I stood in the pasture yesterday and watched Maria brush her pony Chloe, who was filthy from walking in mud and rolling in dirt. Chloe stands easily and quietly when she is being brushed, as she does. I saw this circle of love in my head. Red was lying in the background watching the sheep intently, as he does. Fate was watching Maria and the pony, occasionally glancing over at the sheep and running in circles around them, as she does.
Maria had a look of fierce concentration as she brushed the dirt off of her horse, who she loves. We need to pay attention to nature and animals if we wish to know them and care for them well. It seemed a beautiful tableau to me, of connection and harmony, everyone in their place, at ease doing what they do. Such moments are special to me healing and powerful in their own quiet way.
I received a letter from Jennifer Garside today, she is from Greenfield, Iowa, and spoke in the plain and direct voice I have come to often associate with people from the Midwest.
She sent me a $20 bill neatly tucked into a plain white envelope with a letter typed on a computer. The letter was in my post office box, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816
“Your writing about community has been so inspiring,” she wrote, from Joshua Rockwood to Blue Star to the Roundhouse Cafe.”
Living in a small Iowa town, she said, the idea of community touched her. And she knows whereof she speaks.
“After my grandpa got out of the Army in World War II he started his own store, little by little adding televisions, radios, appliances, carpet and furniture building his business into three buildings in our town. It provided a comfortable living for my grandpa and grandma and they were able to buy a farm and he was able to accomplish his lifelong goal of being a farmer, not starting until his 50’s but returning to what he felt was his roots.”
After Jennifer’s grandparents retired in the 1990’s, they sold their buildings and closed their businesses. There is no way in today’s big box store world, Jennifer wrote, “that a little mom and pop business like theirs would have survived.”
Jennifer wrote that she is not a person with a lot of money, but she likes to give “because it truly makes you feel better to give than to receive.” Projects like the gofundme effort on behalf of Lisa and Scott Carrino are her favorite, “because you feel like you are actually helping “real people” instead of it going to a “large non-profit charity where very little of your donation every actually goes to help the cause.”
I find this sentiment expressed frequently about crowdsourcing, people want to know precisely where their money is going, and they have grown somewhat wary of large charities and non-profits, they are not really sure where their money is going. They like to give to people.
Jennifer Garside has been following my blog from the beginning, she wrote, “and my favorite part of the journey is that you now have a community. I’m sure you feel it too and I know in very early blogs you always mentioned not feeling like you belonged anywhere! Now Cambridge is your community and that is a great gift. I think of how many people in this country never get to experience that feeling and so many who don’t even know what they are missing.”
This was a wise and poignant letter, it meant a great deal to me. I remember writing on my blog soon after I started it, and when I was in the midst of a powerful and debilitating breakdown and depression, that I did not feel as if I belonged anywhere. I knew almost no one in my small and remote town of West Hebron, I had isolated myself from almost everyone – my family, my neighbors, the friends I once had and lost.
I roamed my 90-acre farm, writing my books, herding the sheep with Rose, in awe of the powerful blizzards and storms that swept in and enveloped me.
it was before I met Maria, and I had lived more or less alone for six years.
My wife at the time, a very good person, loved her life in New York and had no interest in moving to the country. Our marriage was struggling by then, although neither of us wanted to admit it. I was on my hero journey, I couldn’t quite see it.
We told each other often that we loved one another so much we each wanted the other to have the life they wanted. And so, our marriage began to wither and die. There was some truth to that, I think, but we lived apart for nearly six years, we separated and divorced after 35 years of marriage.
In a good marriage, of course, and if you are well, you do not live 400 miles apart.
I was not well. The divorce was the most painful thing I had ever experienced, and I felt a kind of loneliness and depth of loneliness I never imagined. Until Maria appeared like an angel, and my life began anew.
That was a very hard time for me, as Jennifer sensed, and I almost did not survive it. It is remarkable to hear from someone like Jennifer, who has never written or messaged me before, and who has been following me for seven years. And who is happy for me to find community. It is true, we have found a community in Cambridge, it is very important and I was one of those people who did not know what I was missing.
Meeting people is not easy for me, and I find my friendships and community slowly and uncertainly. But they are coming, it is happening.
