I asked the Gulley’s if I could take an “American Gothic” kind of photo of them to help publicize their June 30th Open House, and Carol grabbed a pitchfork and Ed one of his flower art sculpture. These two have been working together for decades, Carol and Ed are both farmers, they work side by side through every kind fo weather. I loved the picture, it captured their closeness and spirit.
It is brutal work, running a diary farm, and they have plenty of bruises, stitches, broken bones and cuts to show for it. You can find out more about their Open House in June on their blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal. Maria and I will be there, this will be memorable.
We went over to the Gulley residence this afternoon, a/k/a the Bejosh Farm, home of the wildly popular Bejosh Farm Journal. We met with the Gulleys to talk about how we could help them plan their first Bejosh Farm Open House on Saturday, June 30 at their farm.
In addition to being long-time dairy farmers, Ed has become an artist, his farm sculptures have been selling all over the country, and Carol has become a writer, the two of them work on their blog daily, their stories are the authentic, funny, poignant and sometimes sad story of the American family farm, and it’s ups and downs.
The Gulleys’s are working on a book about life on their farm through four seasons, and they hope their open house will be a window into the real life of the family farm – they are vanishing all over America – and also a chance for people to see and buy Ed’s remarkable sculptures, all made of farm and tractor parts and implements.
Ed is a character right out of Wendell Berry’s poems and essays, you can see through him and Carol what makes the family farm so iconic and special, and what is being lost by the collapse of so many small and independent farmers, being bulldozed by giant corporate farms and government policy, which has long been to favor the bigger corporate farms over the small fairy farms, which the government says are not as efficient.
Ed has been changing his life, producing a beautiful and original line of sculptures and wind chimes. You can see his work on the Bejosh Farm Journal, and I’ll also be posting some of Ed’s art on my blog in advance of his Open House.
We have been having two Open Houses here at Bedlam Farm, but this year, we decided to only have one Open House, the one in October on our Open House weekend. And we want to support the Bejosh Open House in any way we can.
At the Bejosh Open House, Ed and Carol will also talk the remarkable turn in their lives, from dairy farmers to creatives. Ed says when his knees finally wear out – most of the dairy farmers I know have had replacement knees for years – he opes to make his sculptures full time.
And Ed does what he says we will do, he and I are brothers from different mothers. The Gulleys’ are making a rare and remarkable turn in their lives with their art, blog and book. They will talk about all of these things, and you will meet calves and cows and goats and get a tour of the inner workings of a dairy farm.
Ed’s art will be displayed throughout the farm for people to look at, and hopefully buy.
I’ve been photographing family farms for years here, and I have gained a sense of what will be lost if these farms disappear. A farmer like Ed Gulley loves and cares for the land and soil, he knows every animal on the farm and loves them all, he can rattle off the name of every cow, something you will never hear on a corporate farm with 2,000 cows.
As with everything else corporate, a corporate farm is, by every account, all about money. Ed represents the very opposite of the new and huge kind of farming. His farm is a great place for an animal to be born or rescued, he will never make much money, the milk prices are the same as they were in 1970. He farms out of love.
Family farms are deeply rooted in the culture of rural America, and when they die, Main Street withers, community falters, small businesses flee, banks close.
As stewards of the land, they care for it and nurture it, something corporate farms do not do. In the large farms now producing most of the country’s milk, cows never get to set food outside, are euthanized the minute they get sick, even with minor injuries, and never know the sweet life of the dairy cows: – sitting outside in the pasture, taking in the sun, resting in shade and drinking fresh water.
When the farms die, a part of American life dies with them. In this country, the shelves in the supermarkets are full so most people pay little attention to where the food comes from. At Ed and Carol Gulley’s Open House, you’ll find out.
The farm is an amazing place, a maze and museum all at once.
And you will get to see a lot of animals, including pheasants, a rescued possum, and milk cows.
Deetails will be on the Bejosh Farm Journal blog. It will be a hoot, Ed does nothing halfway. They are the real deal.
Friends, the RISSE Wish, the longest to date, sold out over the Easter weekend. Thanks.
Well, the Army Of Good has chewed up another very long RISSE Amazon Wish List, there are only two items left, the RISSE staff is seeking seven Disney coloring books for $2.99 apiece and some bins to keep lunches cold. I can’t stand to see such inexpensive items on the list, I might go clean out the coloring books myself.
Thanks everyone, for your generosity and commitment
Maria and I had the sweetest morning this Easter morning. We stayed in bed until 10:30 a.m., a rare thing for us. We trawled You Tube for videos of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and other places there we wish to visit on our next trip. We’ve begun a New Mexico second trip fund, an envelope in which we put spare cash when we have some. We have $300 only several thousand more to go.
When we finally got up, we drove to Vermont to have some breakfast and I stopped along the road to take photos. We had lunch at a funky old Vermont family restaurant, it was a beautiful day, a lazy day.
The woods are dotted with old things set aside, and I found this old gas tank pump, sitting peacefully in returning, it’s last sale still recorded in the old window, the old pump lying in repose.
