The donkeys are faithful creatures, they make sure to visit with us every day, even before they eat. They have the most gentle and indirect way of showing affection, they come up and lean against you, standing absolutely still. Maria sits between them, she sends visual messages to them, they send messages back.
Even the restless Fate pauses to sit and watch in the background. In this way, they communicate, the donkeys will calm Maria if she is anxious, they seem to need this daily attention to be grounded themselves. Often, Maria will receive images and messages from them, often, she will send them. An exchange of pictures and feelings, more than anything.
Humans need this, so do the animals. They need to remain among us.
P.S. Maria sold all of the things on her Open House Clearance Sale Video, except a few jars of balm. Thanks.
P.P.S. If you want to know more about talking to animals and understand them, you can now pre-order my next book, “Talking To Animals.” I will sign and personalize it for you, and you will also get a tote back along with the signed book. Battenkill Books takes Paypal and credit cards, and they actually love books and are incredibly nice to deal with.
Kelly Nolan has changed, I realized tonight when I took her photo. She is no longer wearing a pony tail, she has the same kind of businesslike grace she always shows, even when swamped with work. It was quiet in the Bog tonight, I told Kelly I wanted to experiment with my infrared camera by taking a portrait of her, my first with the IR camera.
This camera sees light differently than I can – the photography of the unseen – and I wasn’t sure what would happen in the low light of the Bog’s bar. I liked the result, it was a different perspective on Kelly, her smile was just as warm and genuine, there is a steadiness about Kelly, the face of a person who knows who they are and is comfortable with who they are.
I want to try some more portraits with the IR camera, especially of animals. Since the light spectrum in animal’s eyes is different that that of people, the camera sees them differently. I think this photo is beautiful, evocative.
There is a “Fourth Wall” around my life now, and I think of it often. It is important to me, I need it in this porous world, where none of us can ever really be alone any longer.
The fourth wall is a theatrical term, but it has more bearing on my life than I might have imagined even a few years ago. The fourth wall is the conceptual barrier between a creative work and its viewers or readers.
It is an expression stemming from the world of theater, a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audiences. While the audience can see through this “wall,” the convention assumes, the actors act – and sometimes insist – that they can not and should not.
I have embraced the theory of the fourth wall in my life in recent years. I have worked hard to recognize and construct boundaries in a world where technology is destroying the very idea of privacy or boundary. Increasingly, there is no space at all between us, at any time day or night.
The “Fourth Wall” concept, an invisible wall which exists mostly in my own head and consciousness, is the best answer for me. We live in an open world, few of us have anything resembling privacy. Anyone can reach us any time for almost any reason. In order to live and survive we need (and I want) to live an open and interactive life. But I also wish to preserve my privacy, dignity, and the space around me I need to work and create.
I first studied and embraced this idea a few years ago, when I had open heart surgery.
A group of people – members of an online group I had created – generously decided to raise money to send me on a post-surgery trip to Florida. It was, of course, a very giving thing for them to do, yet it disturbed me. No one asked me where I wanted to go, or if I wanted to go, and I was troubled by the amount of money that was raised for me to take this vacation, I would have, if asked, preferred it go elsewhere, or for a better cause.
In fact, the gift was set up so that the money could not be refused.
As I recovered, one of the leaders of the project came into my house, and while I was sleeping, and dressed in hospital clothes, tried to put a Fairy Crown on my head and take a video of me as I lay drooling and medicated in my hospital chair to show it to the others.
Maria, understanding what a violation that would be for me, stopped her. We choose an open life, but we are intensely private people in many ways.
What a curious position, I thought, here were good people trying so hard to do something good for me, and yet I felt invaded and diminished, all at once. What was wrong with me?
I realized then that I needed to pursue more thoughtfully this idea of the “Fourth Wall,” a boundary between me and my life – a life I openly share – and the people who follow it.
Talk about a problem of one’s own making. I want people to read my work and follow me, I also want us all to learn together how to create healthy and appropriate boundaries for creativity in a society that believes lasting friendships are made with a tap on a keyboard. So I have been embracing the fourth wall. It is an answer for me.