I am so grateful to you, Jennifer, for sending me your hard-earned money, it was not necessary, and for offering you perspective. I love getting letters like yours, they let me know that words matter and my stories matter, I will think of you out there in a small town in Iowa with a cup of coffee and my blog in the morning. What a sweet thought.
I imagine you know what you are talking about when it comes to community, from your grandpa to your small Iowa town, and the big box store world we all live in. Letters are special, they take time and thought and love. Thank you.
My Post Office Box is P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816
In the past few months, Donald Trump has entered the consciousness of me – I am allergic to most politics – and many other people, everyone I know is speaking about him. So I wanted to write about how I am coming to terms with what I call Trumpism. Many people are concerned about it.
I was a political reporter for awhile, I wrote for the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other places, the politics I wrote about then has no bearing much on the politics of today, my experience is of little relevance. I don’t think much of the old days. None of what I read about or see on the news would have been imaginable just a few short years ago.
I ought to say that I have no appetite for the left or the right thing. I don’t hate people who disagree with me, unless they do so hatefully. I don’t tell other people what to think, what to do, or who to vote for. I don’t argue my beliefs on Facebook or anywhere else, I am a sort of Henry David Thoreau type of recluse, I believe in minding my own business and living my own life and not thinking that just because I believe something, everyone else ought to.
This writing is my personal journey to try and understand what is happening around me, I’m sharing it so I can understand it, not so everybody else will agree or disagree.
I am not writing to endorse Trump or attack him, rather to share how I am coming to experience him, since he is now in my face and in my head and on my screens daily. He is clearly not going anywhere soon. I am always drawn to writing about what everyone else is thinking about.
I am not an analyst or political commentator. It is not your business to know who I am going to vote for, nor is it my business to know who you support. And truthfully, I don’t care. I know this makes me strange, but then, if you read the blog, you probably already know that. If you are angry about politics, and hate one side or the other, this is probably not the place for you to be.
Trump has shocked me with his vicious and continuing attacks on women, I find that offensive and also sad, because his hateful speech towards women and Muslims and anyone who disagrees with him is offensive by itself, but it also completely obscures the very powerful issues he has raised and revealed.
Writing these days, I see that I am channeling Wendell Berry and Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders) at the same time. A strange mix. While Berry is a poet, farmer, author, environmentalist, and a gentleman, Trump is none of those things. But they both approach the same important subject (for me) from opposite ends of the political spectrum: “What are people for?”
Since World War II, and then most dramatically starting in the 1960’s, we have seen millions of good jobs leave the country and thousands of communities destroyed in exchange for the promise that our opening up to a global economy and linking to other parts of the world would benefit our entire economy and everyone in it.
It has not, of course, as both Berry and Trump (and Sanders) point out, the global economy has lowered some prices and greatly benefited a handful of people at the very top of the economic pile. It has left wounded and stranded vast numbers of working and middle-class Americans, who have not been aided or helped in any way to deal with the loss of their work, dignity, peace of mind and community. They promised trickle-down economics, but there hasn’t really even been a drip.
There was much talk of re-training and of so many new opportunities everyone would find new work. That didn’t happen either.
Enormous swathes of America have been devastated by the flight of jobs and businesses overseas, and as we now know, corporations and the wealthy have profited beyond imagination, almost everyone else has suffered. People feel misled, betrayed and abandoned. In other cultures, they would have taken to the streets long ago with sticks and torches. They may yet. I think it was hard for many of them to believe what was happening. The credibility of leaders has been profoundly damaged.
And now a presidential candidate comes along who seems as angry as they were, and who reflected and mirrored and spoke to their anger.
The big mistake, said one Stanford economist I read regularly, was not in signing trade agreements, but in not taking any responsibility for aiding the people damaged and displaced by them. Many were – are – older workers, not trained for the tech revolution and were simply discarded. They have been struggling ever since, they live in fear and have no reason to hope.
There was this feeling that it would all work itself out, but that turned out to be the way in which they white-washed the damage and brushed it under the rug.
That, wrote the economist, is the fault of both parties. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have grasped the scale of the suffering caused by the rush to the new global economy or done much about it. Everyone who lives in a town or city in rural or middle America sees it every day.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seem to have understood this and have made this central themes in their campaigns (Wendell Berry has been writing about it for years). They both are doing much better than anyone predicted. In a sense, I would have expected a democratic socialist to fare even worse than a foul-mouthed and sexist billionaire.
