I used to joke that Bejosh Farm is a kind of Disney World of dairy farms. It still is. There are dogs everywhere, rescue cats, a 14-year-old Goat named Sadie who sometimes wanders through an open door into the farmhouse, a Sleep Walking Chicken named Ethel, and a strutting Peacock named Willie.
And of course, cows and calves everywhere.
Every evening, Willie (he escaped from his enclosure and will not be caught) parades behind the farmhouse looking for Ed and/or Carol to say hello and perhaps get something to eat. I am always startled by the sight of him, I have never been close to a Peacock before.
He wants something from me, perhaps a treat. There is no place like Bejosh Farm.
Still Alive: Carol helps Ed with an ice cream float.
I keep thinking each video with Ed Gulley is our last, but I keep being wrong. Cancer is like that, it doesn’t need to be consistent or liked, and it surely doesn’t care what I think.
When I arrived in the afternoon so sit with Ed while he slept and sketched, to keep him company and let Carol get a short nap, I first read him the words of St. Francis on the death of a friend:
“Remember when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received, only what you have given: A heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.”
Ed can’t talk for too long now, his breathing is labored, his energy wanting dramatically, his body is not really listening to him any longer. He did want to sketch. But I’ve been reading from some of my spiritual books.
I wrote yesterday about Ed’s compulsion to be creative now, but he was so tired the last day or so that I didn’t even think of a video. He seems to live for his sketches, paintings and poems. They give meaning to his life, now, he says, when he can no longer be useful or productive or independent as he has been almost every day of his life.
I did think of a video today as I sat by his bedside reading a book, silently watching him sketch so intently, even as I could see his body failing a bit more each day, and sometimes more than a bit.”Do you want to talk about your creativity?,” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “very much. It is very important to me now.” To my surprise, he was ready.
For me, this was our most poignant video yet, and the only one in which some tears came to my eyes.
Ed and I talked about his creativity and how it helped him navigate the humiliation and embarrassment of needing help to perform the most simple tasks, ones he had performed all by himself for more than 60 years. He was, as always, open, honest, and at one point, heart-breaking.
This most active and powerful of men is quite helpless now.
A larger than life man, he admits he has encountered something much bigger than him.
He said the worst thing for him was the feeling of helplessness he had when he has to ask someone to do everything for him – help sitting up, standing up, going to the bathroom, drinking, eating, taking a sip of water, a forkful of food, or spoonful of ice cream, holding a pen or pencil.
A proud and fiercely independent man, he hates asking other people to help doing these once simple tasks he always took for granted, but are now impossible for him to do alone.
He can no longer stand up, walk a few feet, sit up straight without being propped up by pillows and guard rails on his bed.
He cannot bathe or clean himself, or walk. He hates to bother people, nor can he wait for what he needs, time is very different for him now. He is frustrated and feels humiliated and stripped of his pride and dignity. Sometimes, he says, he just wants to be left alone to die.
Sometimes, he is defiant, promising to walk again in a few days. This is typical, Ed has some hard realities to consider.
It is quiet now when I sit by Ed every afternoon. I bring some food, neighbors and farmers are bringing food to Carol and Ed every day, no farmer has to cook a meal when they are in trouble and there are other farmers around.
It feels like a chapel more and more each day, apart from Ed’s children and grand-children, it is quiet. A hospice social worker drops by to talk to Ed and Carol, so does a home care aide, who bathes him and helps straighten out the bed.
The farmers who come by all day Saturday and Sunday are all busy, it is haying and corn harvesting time. Ed is well aware that this is the time of year when he would be out and in the tractor all day.
I bring a book – Anne Tyler today – and sit and Red. Mostly, Ed is asleep, when he wakes up he is either hungry or wants to sketch. We are very much aware of one another, but we only talk occasionally. The New York Yankees radio network is always on, usually at a low volume.
But the summer baseball chatter, so familiar to people like me in the summer, evokes a certain nostalgia and familiarity, especially on his 1940’s radio. That, and the farm and farmland all around give an iconic and timeless American feeling to his room.
I am sorry about the circumstances, but I love the quiet and the dim baseball chatter, and I think Ed does, too.
Finally, he has a chance to think about what is happening to him, I can almost hear his mind whirring while he draws. He’s trying to make sense out of it. It’s like chess, he keeps telling me, you make a move, it makes a move.
Our friendship, uncertain and confusing at first after his diagnosis, has taken root and found a safe and loving place. I know how to help now, what I can do and what I can’t do.
