Bedlam Farm: Happy Seventh.

  November 6, 2008 – I came to Bedlam Farm a little more than six years ago, for reasons I did not really fathom, but that I sensed would change my life and permit me to seek answers to questions that had challenged me all of my life. I could not have and did not imagine the wealth of new experience that would confront, even overwhelm me.
  If a good life is one hero’s journey after another, buy a farm and run there. I remember sitting with my donkey Carol in the big barn as she lay dying, she eating oats from a bucket while the two of us listened to Willie Nelson on a Boombox. I remember pulling freezing lambs out of a February blizzard with Rose and pulling others out of screaming ewes in howling winds and sub-zero cold. I remember hauling hoses across the driveway in my teeth to get water to animals after the buckets froze and the power went out.
  I remember my first ram butting me into a fencepost and knocking me out.
   I remember the Canadian howlers that buried the farm in snow, ice and drifts for days while I dragged hay bales across the mounds of snow to the troughs. I think of Rose and I taking the sheep out into the woods.
 I haggled with farmers over hay, and met farriers and sat with shearers in barns and talked to farmers about their hard days. Rose and I have often gone to a farm late at night to help get animals back in a barn, or find sheep and goats out in the woods. I remember coyotes with their blood-curling howls right in the back of the farmhouse, so close the hair on the dogs backs stood straight up. I remember shooting rabit raccoons, rabid feral cats, and blasting away at coyotes and foxes heading for the chickens or lambs.
  I remember shooting a ewe who was sick and in pain when the vet said she couldn’t get there for days and I ought to put the ewe out of her misery. There were days without power, and giant sheets of ice that took hours to navigate. I remember Rose by my side all of the time, day after day, night after night, and I remember toppling barns, freezing troughs and hoses, rotting foundations tottering fences and bursting pipes.
  Also climbing the hill to read “City of God” to the dogs and crisp fall afternoons and flies swarming in the summer and gentle donkeys. And four-wheeler rides out into the deep forest.
 And doing hospice work and, as Joseph Campbell warned, becoming disconnected and falling inward to a dark, even dangerous place. I remember getting my Canon camera and going to the back of the farmhouse and getting a serious shot of Elvis, one of my first, and of chasing sunsets with Izzy, and hanging out at fairs, parades, firehouses, churches, concerts. And much happiness, even joy, and pain, loss and sorrow. That is life and still more life. I have edged close to God and run away, trawled the Adirondacks, baptized dying people.
  Less than two years ago, I started this journal, which became a blog, and new something bigger than me.
  I don’t often reminisce and am not into nostalgia, a dangerous trap. Given a choice, I would always rather look forward than back. But sometimes, at unexpected times, I am taken aback by the wealth of memory, by the scope of the change. I feel sometimes that I have lived a lifetime up here, and that I have several more to go. Sometimes I want to laugh, sometimes cry.
 There are a number of things in my life that I have been looking for, and am determined to find.
  Sometimes I remember why I came here. Sometimes I forget. It always comes back why I love this farm.
  If there is a perfect life, this is not it. How could it be? Why should it be?
  But it is a lot of life, and how can one be any luckier than that.
  So I enter my Seventh Year on Bedlam Farm, and I ask myself what it is that I want? What does it mean to me to be here? I want the same things I’ve always wanted, and sometimes found, sometimes not: love, truth, creativity, change, growth. To write about animals and life. To take photos that reflect the world around me.
 To feel that each day counted for something, and that every single day, without fail,  I created something.