That is how upset people are. Most, according to the polls, are not, in fact, driven by ideology. They don’t care about the left or the right either (bless them for that), they are tired of getting screwed by rich people and politicians.
Hilary Clinton was a champion of many of these trade agreements, and her Republican opponents are still talking about tax cuts for the rich and cutting Social Security and Medicare. They don’t seem to have gotten it yet, even in this traumatic year. It might take a revolution.
No one, including me for sure, seems to have grasped the depth and anger and devastation this arrogance and indifference has caused – to farmers, industrial workers, small businesses, factories and countless cities and towns. We do seem to know about the wealth it has brought – to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and other cities who have been able to attract new kinds of businesses that need new kinds of information workers, not factory workers. Our media does much better fawning over the rich than talking to the poor.
There is no greater formula for political upheaval in all of human history than when great masses of people to suffer while their rich Lords and Masters and political leaders get obscenely rich right in front of them, all the while making feckless promises they can’t keep. The mean income of members of congress is over a million dollars a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Billionaires have been given the keys to the kingdom by the corrupt and greedy high priests of the Temple.
This is all so strange, Karl Marx’s wet dream about capitalism’s self-destructiveness slowly coming true. Jesus would have been lighting torches, calling on his disciples to pick up their swords and head for the Capitol.
For me, the real issue isn’t whether or not Donald Trump is a pig – oink, oink – but who will try to solve the issues he has raised and the candidacy he has despoiled by soiling himself almost daily. He is pulling the plug on a lot of rage and seems not to care where it goes.
The Republicans have their set of beloved issues, the Democrats have theirs. I can’t say I’m wild about either the left or the right, people who put labels on their head might as well label them “I am lazy and dumb.”
Nobody was talking about the issues of the once comfortable and relatively prosperous middle and working class, even as it steadily disintegrated. People are talking about it now. It.
I’ve always loved Wendell Berry and I do not love Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has got to be kidding, loveable as he is (single payer health care for everyone and tuition too?).
But I will give the devil his due.
Trump shamed and exposed the professional consultants and the elite politicians and the media all at the same time, all were lazy, greedy, unknowing and asleep.
It is not in the least surprising that large numbers of people are furious and also desperate for a radical change that will address their very legitimate fears and troubles, as political leaders are supposed to do but have not done. They are in a panic to find anyone – anyone – who might actually change things for them.
This does not make me want to vote for Donald Trump. His offensive and divisive behavior is not, I think, something I will ever be able to get past. He is, to me, utterly unfit for so complex a job as heading a big and complicated nation. I think if I voted for him, I would be pissing on the very idea of the country I love.
For me, our national soul is a generous and decent one. I believe that will reveal itself.
If I voted for someone who says the things he says about Muslims and women and the wives of his opponents then I could not look myself in the mirror every day. I understand that some people feel differently, and they will have to look in their own mirrors and make their own decisions.
The people supporting Donald Trump and shouting at his rallies are launching their own kind of revolution, and it seems inevitable and also shocking that he was the first one to really see it. I haven’t figured that out, how a golf-obsessed and ostentatiously vulgar billionaire could see what almost everyone else missed.
For years, I’ve seen Donald Trump in the same vein as I’ve always viewed Hugh Hefner, a strange American celebrity curiosity that no one could possibly take seriously. I could follow their antics and posturing from time to time, but I never ever really thought about them. I never had to think about them.
So I was quite wrong about that, and today, everyone is taking Donald Trump seriously, he is the talk of the nation.
He is driving the truck. He understands media in a way very few politicians ever will.
I don’t care to spend the year ranting about him and wringing my hands, I do care to try and understand what is happening. I think I’m beginning to grasp it, my search have brought me into contact with a number of supporters of Donald Trump whose lives have just been shattered by fear and change.
And my readings of H.L. Mencken have also helped me. This is not new, he said, from time to time savvy populist bubbleheads – he called them Boobus Americanus – rise up to speak to rage and fear and people and they invariably blow themselves up, since they have no idea what to do beyond spawning hysteria and pitching to hate.
I think I see history repeating itself, this particular strain in the American psyche. Mencken wrote about it for years.