Every day, Maria and I are called up to think of our imaginary wall, a construct, I believe, that promotes our own idea and sense of boundaries. A woman wrote me just today telling me I had written her an encouraging message years ago, and that she had decided to change her life radically. She was leaving a long career in health care and letting go.
“I would appreciate any help you can offer,” she wrote me,”I know your time is limited, but if you could reply, I would be forever grateful…”
This business of the Fourth Wall is an instinct really, a feeling.
I felt this letter had crossed the wall, and I feel from the letter that this is a good and worthy person setting out on a better path for herself. I did write her back and I told her I wished her luck, but it was not appropriate for me to offer this kind of help to someone I had never met and did not know, much as I applauded her courage and wished her good luck. I told her God created therapists to help people let go and move on.
This kind of response is always painful for me, I feel guilty. What would it cost me to have a 10-minute chat? Truthfully, it would cost me a great deal. And set the most troubling of precedents.
This letter writer had crossed this wall.
I suggested she seek a professional psychologist or social worker if she needed support and guidance in her life. I have enough trouble taking care of myself.
When someone pops up on Facebook and asks me where I buy my clothes,or tools, or animal supplies, I do not answer. We are not that kind of buddy, that would be misleading. They are crossing the wall.
This presumption of friendship breaches the wall for me, I am not everyone’s pal, I am an artist and creator in my own mind, there is a conceptual barrier there that is important to me.
Almost every day, someone writes me stricken with grief over the loss of a dog or cat, and asks to speak with me and help them move on with their lives, which they often say has been shattered, they say they cannot let go of their grief.
This challenges my wall, and my own sense of humanity. But I am very clear that this is not something I should be asked to do, not something I should ever do. Recently, a woman was disappointed in me because I declined her request to call a grieving friend of hers – she had lost her Lab to cancer – on her birthday to wish her a happy birthday. It would, she said, mean so much to her at a difficult time.
When I wrote Going home: Finding Peace When Pets Die, every vet, shrink or psychologist I spoke with said animal grieving had become a serious public health problem, people were emotionalizing pets to an unprecedented degree.
I should not be supporting that.
It is so easy to be a hero in that way, it costs nothing to do and takes little time.
But I knew it would be wrong for me to do it. Death by a thousand cuts, you can give yourself away in pieces, or in big chunks. It is not my job to heal her friend, any more than that it is her friend’s job to heal me.
I have lost a number of dogs in recent years, I go get another and move along. If I were unable to do this, I would not contact a writer but a therapist, as I have so often done in my life. It would be unethical for me to play therapist to strangers over the Internet, even for the money people often offer me. I wouldn’t do it.
A couple of days ago, someone Maria and I met at a reading years ago messaged her and said she has suffered a loss in her family, and was struggling. In her letter, she passed along the most intimate details of her life, as if we were her closest friends. She would in our area one day soon and she hoped to stop by to visit the farm, it would help her healing. We said no, we can’t accommodate that, our home is private place, and a workplace. It is one thing to host two open Houses a year, it is another to turn our lives into one.
She wanted more from us than we could or should give.
Guilt is not friendship, it is not authenticity. We have made many friends from people we met online, but all of them have a sense of boundary and time. It feels right when people acknowledge respect for boundaries and when we can take the time to get to know and trust them, and for them to know and trust us.
It is not a simple thing to define this wall, or know when to step behind it.
In the theater the fourth wall refers to the imaginary wall at the front of the stage separating the audience from the performers. The fourth wall, along with the sides and back of the standard stage, encloses the created world of the play. Breaking the fourth wall means doing or saying something that either explicitly or implicitly acknowledges the artificiality of the environment and the fact that both the presenters and the audience are aware of that artificiality.
An actor might break the wall by physically walking down from the stage, and out the door instead of stage left or right. Or she might make a reference to the fact that he is a performer in a play by addressing the audience directly.
