Month: June 2012

Red reminds me to stay focused, do my work, live my life.

Red took his first swim this afternoon, we took him and Lenore to the Battenkill River in Shushan. Lenore took off after sticks, Red waded back and forth between me and Maria. He seemed to enjoy the water but isn’t sure yet about swimming. I’ll go in with him and get him paddling soon. Red herded sheep this morning, helped us settle in with some new sheep Darryl Kuehne brought over. Tonight, the third meeting of the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop. I can’t wait.

For me, fear has always had two faces. The internal one, the one that grows inside of us biologically or neurally, or was brought to us, that we saw or learned immediately around us as we evolved – from parents, siblings, relatives, friends, teachers.

The other is external – the messages of fear we are taught, that are broadcast, mandated, shared by the communities around us – the modern media, cable news, medicine, the law, politics, conventional wisdom. It has come as a surprise to me to see that fear has become a profit center, one of the major industries in our corporate culture. The more we fear our world, our health, our neighbors, the left, the right,  the weather, or age, crime, retirement, work,  the more we think we can buy ourselves to safety, live forever, preserve our bodies. It was my major miscalculation in life. It is a major miscalculation I see in so many people.

Tests, IRA’s, expensive software security programs, weather alerts, medical tests, weather alerts, political blogs, pills and pills.

I saw that I was caught between these two faces, see-sawed from one to the other. I saw that most people are, and that they rationalize their fear. They have to get their tests, they have to be careful. They dare not flaunt the faces of fear or tempt it’s horrific consequences.  Don’t put up  your blog because someone will come after you, steal your money, be nasty to you. Don’t trust your neighbor or customer because he might sue you – the airwaves are full of greedy lawyers and doctors looking to alarm you and save you for money. Don’t leave work you hate because you will lose your health care, sail into the abyss.

Don’t skip the news because you might not know that the world has just stopped rotating on its axis, they are rioting in Egypt, there is yet another urgent controversy in Washington. Don’t forego your blood pressure or cholesterol pills or you will have a heart attack or stroke and end up in one of the biggest fear-for-profit machines of all, care for the elderly. The faces of fear are creative, active, greedy, ubiquitous. They eat people up like popcorn and snuff out more lives than any cancer could dream of.

I have been working for years now to construct a center, my own space between these two systems. Part of that is building a spiritual life, a place within me of calm, safety, peace and affirmation. Part of that is finding love, an anchor to share my life. Part is living and working with animals, many of whom possess such a center and remain steady and accepting in their evolving lives. Part is disconnecting from some of the external world – conventional medicine, the so-called news, the legalistic way of looking at the world, the fearful way of living in the world, looking over my shoulder all the time for the many dangers – food, Web, people – I am constantly being told will harm me. It is an awakening for me.

I live very much in the real world in a very real place with very real people and animals and realities, bills and issues. When I see the faces of fear, I withdraw into my work-in-progress center. I ask myself if life is good, if I love my work, if I love my wife, if I love my animals. I meditate, walk, take photos. I write.  I read, sit quietly. Piece by piece, my center grows.

And I find myself. And it is miraculous.

We put Bedlam Farm on the market six months ago, and nobody wanted to see it in the winter and early Spring. I understand the nature of the real estate market, but I was surprised, a bit hurt too, to be honest. I love the farm so much and so much of my life, work, blood and fortune is in it – and it is such a beautiful place for me – that I couldn’t understand why no one even wanted to even see it. Now, as the realtors predicted, it is early Summer and several people do want to see it, especially after we dropped the price by $50,000 to $399,000. Two years ago, we put it on the market for $650,000. I have no complaints about this. Times have changed, and I will change with them. The farm has been magical for me, and I will not regret a second of my life here.

Sometimes the realtor asks if I am comfortable sticking around, as people want to meet me or have specific questions for me. Sometimes they don’t want me around, so that people can speak openly about what they see.  I am fine with that. Yet I have to be honest, showing the farm is hard for me. People see it so differently than I do, even those who love it. People are so different than me, something I sort of know but am occasionally jarringly reminded of. And showing the farm makes it real. People are coming to see it, and we are leaving.

I bought the farm one day in 2003 while driving down Route 30. I looked up and saw this sprawling old farmhouse and barns sitting high up about the small hamlet of West Hebron. I called a realtor on my cell phone and said I wanted to buy it. “But you haven’t even seen it,” she said, and she added, it wasn’t for sale. A few weeks later, she called to say it was suddenly on the market. I bought it over the phone. But you haven’t gone through it, she said. I know, I answered. I’ll have it inspected and check it all out. I just love the place and I want to live and work there. I bought it. My life changed forever.

The farm was a portal for me. My life fell apart there and came together. I’ve written seven adult books, three children’s books, an E-Book original there and became a photographer, an artist. I broke down and got divorced there, got rich and went broke there. Got well and found love there. I have redone or re-worked just about every inch of the place, restored four barns, built four out buildings, a drainage ditch, new wiring, two new rooms, a stone wall. Walked a million times through the woods, read St. Augustine to my dogs. Blows my mind really. I spent all kinds of money I will never get back and that is okay by me. I love my life and will not speak hard of it.

When we bought the New Bedlam Farm, we thought of Florence’s spirit and the feeling of the place and our change to buy it together and we didn’t even think much of the ancient wiring or the 50-year-old bathroom or Grandma Moses’ kitchen or the windows that haven’t been opened in 50 years or the tiny septic tanks outside or the collapsed barn. Who cares? We’ll get around to fixing them. It isn’t important.

Maria is more grown-up than I am and has more experience buying and selling homes. Normal people care about the details, she says, go over them. It is the way it ought to be done, she said, even if it isn’t the way we do it. I am learning this. I listen to her. And the farm is in pretty great shape, I am proud to say, and people do seem to love it. Maybe I am just sensitive about this entry into my most private of spaces, the spaces I don’t even ever put up on the blog.

But when people come through and look at the farm as if it were a business transaction, or fuss over the placement of a barn,  or the strange layout of old farmhouses, it is sometimes hard for me to understand that it is a business transaction and this is perfectly natural and normal, what adult people do when they are looking for new homes. Perhaps it is what I should have done. This is why I don’t have lots of retirement money in the bank. Or any. I think a spiritual life and a creative one teaches us that we live in a larger field than us, swim in a bigger stream. The people who buy it need to love it in their own way, not in mine. But as much as I want to get to our new home, it hurts to sell this place and leave it, and it is pure ego and foolishness to think everyone who comes here ought to feel the way I did about it and appreciate it in the way I do. They have to make their own history here.

Maria said I might want to skip showings and let the realtor do it, but I don’t want to. I’ve learned to grow up and and take responsibility. And I want to make sure I am here to see that whoever buys the farm sees the spirit that inhabits this house, these barns, the creative spark that opened up my life and Maria’s along with everything else. Even if it hurts.

Red seems to possess gratitude and trust.  Karen says she loved him so because he trusted a world that did not treat him well. I notice that he appreciates being cared for. We went herding this morning and he appeared very grateful for his post-herding hosing.