Day: March 15, 2016

I have deepened an important connection today and begun a remarkable collaboration. I have given myself the greatest gift I can offer myself: a new friendship, an opportunity to be creative, to support the power of the word to heal us and give meaning to my life.

Yesterday, I wrote about a friend, a woman who is a Zen teacher, a fiction and non-fiction writer  who lives in nearby Massachusetts.

I did not identify her, but wrote of her struggle to cope with the sudden illness of her beloved husband, who had a stroke a month ago. I had messaged her and asked if I could be of any help, and she wrote back and said she didn’t know how I could help. She said “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 is a writer, but she said one of her most painful losses was not having the time to write.

Her message touched me deeply.

I wrote back. I said “I think I can be  helpful to you, I think it would be valuable to others and incredibly good for you to write what you just sent me in  your e-mail, to help yourself figure it out and to help others. Great writing is often about vulnerability and authenticity and learning, I said, and perhaps I can help you by offering myself as a writing coach and an editor through this experience.

“Everything is a gift, as you know,” I wrote. “I propose you write about your life now when you can, hopefully daily and on your blog, and I will respond with suggestions and observations and help if you need it. Think about this and let me know.”

I wrote that people often tell me they don’t have time to write about the critical things in their life, and I often respond that it is my belief that they don’t have time not to.

My friend’s name is Eve Marko, she has given me permission to use it and tell some of her story here. She thought about my offer, and she said it had done her good instantly. She wanted to come up to Cambridge to have lunch with me at the Round House Cafe and talk about it. She same to the farm today and we met at the Round House and spent an extraordinary two hours together.

We connected very strongly and we agreed to collaborate on this crossroads of her life, to open a dialogue between us on creativity and healing, and also to assist her in writing about the impact her husband’s stroke has had on her life. She is a strong and independent person, a life-long spiritualist and a committed creative, and she believes her challenge is to care for her husband but also preserve her work and her life.

Beyond that, she can use her blog to journal about one of life’s most momentous experiences and about the gap that has opened  in her life between discipline and energy. I know we can all learn from this, Eve is a brilliant thinker and a profoundly gifted writer. She is also a loving human being, she has followed my work for some time and supported it in important ways. I’d like to do the same for her.

Please check out the very powerful piece she wrote about the night her husband fell down and he could not get up, and she could not get him up.

Eve had a classical education, she loves literary works and the idea of writing openly on a blog  – informal and different for her – worried her and troubled her, I could see. I believe she will come to embrace it, as I have. Blogs are, in many ways, a new form of the book.

This is a rich experience for me, and if I can  be honest, I am excited about the chance to work with Eve, who brings a deep spiritual experience as a Zen teacher and also as a writer to this chapter in her life.  She brought me another gift, beside herself, a book by Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, a beautiful and very spiritual account of his cancer.

I saw pain and sorrow, as well as laughter and joy, etched in Eve’s tired face this afternoon.  This evening, I opened this very poignant book and the first thing I read was on page 19:

“Sorrow is so woven through us,” wrote Winan, “so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. That is why, even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They  burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still born.”

Eve and I spent the afternoon together and she came to farm and spent a long time talking to Maria in her studio. Our friendship deepened, and instantly. I felt completely at ease with Eve, our time was marked by honesty and trust. And then, by love. We often connect with one another when we are opened up by life, this happened to me again and again.

She was enchanted by the dogs, Red reached right into her soul, and Fate had her grinning with her energy and enthusiasm.

Maria loved her as much as I did, and also felt the power of this connection and this collaboration. Eve bought two potholders, she has followed Maria’s work. She left with a jar of Scott Carrino’s sweet maple syrup.

I await Eve’s writing, I will have a conversation with her about joy and sorrow and share her writing, when and if she can. She will, I suspect, write often and well. She had many fears about sharing this journey on a blog, and we talked about those fears a long time.

We got, I think, to a beautiful place in the middle of sorrow, pain and the joy and glory of life. You are invited to join us. More to come.

