There have been thunderstorms all week, and it has always intrigued me why some dogs fear thunder and some don’t. Lenore doesn’t even seem to note, she just dozes right through even the loudest storm. Frieda gets visibly rattled – Rose hated storms and shivered all through them. Frieda stays close to me, her eyes seemingly pleading for some explanation of the world behaving strangely. Dogs have such greater hearing than humans, I can only imagine what thunder seems like to them.
What does it mean to be creative? I put up hundreds of photos each week and nothing is more interesting to me than to see which ones strike a chord with people, touch them in a particularly clear way. Two days ago, Maria picked a peony out of the garden and put it in a blue vase. I saw it and moved it out into the living room. It struck me as especially evocative – a promising still life. So I took a photo of it and put it up on the website and got a huge response to this photo.
Here was a case in which creativity had a line – Maria saw the possibilities, they touched me in a special way, I decided to photograph and share them. This is a potent example for me of my idea that most people are creative, even if they have not had the chance or will to develop those instincts. This sort of thing is what Maria and I both do for a living. We are always looking for light and color, always trying to capture them. But they are also simple things. Anybody could see this, anybody could have taken the photo. There was no special skill involve beyond seeing the potential and in my case, adjusting for the exposure coming through the window – thanks Christine.
Art used to be run by elites, and elites still see art like painting and photography as something for them, not for the masses. The Internet causes dislocation and chaos everywhere, but it is also a great leveler. For better or worse, we are all artists and writers and publishers now – we have our computers, blogs, tablets, cell phones, browsers, paint and sketch programs, games, video cameras, DSLR’s point-and-shoots.
Digital photography brought an amateur like me to photography, and millions of others as well. It has brought Maria to videos, photos, blog writing, and influenced her text, color and art. Creative is, to me, internal, not external. Classes and teachers can be helpful, but creativity does not come from them, only the skills to hone and develop it. Creativity is the light inside of each of us, released. It is subjective, more so all the time. Your idea about a good photo is just as good as mine, as many people are finding when they try it. Creativity is the spark inside of us, I think. It is a universal gift, even if we all used it differently, or not at all.
Just about every day, someone asks me to put up a new video of Simon braying, but I think there are enough videos of Simon braying on You Tube to last awhile. I just don’t like doing the same thing too often. For me, creativity requires being spontaneous, so I don’t really listen to requests for photos (every day someone asks for more dog photos also), but rather take the photos and videos that seem fresh and interesting to me. This is why I can’t imagine charging for the blog. One woman squawked on Facebook recently that there were not enough photos of dogs lately. There’s a refund on the way, I happily replied. Head for petfinder.org, there are thousands there. People might think they can tell me what to do if I started doing what I was told. I suppose they think that anyway.
For me this would all get stale fast if I started taking orders for images. And I would get angry quickly enough. I know me. Still, I understand the impulse.
Simon’s call to life – he brays to me every time I come out of the farmhouse – is certainly stirring. At no point in my life did I imagine having an appreciative donkey bray for me every time I walked outside. Life is refreshing in that way. Simon is perhaps demanding a carrot or cookie, but it does often appear to me that he is expressing his own form of gratitude, of celebration, in that sense a call to life. I doubt he remembers his ill-treatment before coming to the farm or cares much about it – humans need to remember such things, not donkeys – but there is something affirming and celebratory about him and his wondrous bray, which echoes through the valley and can be heard for miles. He seems to love his life, and he seems to be a very happy creature. Maybe his long period of deprivation has give him this sense of joy. I wonder if our new neighbors will like the bray. In the country, people tend to appreciate things. They will likely get a rooster crowing also.
Chickens don’t show much empathy or community when it comes to eating worms or bugs or feed. They squabble and cluck and race around all day. Nighttime is different. Maria and I love to come into the barn at dusk and watch our four chickens hop up onto the roost, gaze out the window at the valley for awhile, preen and cluck and clean themselves, and then squeeze together until each one is touching the other. Then they settle down and take in the night.
I hope for as peaceful a night for you. I love taking photos of the chickens, with their odd shapes and colors. Is there a market, I wonder, for a chicken photographer?