So that’s as far as I’ve gotten. If I were sitting and having a cup of coffee with Mr. Trump, I would probably tell him what I imagine many other people are telling him: you have some important things to say, and many people are listening to them. Why did you crap it all up with so much hateful and repulsive garbage?
Then the answer hit me, of course, it is really quite obvious. Trump obviously saw himself in much the same way I saw him, as a famous oddity nobody needed to take seriously. I’m fairly sure he is as shocked about it as I am, as most of are. Now, he is scrambling to be taken seriously, he is pounding his fists on the table and demanding it, threatening us with riots if we don’t go along.
I don’t think it works that way. Now, it’s probably too late for him. Most people don’t want to ever take him seriously. There is something very reassuring about that. And also something sad.
So there. When I write something I learn how I feel about it, I come to terms with that. Many of my friends and former friends have never understood that. But it always works for me.
Joshua Rockwood came to Cambridge today to see me at the Round House Cafe, he invited Ken Norman, a farrier who also supported him during his hard and frightening struggle with the secret informers of the animal rights movement who nearly destroyed his farm last year. I was glad to see Joshua, I miss him, he is a cherished friend.
(I am going to be speaking at West Wind Acres Farm on June 18, at the Open House Scheduled there.)
Joshua survived that hard struggle last year, won it handily and completely. The charges against him were false and unjust, he should never have been arrested on those 13 counts of animal neglect and cruelty. Farmers often tell me that struggles with the animals rights movement are never really over, the justice system seems to be an annoyance for them, as is truth and rationality. Many people have told Joshua to expect to be harassed and monitored for years, if not forever.
There was a surreal moment for me, when Scott Carrino, the owner of the cafe came over to stand with Joshua and Ken Norman. All three men have used crowdsourcing projects to help them when they were in need. Ken needed help when he had double-knee surgery more than a year ago, Joshua raised more than $70,000 in legal fees and farm support to keep his farm going through his ordeal, and Scott is raising money on gofundme to buy his cafe.
Three very worthy people, in very worthy causes, supported by good and worthy people from everywhere.
Joshua is doing well, his business, nearly destroyed when his face was posted all over television as an animal abuser, is picking up again, he is pleased to fact court hearings and jail, although people still drive by his farm with cameras every know and then hoping to catch him and his animals in some sort of difficulty, so they can call the police. Joshua does not dare make a mistake. And he makes very few.
It is not the way free people are supposed to live, in perpetual fear of secret informers and the police, but that is the way many farmers live in America.
In America, we value lawns and neatness over the people who give us food to eat. Whenever I mention bringing a calf to our farm this summer, people instantly e-mail me, demanding to know if the calf will be separated from its mother, which many consider abuse.
Very few understand that if the cow stays with its mother, the mother cannot produce her fresh milk for sale, the farmer will starve to death, and children will not have milk to drink that is not produced by artificial hormones. This, is seems, is the new idea of what it means to be humane. They worry about the calf, never the farmer.
Joshua lives in a town that is being heavily developed, the remaining farms and farmers are under siege from new residents who hate the smell of manure, are traumatized by the sight of chickens running in the road, and value their lawns much more highly than the lives of the farmers who produce their food and their farms.
When his pigs get out – very few farmers on this earth can afford the maximum security fences that can guarantee that no pig or chicken or sheep or cow will ever get off the farm and onto a road – there is hysteria and outrage.
This is not true in rural America. Animals are all around us, so are farmers.
When chickens go into the road around here, people either run them over, slow down, or avoid them. They do not call the police. It is considered life, not a crime.
When animals break out of fences, as they often do in rain or high winds or when the grass is rich on the other side, my neighbors do not call the police to complain, they come to the door and offer to help bring them back inside the farm. When horses lie down to nap in a sunny pasture, or cows stand out in the snow, we do not call the ASPCA and demand an investigation, we smile at the beauty and simplicity of the sight.
And if Joshua lived around me, and his dogs sat out with the sheep in the cold or his water tanks froze, we would come to his farm and ask if we could help him get through the winter. We would not have him arrested and try to ruin his life and livelihood and traumatize his family. That, I think, is community.
