Fate is a profoundly sweet animal, she loves every human being she encounters. She even loves the sheep too much to push them around. At the town dump today, while Maria and I were throwing out garbage, Fate was receiving a never-ending stream of visitors, including Lilly, a dog lover who wanted to take Fate home. The staff at the recycling center lines up to give her biscuits, donuts and to call her sweet names.
I am grateful to be working with Ali and the refugee children, and now also with Red, the ambassador to connection. I recognize the selfishness of this work, as perhaps many of you do. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the hatred and destructiveness in the world, and this works helps me to shed it and live around it, to live a life that is expansive enough to transcend it, at least most of the time.
Hatred and destructiveness are everywhere, in me, our political system, our media, in the left and the right, and all over the technological world of social media. There is not a day when someone does not send me a hateful message (or a loving one, to be fair.)
I am particularly affected by the hatred and destructiveness that targets helpless and innocent children like the refugees and immigrants above, and their families. Destructiveness often ruined their families, drove them from their homes, burned down their building last year.
They are the antithesis of hatred and destruction for me, this the way in which I cope with the hatred of our times. They are a way for me to do good, rather than for me to hate. That is quite a gift.
I ask myself almost every day, how can I live with this in a positive and meaningful way, without succumbing to it? In his very important book “Escape To Freedom,” Erich Fromm, the writer, analyst and social scientist writes presciently about our times and the challenge for everyone who seeks humanity rather than conflict, anyone who wishes to keep his or her heart from turning to stone.
Hatred and destructiveness of the kind we see in our country almost every day is rooted, says Fromm, “in the unbearableness of individual powerless and isolation.”
Any even casual observer of personal relations in modern American can hardly help but be struck with the amount of anger and destructiveness to be found everywhere. There is virtually nothing that is not being used as a rationalization for destructiveness, cruelty and hatred. Just look at the daily spewings of the “left” and the “right.”
Love, duty, conscience, humanity, patriotism, empathy are all being used as disguises, writes Fromm, to destroy others or corrode the better angels of ourselves. I was struck by Fromm’s suggested explanation for this destructiveness and also for his implicit solution for living with it.
It has certainly been helpful for me.
“It would seem,” he wrote, “that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportonate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire, but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s sensuous, emotional and intellectual capacities.”
Life, he suggests, has an inner dynamism of its own, it tends to grow, to be expressed, to believed. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction and rage.
The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards anger and destruction. The more life is realized, the weaker is the impulse and need for destruction. Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.
This so eerily fits my own life, it almost brings me to tears, thus is it important to share. What is creativity, after al, but the expansion of one’s own life, a way to grow, to express oneself, to be believed? When this tendency was thwarted, I nearly destroyed myself and did much harm to others. In expanding my life – this work with the refugees and the Mansion is a manifestation of that – I am giving rebirth to myself and helping others.
Even then, Fromm wrote that the root of destructiveness in working people is the isolation of the individidual and the suppression of individual expensiveness. How on earth is the average person to expand his or her life when their own work is trivialized and considered a fraction of the hedge fund manager, when their income declines, when they can’t afford their own health care and security?
I knew that I had to expand my life or perish, and it has saved me. I recommend a fulfilled life highly. For me, it has been the path to living meaningfully in an angry and often destructive world. I do not believe in living a life dictated to me by others, or for the profit of others. T.S. Eliot called it the “hollow life.” Joseph Campbell called it the “substitute life.”
I remember thinking that I must l live my own life or be lost forever.
I’m still thinking about our visit yesterday with Mary Kellogg, a poet and our cherished friend. Jackie Thorne, another friend and poet came to visit Mary, and Maria and Mary have loved one another for some time. Maria is a poet of her own, her works are her poems.
You can see and touch the connection between these three gifted and remarkable women, it is hard to me to even imagine any three men I know or have ever known do this. I formed a men’s group in a Quaker Meeting in New Jersey a long time ago, and one by one, these wonderful men just got too busy or distracted and stopped showing up.
This is what happens with men, I think so many things are more important than friendship. I sat across the room with my camera and watched and listened, it was a joy to see it. Mary and I are very close also, but there is something powerful and stirring about the bond between women.
Something that connects them in a particular way. It was so good to see Mary again, she is 88 now and felt poorly for much of this year. She is on the rebound, and we loved the four poems she read to us. We are excited about publishing another of her books, hopefully in time for the October Open House.
Mary lives by herself on the top of a mountain, she says she will never leave, and I believe her.
We had an especially wonderful and well-attended Open House last weekend, we are still aglow from it.
Lots of people came, the refugee kids sang, lots of art was sold, lots of animals fussed over, the Mansion residents showed up, it was what one attendee called “Bedlam Farm bliss.” That’s the idea. It felt to me like our best Open House yet.
Our next Open House is on Columbus Day weekend in October of this year, and we have to start preparing almost immediately. The Open Houses are a great deal of work and a significant disruption in our lives.In some ways, they are too successful, if such a thing is possible.
Maria and I have been talking a lot about our plans, and we have some ideas we like for next year.
I wanted to share them with you.
First, we are thinking of scrapping the Spring 2018 Open House and just hosting the October Open House. There is only one reason for doing that, to be honest, it is just too much work to have two and both of us are busier and more active than ever. Maria has to take apart her studio and curate a large and complex art show.
It will be another week or two before her studio is put back together and both of us are back to work.
That’s too much disruption, and nobody to blame but us. We are immensely grateful to all the people who travel to see us.
There is just a lot to do. Our new idea is to have a Pop-Up Gallery art show on Main Street in Cambridge next Spring instead of our June Open House.
We’ll find a big and empty space, and hopefully bring some excitement and lots of visitors to Main Street, the focal point of our wonderful community.
It would be exciting for us and especially for Maria, and we hope it would benefit our downtown, which is beginning to pick up some steam after years of decline and struggle. The New Round House Cafe is causing a lot of excitement and a new micro-brewery is bring newcomers to our town.
Our small town is fighting hard for community, and we would like to join the fray in creative ways.
Our weekend farmer’s market is busier than it has been in years, and Scott Carrino’s Friday pizza night has become a town tradition. We’d love to pursue our own passion for encouraging the kinds of creativity that are often shut out of galleries and media. Rural artists have a hard time getting recognition and sales, a pop-up gallery – renting an abandoned space for a single show – could be exciting for us, and hopefully, for others.
We would hold our Fall Open House as usual, on both days of Columbus Day Weekend. We’ll reassess next year, we might take a year off from Open Houses and then return, or we might just keep on going, we don’t have to decide that now.
We are also discussing whether or not to sponsor another Creative Workshop. I think we have too much else to do this year, Maria is figuring out how she feels, we’ll talk about it and decide.
We will keep you posted. We are committed to sharing our lives, online and in the real world, and neither of us wants to quit on that. We just have to be flexible and do both in a way that works for everybody.
