This is one of my favorite portrait subjects, it’s a farm, on nearby Route 61. The farmhouse is beautiful and reflects the afternoon light The barns, all meticulously maintained, surround the back of the house. The photos of that farm capture a time and a feeling, I often drive up here with Red and sit in the car, looking down on this beautiful valley.
Mary Kellogg was socked and delighted to receive your letters, she said they meant a great deal to her and she read every one of them. She intended to write back to each person but her daughter pointed out there were far too many for her to respond to. She’ll probably try again.
She wanted me to thank you for sending them, they kept her busy and cheered her up. She couldn’t figure out where they came from at first, but then she saw my name mentioned in some and she figured it out. “Jon must have mentioned it on his blog,” she said, laughing with her daughter Nancy.
A great mood lifter.
Mary tried to show us the huge pile of letters, but Nancy said she brought them home – she was running out of space on her dresser in the hospital room, Mary can go through them carefully when she returns to her farm, which she is very anxious to do.
Mary is recovering well from her fall two weeks ago, her physical therapist took her outside the rehab center for a long walk, and Mary handled it well. She said her hip is just a little sore. She was alert, smiling, and joking about having her hearings aids out, she can’t hear much from one side.
It looks as if Mary is going to another adult care facility next week, the doctors feel she needs a little more time to get the leg stronger before she goes home. She might be there a week or two. She is just learning to stand up on her own again.
Since she’s leaving the Washington County Rehab Center in a few days, it doesn’t make much sense to send her more letters. If she will be in her new transitional center for long, I’ll provide that address. The letters greatly boosted her morale, and she showed me some of the more memorable ones. So many of you were very kind to do that.
There are a lot of loving people out there, and thanks. Mary is special to us, she is working on the final poems for her next book, as yet untitled, we hope she will be reading from it at our October Open House. I told her falling down and breaking her hip is no excuse.
Jean is one of our regular stops at the Mansion.
I’ve been doing hospice and animal therapy work with the dying and the aging for more than a decade now. In all of that time, I have never heard a person on the edge of life say their biggest regret is not having saved more money for retirement, or given up the life they wished for more money than they managed to earn.
The most common regret I have heard from those on the edge life is that they did not live their life to the fullest, and did not live the life of their dreams.
In recent years I have faced the very difficult question of what I would sacrifice to go confidently in the direction of my dreams, as Thoreau suggested, and live the life I imagined. I made my decision. I decided I would give up everything I had, if necessary, to live the life of my dreams.
And it was necessary, in many ways.
I won’t lie to you. I have worried about it, even regretted it at times. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
There are three elements to my idea of a good life now: authenticity, continual learning, and continual service. My world is my life, my religion is not to be good, but to do good.
Joseph Campbell wrote that we must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I got rid of the life I planned, and now have the life that was waiting for me. It feels quite glorious.
For me, working only for money and security is a form of slavery imposed on unsuspecting people by the greedy and the powerful. They can never see past measuring life in terms of money, or frightening more vulnerable people into doing the same. I will never be a slave.
A decade ago, I had to decide what I would sacrifice to live my life.
For most of my life, I had earned a lot of money and spent a lot of money and my wife at the time was mature and responsible, she saved a lot of money, mine and hers. When I got divorced in 2008, we had hundreds of thousands of dollars in an IRA’s put away for retirement.
After the divorce, I had $5,000 in savings, and I soon spent all of that during our disastrous efforts to sell the first Bedlam Farm, which took all the rest of my money over the next few years and then some.
I have no regrets or complaints to make about my settlement or my wife then, I made the decisions I made knowingly and in good faith, I am totally responsible for them. I blame no one else.
Between the recession, the divorce, and the collapse of publishing as I knew it, I understood that the decisions I made would shape the rest of my life.
I understood I was casting off the very idea of a safety net and rejecting the widespread obsession most Americans now quite understandably have about money and security. It costs a lot of money to die and grow old in America. This was scary.
I knew I was giving up the idea of a conventional retirement – I have no plans to ever retire, not as long as my fingers and camera work – or the kind of security we are always being told we need as we age.
A number of people, including a psychotherapist, cautioned me that most people my age – I was 61 at the time – would not undertake such change and risk. He said I was taking on more change than any patient my age he had ever treated. You don’t have to make these changes he warned, there may well be a time when you need or want the money you have saved up.
You can just keep things as they are, he said, and those words sent a shiver through my spine. No I can’t, I thought, no I cant.
There in that chair, in that office, I promised myself that I would not die in the way that I was, I would change.
