He summons the courage to be honorable and live a good and free life.

The Democratic Man believes, as Henry David Thoreau believed, that we each have to make our own way and learn from our own mistakes, the Democratic Man was conceived before Facebook. Life was not about sharing, but about living.

All around us are enemies of a kind, people pressuring us to live in their way, not ours. We can not always depend on other men and women to stand with us, because they have their own important struggles to wage. Everyone has it worse off than I do.

“The vast majority of persons,” said Sir Francis Galton, “have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.” It is just five or six generations back, say historians, that four-fifths of the people of the world, black or white, were slaves, in reality if not always in literal name.

Liberty is a baby, still learning to walk, easy to talk about, difficult to grasp. We were slaves much longer than we have been free.

Jefferson reminded us that democracy is messy and often ugly. It is not a perfect system, it is simply the best system yet devised for people to resolve their differences and have a shot at being free. In a democracy, no one gets everything they want, every one is supposed to get some of what they want. It’s the alternative – endless war and slaughter and agony – that is unacceptable.

We love democracy until it happens, then we throw up our hands in fear and outrage.

When people cannot be free, when the rich and the powerful forget their promises and responsibilities, then the mob rebels and revolts.In the Corporate Nation, many people have become slaves again, to lives without meaning and work without security. They wish to be free again, they have lost faith in liberty. The rich have to decide whether to fight or back away. Every revolution in the history of the world was started by an angry mob, almost always in a city.

One person at a time, is my notion. My task is to live my own life freely and openly, to defend my precious territory and ask it to support me. I am a warrior for liberty, for me, this is not a hoary patriotic term but the most important thing in my life. To be free to love, create, be fulfilled.

Mencken is a good guide to democracy, an idealistic cynic and realist. Politics, he said, is the trade of playing up our natural poltroonery – of scaring us half to death, and then proposing to save us. Free people often wonder at the slavishness of others, not always seeing that there is most often no difference between us.

He reminds me that democracy is not a beautiful thing or a rational thing or a peaceful thing. It is just the best thing, the only thing that has ever even thought about bringing us liberty. So I want to be the Democratic Man, rejecting the mob, a citizen of honor.

Today, a gift for Maria, and also, to be truthful, for me. We are having a day of silent meditation, walking in nature, being together, celebrating our lives, and re-committing ourselves to one another and to the way we hope and wish to live. In a time of conflict and anxiety for many, we wish to ground ourselves.

We are going off to Pompanuck Farm, a beautiful and safe place for us to retreat for a bit and center ourselves.

This is something we do from time to time, it is always beautiful and affirming. We will spent the day walking in the woods, being with our dogs, loving each other. We will have some hours in silent contemplation, some time to read, some time to think and hold hands and count our many blessings. We are so lucky to have one another, to love one another, to do our work, to have our friends, to be growing and learning and changing together.

Here, at this point in our lives, we are strong and we are hoping to do good, bringing our elixir back to the world, sharing what little we know, hungry to learn more. This morning, more angry and disturbing news. This seems to be a new and daily ritual of our lives, I feel for those who are upset and troubled.  Today, I re-commit to voting with my life, not my mouth. By being fulfilled, compassionate, open to the ideas of others.

We will be back home this afternoon, enriched, I believe, and at peace.