Day: February 6, 2017

Peggie does not waste a day of life, she was excited to show me her new red hair coloring and pink fingernail polish, she has been re-done again. Life is what you make of it, and Peggy makes something new of life every day. Her enthusiasm and joy are both infectious.

Peggy is ringing in Valentine’s Day a bit early, your wonderful letters, packages, messages and photographs are pouring into the Mansion, one again the talk of the place, once again lighting the residents up, they are so excited to read and share your letters, and in the office, the packages and gifts and messages are piling, there is a stack of letters two feet high and a dozen bags full of surprises on the office floor.

Once again, the Army of Good has come through, such generosity and love and empathy.

This is the path, for you, for me, the way to redemption and healthier country.  You are bringing comfort to the people who are sometimes forgotten, and live at the edge of life.

In the activity room, the talk was all of Valentine’s Day.  There is a party at 2:30 p.m., and I’ve been invited. Next Wednesday, I have been invited to dinner at the Mansion, they want to feed me at least one meal while Maria is away. I don’t have the heart to tell them that Maria does not cook much, I do, but no mind, Red and I were delighted to accept this warm invitation. We look forward to it.

The most painful thing the residents of the mansion have to endure is the sense that they are alone and forgotten. You have given them a wonderful Christmas, and on Valentine’s day, you are telling them they are loved and not forgotten. They will never forget what you have done for them, and neither will I.

You have shown that Christmas is about selflessness, not greed and Valentine’s Day is about love. You honor both days in the most touching way. The Mansion address is 11. S. Union Street, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. The Valentine’s Day party is on the 14th. It looks to be lively.

Red and I met Ellen, the newest resident of the Mansion, and visited Connie, now working on her 15th pair of mittens. More tomorrow morning.

Many of the people I know from my former life are struggling painfully to come to terms with the election.I am sorry to see and hear so much fear and anger.

The suffering is so very real, as it clearly was when the people on the other side of the great divide were feeling it. This disconnection is almost exactly what they were  feeling it for some years. Now, those people, my neighbors and friends,  are feeling great hope and promise, as so many others elsewhere are feeling great anger and despair. It’s difficult to even see across this divide.

They feel someone is finally worrying about them.

It seems one half of the country has just traded their hearts and souls with the other.

I am a city boy, I’ve been living in the country for 15 years, loving it more every year and slowly coming to understand a few things about it. As my forebears did, I have assimilated, I have many good friends and feel very safe and accepted here.

People here may understandably never see me as a country person, but increasingly, that is how I see myself. I have never felt I belonged anywhere as much as I feel I belong here, a strange thing for a Jewish kid from Providence.

This is my home now, community and character still live here, and we know one another and watch out for one another and live close to nature and the land. I could never go back, and I doubt they would have me anywhere I came from.

I understand I will always be an outsider, a refugee myself, just like my grandmother, but I have always been treated with courtesy and friendship and respect. When I need help, people come running, just like they do for the true locals.

I live on the boundary between these two now warring cultures, it is like having cymbals crashed against my ears sometimes.

The election was not as shocking to me as it would have been if I were still living in New York or Boston or Washington or Dallas or Northern New Jersey. I didn’t put it all together, but I was well aware of the great rage and despair building up around here, the sense of betrayal and abandonment, the fury at the “elites” in the big city who had contempt for country people and all of their values. I saw all of the “Trump” signs sprouting like dandelions on all of the lawns.

They love him and believe in him, he is, for many, their last hope.

I am also well aware of the joy and celebration many people here and across rural America feel about the new President and the bold and dramatic steps he is taking to change the country. I feel schizophrenic sometimes, living between these two worlds who see life so differently,  and who have so much contempt and mistrust for one another.

One friend from New York City told me she is preparing to move to Canada or Europe, she doesn’t feel this is her country anymore, she doesn’t want her children to grow up here. She was devastated by the election. One of my neighbors here told me “I have hope now, for me, my children, my country, for the first time in decades. I have never been so excited about a new President.”