We trust one another completely, we don’t need too many words any longer, we just get the other. He often needs to just be left alone.
I am sorry to see Ed suffer and fail, but I was trained well in hospice work. I can’t save him, or tell him and Carol what to do. I don’t try to manage his disease. I have no wish to take it from them. They will both do what they have to do.
There is really nothing I can do but be there, and give voice to Ed when he needs to have a voice. The videos are very important to him.
I can provide some respite for Carol, when she lets me. I know the drill. I bring a book to read. I fetch a drink and some food. I am quiet unless spoken to. I make sure to stop at the Moses farm market every day on the way to Bejosh Farm, to bring strawberries, blueberries, corn or tomatoes.
I let Carol sleep for a half hour or so, the longest she will permit herself to be apart from him.
I pick up my book on St. Francis from time to time, I need it sometimes almost as much as Ed.
Hey Ed, I said, let me read this to you:
“My dear son, be patient,” said Francis to a sick friend, “because the weaknesses of the body are given to us in this world by God for the salvation of the soul. So they are of great merit when they are borne patiently.”
I like that one, said, Ed, please read it again.
(You can follow Ed and Carol and Bejosh Farm every day on the Bejosh Farm Journal.)
Ali and I met at our “office” this morning (at a Stewart’s convenience store, in the village of Schaghitcoke, we sat at our usual table. One of the soccer team members, Eh-Thaw from Thailand came along, he wanted to see our office and say hello to me.
He is one of the nicest people, and also one of the most polite. Eh-Thaw was hungry, and hadn’t eaten today, so I bought him a slice of pizza with enough stuff on it to kill me in minutes, but he wouldn’t eat it at the table with us.
I asked Ali why and he said it was a common thing among the players, they thought it rude to eat if no one else at the table was eating. Since we weren’t eating, Eh-Thaw ate his pizza at another table and then joined us. We talked a lot about the Thai soccer team trapped in the cavve, Eh-That said he and the team couldn’t stop watching the coverage and praying for safe ending.
“It could have been me, couldn’t it, Mr. Ali,” he asked of Ali, who said no, they would not be going into a cave like that, because of the Army of Good, he said, “we only go to safe places.” Eh-That is from Thailand, he said it could easily have been him in that cave.
Ali and I had some business to do. I had to write a check for $750 to Hawah’s landlord, the county housing agency approved the rent subsidy for her, but they haven’t sent a check yet, and the landlord needs to pay his mortgage. I promised at the time that if there was any trouble, I would back up his agreement to give Hawah, our friend from Libya, a large, very clean, three bedroom apartment before he had the government payment in his hands.
So I had to keep my word, he is a good man who has helped us find housing for several refugees. He said I will get the money back once he starts getting the monthly payments.
That leaves our fund a bit low, but I gave Ali a check for $300 so he can get the team some equipment and take them Kayaking this weekend on a nearby lake. They love Kayaking, they went for the first time a few months ago.
I told Ali it was perhaps best for me to skip going to Albany this week, it seems there is enough on my plate right now, and I don’t care to burnout, which will help no one. I also need to replenish our fund.
I’m go again next Monday or Tuesday to meet an Afghan man who had both legs blown off by a bomb there and who needs some help.We don’t know precisely what help he will need.
I also want to check in on Lisa, and see how she and her two sons are doing.
We are very comfortable at our office, and the people there are quite comfortable with us, we feel quite welcome there. It was g reat having Eh-Thaw there, I urged Ali to bring a player each week if he can.
Our office meeting lasted about 45 minutes, we talked about our plans for the soccer team during the August summer school break. I have two afternoon retreats lined up for the Powell House Quaker Youth Retreat Center, and am talking to Scott Carrino about a two-night camping trek to the Pompanuck Farm Yirt in late August. We are also hoping to get the team to the Great Escape Adventure Park sometime in August.
The boys are doing extraordinarily well, the whole team was on the honor roll and one player, Sakler Moo, graduated from his junior high school with the highest grades in the school. None of these players have been in trouble and the team has given them great focus and cohesion during a difficult time for them.
If you wish to contribute to our work with the Albany Warriors, the refugee soccer team coached by Ali, and sponsored by me, you can contribute by sending a donation to The Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].
“Lord, make me an instrument of peace, where there is hatred let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.”
–St. Francis of Assisi
When I think of spirituality and spiritual transformation, I used to think it was a movement from darkness to light. But I’ve learned that is not true for me.