This relates to me and my work. In a sense, I am an actor, creating a world, the world of this farm. it is separate from my audience, we are not the same thing.
My writing and photos enclose the created world of this place. Bedlam Farm is an idea, a creation, as well as a reality. I see it is a living memoir, a kind of play of life. Telling people on Facebook where I buy my boots or get medicine or what toothpaste I use for the sheep is the same as an actor speaking directly to the audience during a play and telling them where he likes to have breakfast.
It shatters the created world, the feeling, and the space I need in my own head to create it.
That separation is important, it is what makes the work or the life creative, and not simply a next door neighbor with a leaky roof. The Facebook idea is that we are all friends, all connected. But that is not friendship, not instantly. I receive scores of very personal messages from people asking me questions I don’t wish to answer or sending me private information I don’t wish to receive and can’t absorb.
They are trying to get over that wall.
So my idea of the fourth wall is to almost never communicate with people I do not know, and never discuss personal issues – theirs or mine – with strangers online. I hope I do inspire people, but I cannot be responsible for their lives. The audience in a theater is not the best friend of the actors, and I think that is true of the writer trying to figure out this new kind of community.
For me, this is an issue of identity, not etiquette. The author, like the actor, has to stand back. There has to be some distance, some mystery, we can’t be sharing our grocery lists online. Letters do not have the same effect on me, I love getting them and almost never feel that unease I feel when the wall is being breached. My Post Office Box (P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816), is a joy.
The most interesting thing about the fourth wall in the digital world is that it is so ephemeral, organic and fluid. There is no wall for you or me to see or lean on, no clearly marked lines or obvious precedents. We are building a new thing, learning how to live with it. In this new kind of world, with this new idea of community, we are making our way.
I visited Biddy at dinner the other day, she came up to me and gave me a long look, the imperious Romneys are curious, and generally unafraid. I think she may have been posing for me, now that she is shorn and leaner. This weekend we will look at her wool and get it up to the knitting mill in Vermont.
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. The nature he means is our nature, yours and mine. The images of art, poetry and myth all refer to something inside of us. If you look at the outside world and never make reference to yourself, you have perhaps misread the image. You are missing a part of yourself.
The inner world, say the prophets, is the world of our own requirements and energies and possibilities. The outer world is the identity, the field of incarnation. That’s where we are, that’s where we live and work. Novalis said “The seat of the soul is where the inner and outer worlds meet.”
For the past few months, my inner and outer worlds have been meeting, in conflict and uncertainty: the election.
I think of the inner and outer worlds when I think of this long period of division, rage and accusation. It was, in some ways, frightening. I had not witnessed anything like it in my life time.
My attention has been drifting, I need to return to my journey inward. I have no idea if we return to live again once we die, but I do believe in the reincarnation of the soul while we are alive. Reincarnation, writes Joseph Campbell, suggests that we are more than we think we are. There are dimensions of my being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not yet included in my idea of myself.
My life is deeper and broader than I believe it to be. What I am living is but a fraction of what is really inside of me, of what wants to come out. I want to be more than I have seen and felt in these past months.
I hear a collective sigh, a loosening of the grip after all of this anger and argument.
Time for me to turn away from it, to return to the inward journey, where I belong, where I truly live.
The outer world seems so angry and obsessive to me, a disturbance in the force.
I wonder if my identity is truly out there. I sense quiet and calm ahead for me. Part of my own reincarnation is the awareness of my strength. I will turn away from the anger and argument and go inward with my writing, my love, my service, my animals, my photography, my writing.
The outer world feels like a volcano to me spouting and spitting angry red lava, our new technology a deafening eco chamber.
I want more than that for myself. I do not care to be angry. The first Buddhist saying is “All life is sorrowful,” and so it is, it is not a whine or complaint but a truth, a light to follow. Loss, loss, loss. “You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent in this way,” writes Campbell, “for this is surely the way God intended it.”
For me, the path inward is in part about seeing life as it truly is, accepting it and loving it. I can’t just love the life that is easy and good, I see it as magnificent in the way that it truly is.