The difference in realities is so striking it seems almost like a Rod Serling Twilight Zone nightmare episode of alternate reality, as well as alternate truth. Rather than a country of common purpose and ideals. A land of two mirrors, each seeing the world in a completely different way, each raging at one another across time and space.

I got a taste of this week when I wrote about our taking down of an illegal Deer Stand someone had put up in our woods.

Maria climbed up the ladder with a bolt cutter and hunting knife and took it down. To my astonishment, this story became an Internet phenomenon, shared hundreds of times all over Facebook and via my blog. I got all sorts of comments and messages, some of them quite emotional, quite revealing. People thought our lives were in imminent danger, that we were being reckless and blind.

Many people were alarmed, they thought I was in grave danger, that the hunter who put the stand up was sure to come after me with his friends and gun me down. There was clearly this feeling that the people around me were lawless and violent. Many people said they were praying for my safety and for Maria’s. “Be careful,” wrote a person from Boston, “they are sure to come after you, or maybe shoot one of your animals. Be alert!” Another suggested I get away for a few days “until things cooled down.”

“How could you let Maria put herself in danger like that?,” another woman demanded to know.

I understand that social media is often a hysteria machine, it seems to magnify fear and outrage and distort reality, but what I saw in so many of the messages was revealing about the widening divide in America right now between rural people and urban and suburban people. I live on the borders of both, both places have shaped my life. I love cities, I love the country. I’m not ever choosing between them.

It is as if rural and urban people were both living in different countries, everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen. I suggested to a good friend that she try talking to some supporters of the new President, it might be helpful to here, she snapped back at me. “I don’t wanted to talk to stupid people.”

If I write that people like me ought to listen to the people who launched this jarring revolution, I am accused of enabling racism and bigotry.  Some things, I am told, are simply not acceptable, can’t be listened to or countenanced or enabled in any way.

That is a sad thing to me. It is not helpful to the idea of listening to consider everyone you are listening to as a stupid or bigoted or racist thug. That is not what I call good faith listening. And it is not what I see in the people around me, people who voted differently and feel differently but are quite good people, in no way inferior to me. They are not stupid or racist either. They have seen their world shattered, and they didn’t like it either.

The alarmed e-mails I was receiving were mostly from urban people, the rural and farm messages I got found the story interesting but not very dramatic. We’ve all been there, they said. Yell at the jerk when you see him.

Everyone with some land or a farm has put up with amateur deer stands snuck in by unethical kids, strangers or hunters. You just take them down. The hunters get more ticked off about then I do, it gives them a bad name. They always offer to take the outlaw stands down themselves.

Up here, there is rabid distrust of city people, Ivy League people, media people, politicians. People see the city as dangerous, valueless, insanely expensive, and obsessed with political correctness. Cities are host to the changing world they fear, they want the old world back and they have not accepted the idea – reality to some – that it can’t ever come back. They have not lost hope about that.

Most people dread the very idea of going to New York City, and they wish that there was  some way for upstate New York to secede from a state dominated by New York City’s money and population. City people in the abstract are the enemy. City people in real flesh are welcome.

Reading my messages,  I see that there is this equally rigid and shallow view of the country, people see it as a place right out Deliverance, where gun-toting thugs and bigots resolve differences with guns and violence, where culture has died, where  outsider people like me are targets.

Like all stereotypes, this one doesn’t work very well.

It was not in any way dangerous to take down this deer stand, if the people who put it up show up, they’ll get a lecture on asking permission before invading someone’s property and firing guns on it. That is sacred law of life here, there is no difference of opinion about it.

I have lived in 15 different places in America, most of them cities, and I have never been safer or felt safer than I do here. Generally, violent crime is unknown here. Up here, the good people all have guns and do not hesitate to use them to protect themselves,  but many more people are shot in cities than in rural America. Life is complex.