Darkness is always present in our world and in our lives. It is as much a part of life as birth or death, and will also be present. I can either learn to live with it or let it devour me.
Pure light can be blinding, it can burn, it’s only the two, the mixture of darkness and light, that really helps us to see and understand our world.
Darkness is a powerful teacher for me, and sometimes I see the clearest in the shadows. I know if I can’t live with darkness, I can’t live with life, I would tire pretty quickly of a world filled only with light, and learn nothing about how to live.
The spiritual author Richard Rohr says that Western civilization has failed to learn how to carry and portray the dark side. We have not, he says, taught people how to live with the mystery of life.
I am astonished in recent months at how how much I am learning from the refugees Ali and I work with now.
They have suffered so much and are filled with hope and promise. I know many people who mourn for their lost dogs and cats much more openly and continuously than the refugee women bemoan their hard fate, their butchered mothers and fathers, their dead children and shattered lives.
I asked one woman who has endured murder, rape, the death of her husband, the slaughter of her family, the loss of everything she has known and loved, and now, the troubling challenges and persecution of life in America in 2018, how she has survived with such grace and courage and determination.
“Where I come from,” she said, “we see death and suffering every day, the dark side of things is all around us. Here in this country it always seems to be a shock to everyone when someone dies. In my country, people die all the time. It just a part of life.”
What has made America so special, she told me, is that this is not true here.
It seems to many that we are living in a dark time, at least spiritually, and perhaps, politically.
People are angry and afraid.
In the mist of so much distrust and rage, I set out to find a different way to live, a different way to see the darkness. Watching the enraged posts pour like a poisoned stream on Facebook one day, I remember the moment when I thought: this is not going to be me, this is not how I am going to live.
I saw that no argument I ever saw improved the world, or changed one mind, or brought the light, or pushed the darkness away. Quite the opposite, the more argument and fear and anger that I saw, the greater the darkness.
I love the color and the light, I seek it out in my photography, in my life, in my writing. But I have also learned in my life that darkness is the real teacher, and the best teacher. Unlike the flowers, it is in darkness that I grow and open.
Almost every day, someone writes me to say they envy me, they seek what I have, “the perfect life.”
I feel badly for these people, how empty their own lives must be.
There is no perfect life, no perfect love, no perfect place, no perfect country, no perfect left, no perfect right. We all live in the darkness and in the light.
The prophets wrote about the “suffering of reality” that will ultimately save souls and the world. A friend who is dying asks how God could let him suffer so much, he was taught that God eases the suffering of the righteous. What have I done, he asks, to suffer like this? So he blames himself, and suffers more.
To me, the idea that there is a God who will grant me a life without suffering is one of the cruelest and most banal of ideas. I don’t wish to worship a God like that, what I need is understand suffering and accept it, not to think I will never have to confront it. I’m not ready for a God like that.
It’s easy enough to see why so many people seem to be losing heart. Watching the news, I feel confused and powerless and sometimes, angry. The forces against what I perceive as good sometimes seem to be growing stronger by the day – greed, consumerism, racism, militarism, the corporate monster running lose, the fight for individualism.
History suggests otherwise. The good are always exploiting the poor, there is always darkness and conflict and suffering. Nothing we are feeling is new in any way.
It feels like a crisis of morality and meaning, as it always has. Yet, for me, the irony is that I feel just the opposite. For me, this is a time both of darkness and light, as is always true. For me, I am just beginning to find the meaning in my life, and the personal sense of morality I have always been struggling to define.
This was precisely the challenge St. Francis faced hundreds of years ago, in a time much darker than ours. He had to figure out his true self, what it meant to live a life that was generous and meaningful. What he learned was that the antidote to confusion, division and paralysis was a return to simplicity, one step at a time, one person at a time, one good thing at a time, the right-in-front of-you idea of searching for the light and living with the darkness.
His genius was that he saw what was hidden in plain sight. It was so simple it is almost impossible to see.
The deeds you do may be the only sermon some people will ever hear, he wrote. It was in giving that he might receive.
“We have been called to heal wounds,” Francis wrote, “to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”
In the darkness, I always look for the light, It is not about them, or their news or their anger or corruption. Really, they have little to do with what is most important in life. It is not about what it outside of me, but what it inside of me. That is all I can do, but it is a lot, and this very simple idea has led me out of the darkness and towards the light.
The new blue birdbath only came on Sunday, but is now the soul of the back porch garden, it seems to define the garden, a balance to the colors of the flowers. It appears to have grown right out of the flower bed, and blows kisses to me and my camera.