I remember one beautiful afternoon when I was striding at the top of the world. Jeff Bridges and an army of HBO movie people had come to the farm to shoot a scene for “A Dog Year,” my first bestseller and the launch of my writing about dogs and animals. Jeff invited me to lunch in his trailer and afterwards he asked for a tour of the farm. We picked our way among trailers, cameras, and nervous crew members.
I showed Jeff the restored barns – every penny of the movie money went into them – the new floors and ceilings in the farmhouse, the new fences and seeded pastures, the stunning view. “Jon,” he said, walking me to the porch and looking out to the Black Creek Valley, “when you sell this place, you’ll get a million dollars for it.”
Two years ago, soon after Maria and I got together, we decided we ought to move. Many people attributed this to my growing older or to the dread American notion of “downsizing,” something older people seem to be expected to do. Those were never the reasons. We wanted to find, buy and love our own place. Maria and I are a love story I never even imagined would occur in my life at any point, let alone once I passed 60. So I treat love as the miracle it is, and take it seriously. We want to move to our own place, our own New Bedlam Farm. We first put the farm – 90 acres, a restored 1861 farmhouse, four lovingly restored barns and good pastures with fences and paths off into the woods – on the market for $650,000.
Our timing was interesting, it was accompanied by the trauma of the Great Recession and my divorce, both of which occurred about the same time. It turned out that Jeff was a great actor, but not so great at reading the future of real estate. I was ready, but we didn’t sell it for a million dollars, and we couldn’t sell it for $650,000, it’s assessed value. Rattled a bit, we decided to wait another year or so. This year, we decided it was time again, so we put the house on the market for $475,000. It is currently assessed at $575,000 and we thought it a bargain at that price. They would line up to buy it. We met Rocky and saw Florence’s house and fell in love with it. The new place is no condo. It is a wild place that needs a ton of work. And it comes with a blind pony. All the animals are coming, and more. Life will not be simple or quiet.
We bought it and are closing on it in July. We decided not to wait until we sold the farm.
Bedlam Farm has been on the market for six months and has not yet sold. Almost everything about real estate has changed since I last bought or sold a house, nearly a decade ago. It is literally – like publishing – another world. Three months ago, we lowered the price to $450,000. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone over these figures in my head – how much for fences, a new roof, a new barn, Maria’s studio, a new bedroom, windows with screens, waterers for the animals, a lower mortgage. Paying for two homes.
Today I talked with some people I trusted – a realtor, a financial adviser, and with Maria, of course. It hit both of us at the same, and the realtor and my adviser reaffirmed it. The farm was, in fact, worth a million dollars, she said, but not today, not now. Many people are interested, but no buyers yet. We decided not to belabor or lament this, but to respond to it. You’ll never get your money back, not what you put into it, said the realtor. But you will sell at this price. You will not have a huge chunk of money to fulfill all of your dreams for the new place. So it suddenly came into focus for me, like the autofocus on my camera. Today, I got it. I saw what we had to do. In my mind, I saw many of our plans growing wings and flapping away.
Why not lower the price a few thousand dollars, said the realtor? No, I said, I see the problem. Houses in the $400,000 range are not selling. Houses in the $300,000 range are selling, especially if they are good values. Let’s get it down there. So we lowered the price by $50,000, to $399,000. The new barn and the new bedroom will have to wait awhile. Maybe a new sink too. The fences might have two wires, not five. I try to be open here, and I will not lie to you. I always imagined that this beautiful farm would be scooped up in seconds by loving people who appreciate it. Today we gave a huge chunk of money away and I did not come close to panic. A miracle.
I wasn’t sure about writing about this – it feels personal. But real estate listings are not private. And more importantly, I have always kept to the idea that the blog is about sharing the evolution of my life, and not only the fuzzy and furry and colorful parts of it. So I will keep doing that. I love my life, but it is not just about donkeys and flowers.
As I think about it, it seems fair to say that this is not a sad story, but a quite happy one. We love our lives here and will love them as much or more there. I can’t do much about life or publishing or recessions and markets, but I will not hate my life or dishonor it with complaints, or call it hard names, either. I can’t wait to herd sheep in the New Bedlam Farm with my working dog Red, and walk with Maria in the woods, and sit on the porch and watch the lumber trucks go by and walk with Maria in our acres of woods.
For much of my adult life, I could have bought the new place outright. For some years, I did pretty much what I wanted to do. That is no longer so. But the funny thing is that it has worked out. I would much rather be me now than me then.