What I have learned living in both places is this: the people I knew in cities, the people I know here, are remarkably similar, once you get to know them. They worry about the same things – kids, jobs, money, schools, taxes, security, health. The people up here feel they have been betrayed and abandoned by every government they have ever known.

There is no prosperity or excitement or hope in these towns and cities, they are broken and left behind. People have spent their entire lives watching their jobs vanish and never return, their communities fade, prospects for work slowly and painfully vanish. Their Main Streets are sad and empty shells, their children gone away.

The people in cities have plenty of their own problems,but many are also increasingly prosperous, culturally exciting, filled with the new jobs everyone here was promised but never materialized. They have a media that celebrates their lives and culture, nobody ever comes to talk to the people here, or ask them about their lives.

I know from my own experience that people want the same things, they are just not as different from one another as they think they are.

The people I knew in cities were almost all good people, if one can generalize, the same goes here. There are some bad ones as well.  Here, I am constantly reminded of people’s prejudice towards the so-called urban elites. When I looked at my messages after the deer stand came down, I just see more of the same thing coming from the other direction.

We are losing the ability to see one another as individual human beings, only as labels and stereotypes to argue with and dislike. We can’t go on this way. For me, listening is the only answer, one person at a time.

I will leave the politicians to eat one another, and godspeed to them.

We went out into our woods today, I wanted to spend a few minutes on the Meditation Bench. It was quite cold and icy, Red lay down at my feet and we have some silence, which is always sweet. I think when it’s warm, we’ll move the bench closer to the stream, it is a wonderful sound to hear while in silence.

Red is a gift, he sits by my feet, still and patient. Then bench was comfortable and study. I stopped by the stream to record some thoughts about my Peaceful Hour, and my feelings about letting ideas live. I like presenting my story in text, images and voice.

Ideas have a right to live, no idea can really be considered in a world when hundreds of thousands of people are learning only how to talk,not to listen. In my Peaceful  Hour, I am listening. I love this wonderful stream, I hope to visit it every day.

Come and listen:

Voice Meditation: The Peaceful Hour: Sitting in Silence. Giving Ideas A Chance To Live In Our World.

Maria and I came out of the woods this morning, and there was a welcome party waiting for us, sheep on the hill. It was fun to see them, they were fascinated by our emergence from the woods. I was also struck by how beautiful their coats are getting as they grow in. I think Maria is going to be very happy with this wool. The sheep we had looked wonderful, and the Romneys wool is spectacular. An impressive line-up.

I posted the photo of Cassandra Conety this morning, and I got a slew of messages – the interesting and non-neurotic side of Facebook – saying my photo reminded people of Vermeer’s Iconic, “The Girl With A Pearl Earring,” now hanging at the Frick Museum in New York City, the centerpiece of the show.

Art historians believe the girl in the photo was Vermeer’s daughter Maria, who posed for a number of his paintings.

I am humbled to be compared in any way to Vermeer, and I am sure the comparison is hyperbolic and not literal, but I do see a resemblance between Cassandra and Maria. The light and look is the same, but also the demeanor, Cassandra is a wonderful portrait subject to me because of the character in her face.

i asked Maria, an artist to come in and look at these two images and she said it is the angle of light, the position of the head, but more than that, both images evoke the same feeling, the same atmosphere.

People see a wholesomeness and innocence in the photographs, so do I. Cassandra carries herself with quiet and dignity, as I imagine Vermeer’s Maria does. Vermeer captured the subjects eyes in a way I did not, and they are an important part of the painting, as is the background.

This comparison of my Maria’s makes sense to me, and inspires me to take more portraits of Cassandra while she is working here. This is why I love portraiture, the camera always sees more than I do.

When she came into the house and accepted this work, I said, “you know this means I will be taking your picture,” and she rolled her eyes and nodded, “yes, she said I figured that.”

If people are going to compare my photos to Vermeer, then I am inspired. I think Cassandra could be a wonderful portrait subject.