When several of Joshua’s pigs cross the road and tore up a few chunk’s of a neighbors lawn, she called the police and tried to organize a neighborhood effort to sue him to protect their lawns and perhaps close down his farm. She never called Joshua or tried to speak with him. By the time the sheriff arrived a few hours later, the minor lawn damage was repaired, the pigs were back in their pens, the officers went home.
Joshua went to speak with her, and told her he would be happy to repair any damage his pigs caused if they ever got out again. She could sue if she wanted, he said, but he would never give up his farm. She dropped the idea of a suit. She was fine, she said, as long as her lawns were protected.
Almost any farmer will tell you that people demand good and cheap produce and meat, and shriek when food prices go up, but expect it to be a kind of immaculate agricultural conception – no smells, escaped animals, noises in the night, broken fences, frozen water tanks, animals with dirt on their coats.
I am immensely grateful to the men and women who do the hard work of farming. Their lives are never easy or predictable, it is a powerful calling for them.
Unlike many of my ancestors, I have never had to go to bed on an empty stomach, never had to worry about where my daughter’s next meal would come from. Farmers work awfully hard to make that so. Their farms are dirty, crowded, overrun with the junk they can’t afford to toss out or hope to use again.
Real farms are not pretty, they are not spotless, some of the smells can stop you cold.
If their pigs chew up up my lawn once in awhile, it’s fine by me.
We have lost touch with farms and food and the natural world, we often make the farmer’s life pure Hell, paving our roads with good intentions and passing all kinds of laws and regulations that make their lives harder and less profitable so that urban people can feel good about themselves.
It is easy to say there are too many farmers, if you are not one. Or that farmers are too dirty, cruel, smelly and chaotic to exist with perfectly manicured lawns. We are perhaps the first country in the history of the earth to fill our stores and markets for centuries with good, cheap and plentiful food while countless millions of people have starved all over the world.
Today, with thousands of farm families losing their farms every year, and most of the public far removed from the real lives of farmers, we may one day soon rediscover that farms are more precious than lawns if we want our families and children to eat. But we may have to learn the lesson the hard way, as farm after farm falls into the glutinous hands of giant corporations, many of whom are crueler to animals than Joshua Rockwood would or could ever be.
I was happy to see Joshua, he is doing well. Despite his horrible year, his business is growing again, he is selling pork, poultry and beef, he has a lot of new customer for his popular and healthy meats, and he is now a tough warrior in the deepening struggles of the small farmer to survive in the corporate nation, where we take our food so much for granted.
He has exciting plans to expand his farming work, he is a strong and honest man, if anyone can do it, he can.
Joshua is not afraid, he seems resigned to the fact that there will always be police in his life now, the secret informers will always slither by with their long lenses, there will always be people happy to call the sheriff rather than talk to him, people who will always love lawns more than farmers, some neighbors have no idea of what it means to be a neighbor, and there will always be people who so emotionalize the lives of animals that they have stripped the farmers of much of their own humanity and dignity.
Perhaps what we need is to emotionalize the farmers, to call them our furbabies, see them as piteous and abused, to build them no-kill farms that can never go under, re-home them when disaster strikes, and worry about whether they can be kept with their mothers for life. What a gift to Mother Earth that would be.
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction, wrote Rachel Carson. In part, this is why Maria and I both moved to the country, we wanted to live in nature, to re-connect with it.
Oddly for two urban people, we found the natural world to be…well, natural. It was healing for both of us, inspiring, it didn’t seem as if we had left our world behind, it seemed as if we had come home. Maria has been getting to focus her attention on the wonders and realities of animals, especially her new pony, Chloe.
She has been talking to her, teaching her to push, touch. To wait.
Rachel Carson, who wrote so presciently about the environment, was correct. The more we focus on the natural world, the more we are uneasy about the human propensity to destroy it. We have lost our reverence for nature, failed in our stewardship of Mother Earth.
In our small piece of the world, we are re-connecting with the natural world, and the world of animals. We see nature and the environment in a completely way. We are not political people, we are not drawn to angry messages on Facebook or petitions. But we are learning every day, about the real lives of real animals, about the fragility of the landscape, about the struggle for animals to find safe places in our turbulent world.
The more we understand the realities of the universe, the less taste we have for its destruction. That, in one sense, is the spiritual message of the animals.