I understood that this kindly therapist was afraid for me, as if he knew some great truths I could not yet see.
Most people fear and hate change, they will do almost anything to avoid it. I knew that divorce could be rough, and I knew that long-time marriages were among the toughest, although I had no idea just how difficult it would be, or how long it would take.
I got the message. I risked losing my savings, my family, my friends, my bearings, my own history. To some extent, all of those things were lost.
But I was determined to change. Most people are content to exist, I wanted to live.
Around that time, Maria came into my life and I came to believe that I wished to spend the rest of my life with her.
I had to decide – and own – just how much I wanted to move ahead with my life, put my previous life behind me, settle the divorce in any way I could, seek new relationships, work on my writing and photography, and live the life I very much wished to live: the life I imagined, a loving life, a creative life, a life with nature and animals, a life of service.
I had been married for 35 years, a lifetime for many people, and that made the divorce all the more brutal and panful. I was wracked with guilt and regret, separating from my marriage took five difficult years and was the most painful experience of my life. I thought it might kill me, it nearly did. Out if it came a kind of resurrection, a rising.
I remember taking a long walk in the woods with Rose, my border collie walking ahead of me, scanning the path. I remember thinking I would give anything for the life I wished to live, to find a person to love who would love me, to live in nature with animals on a farm with me, to start a blog, to take pictures, to write that I wanted, rather than submit to what others told me to write.
There were all sorts of spirits inside of me banging on the door of my soul to be free. I pardoned them, I let them out.
When Maria and I were in New Mexico, a place we both love, I had a flash of regret for the money I lost and let go of. That money would have made it possible for Maria and I to visit New Mexico regularly, even to buy one of those enchanting adobe houses we kept seeing and go there part of the year down the road to write and make art.
I am at an age where I know a lot of people who live like that, who get to a warm place in the winter, who never have to worry about the hole in their health care donut, who paid off their mortgages years ago, who take vacations with big and fancy cameras whenever they wish for as long as they wish.
Who have beautiful motor boats anchored at lakes in the Adironacks, condos along the ocean, who built log cabins in the woods.
I gave that up, call it a sacrifice if you will.
But for me, that is not a life, those are pleasures, and pleasure can be found in all sorts of ways, from a walk in the woods, to a night in a deliciously seedy motel with the woman I love, to holding hands in a movie theater.
Pleasure is buying a bra for a poor woman at the Mansion too embarrassed to ask, bringing groceries to a refugee mother who husband was butchered, and who came to America along, the pleasure of bringing a camera to a boy from Afghanistan who has never been given anything in his life and who is on fire to become a photographer.
What a beautiful journey that all is to a beautiful place.
It was a moment, really, that stab of regret in New Mexico. i know how much Maria loves it there, I loved it too, it would be wonderful to be able to go there whenever we wished. This was the first time I had ever allowed myself to think about it in some years. It’s okay, I told myself to have doubts and fears, it is a gift to be human.
But much more important was my realization of the importance of having freedom and living fully, of not taking any of the days remaining in my life and wasting them or taking them for granted. I wasted a lot of days in my life.
Einstein said there are two ways to live in life.
One is thought nothing is a miracle. The other is as though every day is a miracle.
Tomorrow is yet another.
In the past week, I’ve visited a score of dog breeder, shelter and rescue sites I found what I suspected, that all but one refused to sell or release a dog to a household with young children, especially those under 10 years of age. Several of the sites even demanded the dog-seeker pledge not to have a child within five years of buying or adopting a dog.
First, this struck me as simple bigotry. If we can’t ban or demonize one group, let’s find another, it seems to be human nature. Secondly, it struck me as tragic, both for dogs and children, yet another thoughtless way of harming dogs in the name of protecting them.
And it almost certainly harms children, something that should outrage people who care about animals and people.
“Dogs will not be adopted to families with children under 10,” says the website of a Northeast dog rescue group, “nor to those planning on having children within five years,. Adoptions to families with children 10 and over will be evaluated individually, with the needs of the child and dog taken into consideration.“
A conscientious breeder who sells dogs for $2,000 put this on her site: “People with young children will have their applications for my dog rejected automatically.”
I was shocked to read this when I first saw it, and then realized it is almost standard for breeders and rescue groups. Every time I think we have given up on the idea of demonizing or stereotyping whole groups of people, I learn that I am being naive. And even though we loudly proclaim our love of animals like dogs, we seem to have little understanding of just how valuable and necessary they can be to us and our children.