I love taking photos of old things, and they are everywhere here. Speaking of old things, we’re going to the Gulley Farm this afternoon to take some photos of Ed (and the beautiful and young Carol). Stay tuned.
I am not a Christian, but I have always been drawn to the early Christian writers and theology. They had such kindness of spirit and hope.
When it was founded, Christianity became the most generous, loving and inspiring faith in the history of what was a cruel and warring and unforgiving world.
No major faith had committed itself so boldly to lifting the poor and the vulnerable, to peace and the love of other human beings, and to honoring our responsibilities to nature and Mother Earth, considered gifts of God.
Anyone who has studied early Christian culture, writes Thomas Merton in his book Love And Living, “knows well enough how it abounded in life, sanity, joy, and creative power.”
Christ walked the earth gently and lovingly, and I see his spirit very much alive in Pope Francis, but this spirit is a flickering light here in our country now. So much of the most vocal and visible elements of the Christian faith have become a corrupt and shameless tool of the the bitterest, most intolerant and angry elements in our culture, they preaching power, fanaticism, exclusion and dominance.
That is not the meaning of Easter as I understand it.
Jesus taught that we are responsible for one another, that we must practice generosity, tolerance, forgiveness and above all, love. I see and read little about those founding Christian ideals in our culture or on the news. Yet here I am, a Jew turned Quaker some years ago, these Christian values are the tenets I am seeking to practice and follow in my life.
I have always believed the teachings of Christ were open to me, and to anyone who wishes a kinder, more loving world, who cares about animals or the earth.
Easter reminds me of what rebirth means, of what I was before, of what I am now. I do not believe I can ever become a different person – a chilling idea to me. But I can become a better person.
To me, this is the most meaningful holiday in the religious calendar. I think a lot about Easter, and about the idea of rebirth and resurrection.
I believe in rebirth and resurrection, at least in my secular world. I am not the son of God, but I was reborn.
I have experienced rebirth in the most basic of ways. I have been resurrected, given the chance to see the world anew.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that we are not only born once, when we come out of our mother’s womb, but that life requires us to give birth to ourselves again and again.
I have seen many good friends give birth to themselves again, I have seen my wife do it. It is a difficult and frightening and arduous experience to let go of one self and take the leap of faith to a different place. It was the richest and most rewarding experience of my life, and it is what Easter means to me.
I did rise from the dead.
Rebirth was an almost desperate choice for me, and for a sacred few prophets and mystics and travelers I have been privileged to know. It is a process that never ends, that is never finished, that weaves through every part of life. When I broke down a decade ago, I chose life. I prayed for life, worked for life, pledged myself to life.
When I broke down, it was a kind of death, the loss of my old self, the loss of heart and soul.
In falling apart, I was reborn. I think that’s how it works. Light follows darkness, death follows life.
Merton, my spiritual guide and inspiration, reminds us in his writings that Easter has meaning for all of us, not only Christians. It is not only about Jesus rising from the dead and defeating death. It is about our own death and rebirth, our own return to life.
Meditating on the teachings of St. Paul, Merton wrote that we have died to the Law and are now free to live as saved persons reborn, and in the newness of life. Christianity, he wrote, was a liberation from every existing religious and rigid legal system of the time, a radical and humanistic ideal lost in the fog of greed, money and the absence a spiritual ethos in our lives in our times.
The Church, wrote Merton, was born as a society of free people, united not by mere natural bonds of interest and necessity but by love and grace. Persons responsible for other persons.
There is more Christianity in the world of the Army of Good on behalf of the refugees and Mansion residents than in all of the cable news pundits and so-called evangelicals who declaim their piety and faith. As the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt put it so beautifully, hypocrisy is the greatest of all evils.
The true Christians are no longer at the center of our religious or cultural dialogue, they live in the edges, mostly out of sight and mind, supplanted by angry horses who confuse political aspiration with spiritual faith.
Christian friends ask me why I can’t become a Christian, since I seem so close to it in some ways. The answer, I tell them, is that I can’t find God in the Christians of today’s, I can’t tell them apart from the ideologues tearing our democracy apart. I can’t worshop something that was, but is not.
Still, I take so much from Christianity. “Let us not darken the joy of resurrection,” Merton wrote, “by remaining in captivity and darkness, but let us live as free men and women who have been called out of the darkness and into the light.”
We seek peace.
We seek to love one another.
We reject hatred and argument as a means of talking to one another.
We cherish hope and promise.
We reject cruelty and vengeance.
We forgive those who have fallen into evil.
We love our sister, the earth and care for her.
We stand with the poor and the vulnerable, not the rich and the arrogant.
We are the moral stewards of the animal world, and of the natural world. We seek peace, not war, and reject the killing of other human beings.
That is the meaning of Easter for me, that is what I take from Jesus’s return from the dead.
it has as much meaning for me, and perhaps for many others, as it does for anyone born into the Christian faith.