Last year, our donkeys ate big chunks of the pasture gate – it was so cold and snowbound they couldn’t graze. This year, Chloe is eating the gate, just because she can. She’s even gnawing on the chicken wire we put up to keep her from eating the gate. Our handyman Ed Watkins has brought a new four-foot gate over, but it’s short by a foot or two so we need to add some fence poles.  There are always a hundred chores to do on a farm, they are never all done.

I was excited to see Maria working this morning on a new piece, one that combines three of the most enduring images of our farm right now, Minnie the three-legged barn cat, the Red Hen from the Gulley Farm, and the now famous Fiber Chair that Maria has been working on every morning for two years.

I’m not sure what Maria is planning for this piece – it could be a hanging piece or the launch of a new potholder series, but it is exciting to see the Fiber Chair come into its own in the lexicon of Maria’s art and imagery. I think that’s how art works. She said this morning that she doubts she could ever bear to part with the Fiber Chair, but she is ready to see it as an image in her ever-evolving art.

Minnie is one of the great characters of our farm. I got her as a feral kitten, Maria, then a friend, went with me to pick her up. She has grown up in barns with chickens and we think she thinks she is a chicken. Several years ago, she was attacked by some unseen predator and had one of her rear legs amputated. She is an odd and verbal creature, she and I have an uneasy relationship, she and Maria are crazy about one another. Most days, I love her, some days I find  her loud and annoying.

She is a sweet thing, and she loves to sit in the Fiber Chair. The Red Hen came to us at the outset of the Syrian refugee panic, and she became a symbol of that to us in some ways, she and Minnie are fast friends. The Red Hen likes to hang out with the barn cats, and Minnie loves to hang out with chickens, so the friendship works.

Maria will decide today, I think, what to do with this neat piece and how to sell it. You can follow it on her blog. I am always excited by Maria’s work, always so proud of her. One of the legion of Facebook busybodies and yentas messaged me the other day and asked if I wasn’t getting jealous of Maria’s rising star as an artist, blogger and writer. A sexist message, I think.

Boy, is she blind and foolish. My biggest danger is from bursting with pride. This triad is lovely, and meaningful, I vote for a hanging piece, but I can tell you I will not be asked.

A tree gives glory to God, wrote Thomas Merton, first of all by  being a tree. For in being what God means it to be, it is imitating an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.

The more it is like itself, the more it is like him. No two trees are alike, no two people are alike, and our individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary,  the perfection of each created thing lies in its own individual identity. Therefore, writes Merton, each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all of its own characteristics and private qualities, gives glory to life and to the very idea of God.

But putting God aside (which i often do when reading Merton), what about you? What about me?

We are different, I think, from the trees and most things in nature, because we can think. We have a conscience. We can always be better, even if we often are not. We can always face the truth about ourselves. It is not enough for us to be individual men and women, the news reminds us of this every day. For us, holiness is more than humanity.

Holiness, said Merton, means being ourselves. To be sacred, we  must found out who we are and of discovering our true selves.

I believe this is where creativity comes in, for in freeing our inner lights and following our adventure, in writing and painting and sewing and feeling, we found out who we are and we discover our true selves. That is what sanctity can mean for me, whether I believe in Merton’s God or not.

Merton believed that every one of us is shadowed by a false self, an illusory person. He or she hovers and dances around us all of our lives, taunting us and daring us to give in to fear, to live the lives of others, to give up on our adventures, and live the substitute lives of the hollow men.

Every tree is itself, they all inspire me to do the same.

 

The morning chore is a team thing, Team Bedlam, I call it. I do the water, Maria usually  brings the hay out in two trips, a few leaves for the horse and pony, then another trip for the sheep. It can get unruly at first, the sheep charge the big feeder because they are hungry and don’t understand the concept of waiting, so Red is the boundary enforcer, he gets between the two feeders and  keeps the sheep in their place so they don’t swarm me or Maria.

Fate keeps order in her own unique way, mostly by running circles around the sheep until they get dizzy. It seems to work, Red provides back-up. Team Bedlam is an effective, if not always entirely efficient, machine.