There is a vast trove of literature and many studies detailing the enormous benefits to children of growing up with dogs, and the even greater benefits to dogs. Millions of dogs need homes, and almost every child needs a dog. What a profoundly sad disconnect.
Why children should be banned from this increasingly healthy and necessary social support is simply beyond me, I can’t understand it in any other way than seeing instinctive bigotry and discrimination.
The social crises afflicting our urban and suburban societies are taking a toll on emotional distress. There are ongoing massive migrations and population shifts from rural America to the West, Northeast and Southern United States. Many families have no reliable or continuous ties to the communities in which they now live. New technologies, advertised as new sharing communities, separate us from one another, and actually divide us.
Parents and children once lived circumscribed and communal lives, sharing the same activities, faith point of view, faith, even work. The child was an economic unit with everyone participating. Life and death were shared experiences out in the open. Grandma died at home.
Children are no longer needed or even permitted to care for the physical upkeep of their homes. Now children read, learn, entertain themselves and live out their social lives on electronic devices which promote stress, cruelty and isolation. Parents are willing, often eager, enablers of this.
In his ground-breaking book “Pets And Human Development, ” psychologist Boris Levinson wrote about the confusion and alienation in the lives of modern children. “It should not surprise us that an estimated 10,000,000 people under the age of twenty-five are in need of help from mental health workers.” In 1966, he wrote, 1,400,000 children under the age of eighteen needed psychiatric care.”
Today, according to federal health studies, an estimated 15 million young people can currently be diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Many more, say researchers, are at risk of developing a disorder due to risk factors in their biology or genetics, within their families, schools, and communities.
Dogs could help.
Researchers have found that pets radically improve the mental health and development of children.
Numerous studies, reported Levinson a half-century ago, found that families with pets have children with fewer problems than those without pets. “Pets obviously represent a mental hygiene resource of vast importance in our technological society, even as they did in the society of primitive man, who domesticated animals not only for his economic view but for his emotional needs as well”, wrote Levinson.
Dogs give children work to do in the home. They help to build their egos and sense of control. It helps them feel needed, and it gives them great confidence to learn to control a living thing in a humane way. Doctors report that very young children are in urgent need for extensive body contact. Children need some agent that will be soft, cuddly, yielding and present. A dog can assist a child in filling emotional needs that are not always forthcoming in the busy lives of their parents, and teach them the responsibilities of caring for something outside of themselves.
The child learns to walk between one and two years of age, and having an active pet to follow around, says Levinson, “encourages the child’s crawling, increases the use of fine muscles, and makes the process of learning to walk easier and even more pleasurable.” Children can learn from animal health issues the mechanics of health care, and to learn the importance of taking care of themselves.
Psychiatrists like Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud have long argued that pets are an object of fantasy for children, a critical tool for strengthening a child’s understanding of reality and perspective. Children who mistreat or abuse animals often grow up to abuse and mistreat people, sometimes with great violence.
Through their dogs, and learning to care for them, the child can acquire their first understanding of empathy, to feel sorry for another’s misfortunate and happy for their success. Loving a dog is almost all about empathy, since they cannot speak to us.
Children make up fairy tales and stories about their animal friends, this permits them to work out in fantasy the problems of day-to-day living, to test the truth of their conclusions, to apply these insights to their real lives and relationships.
Burlingham, a famed British analyst, wrote that throughout this period of fantasizing about pets, the child gradually and almost imperceptibly learns to acquire a concept of self, and engage in various forms of make believe that don’t come from screens. This stimulates creativity and imagination.
Children who care for dogs can get off of Facebook or Instagram and smart phones, and out into nature and the natural world. Dogs are a natural and joyous form of exercise, they also give children a sense of safety and companionship when they are frightened, lonely or bored. They encourage children to explore their environment, rather than limit their environment to screens.
Taking care of a pet is the beginning of the assumption of responsibility for someone other than him or her self. Children need this kind of experience of they are to be come mature and successful adults. Children ostracized by friends will always have acceptance from their dog.
For me, so much of this is common sense, I regret citing so much of other people’s studies. I have been around dogs my whole life, I know what they dig for me, I saw what they did for my bookish and shy daughter, now a media executive in New York City.
What a shame we live in a world where the people who control the sale and adoption of dogs seem ignorant of their importance to us and the lives of our children. You have only to watch the new to see the value of dogs and other animals in the lives of the young, or the consequences of banning them from their lives.
“A child who is exposed to the emotional experiences inherent in playing with a pet is given many learning opportunities that are essential to wholesome personality development,” wrote Levinson. His play with the pet will express his view of he world, its animals, and its human beings, including his parents and peers.”
