Day: March 22, 2013

I am meeting with my good friend Chris Archibee from Mannix Marketing today to talk about bedlamfarm.com and my never-ending determination (obsession maybe) to improve the blog. Might put the covers of my latest books along the side so people see them and buy them. I want more color on the site, and also want to integrate my work more effectively with Facebook and other social media. I am planning to write three e-books this year and publish a paper book, ‘The Second Change Dog: A Love Story,” about me, Frieda and Maria.

Some other notes:

Some of you have noticed that the photo tab on top of the Farm Journal is gone. I’m not showing collections of the photos, too much static space,  not enough room. I’m not selling photos either. I’ve never been comfortable with it, and just don’t really like to do it. Maria is the one exception. Sometimes she decides to sell a photo she likes and people who are interested can speak to her directly about it. She is [email protected]. Generally, I do what she tells me, it works out. People want to pay for their use or support the photography and the blog are invited to make contributions instead. I’ve got a contributions tab at the bottom of each blog post and that way I don’t have to keep mentioning the idea too often. Contributions support the blog and my photography and help me to keep both of them free.

Many of you have written me urging that Florence Walrath’s journals be a book, or that they be longer, more extensive or more detailed. I don’t think these journals add up to a book, and I don’t believe there is a market for their commercial publication. It is also not the kind of book I wish to write. People tend to think every idea they like would make a book, but the marketplace doesn’t work that way. I don’t have the time to put them in any more context than they are – nor did Florence. I like presenting them in short bits and anecdotes, just the way they are, and I thank you for sharing my love of them.

My pairing up with Fromm Family pet food has been a very happy collaboration  so far. Taking ads is one of those things I said I would never do, and the list of things I am now doing that I said I would never do is quite substantial. I’ve gotten scores of messages thanking me for this great food which my dogs have been eating for nearly a year. Fromm is the oldest family owned holistic premium pet food company in America. My dogs are thriving on it. Their banner ad is at the top of the Farm Journal page and people are very pleased with it.

I am very grateful for your support of my work as Recommender-In-Chief at Battenkill Books. We are selling a lot of books through my reviews and to direct calls and e-mails to the store – [email protected]. I am there on Saturdays at 11 a.m. You can call the store at 518 677-2515. It’s a great job, the pay is poor and the food spotty, but the atmosphere is wonderful and I am loving a lot of books. I love Connie too.  Nice meeting many of you on the phone as well. Bookstores are back. Buy local.

At 7 p.m. on Friday May 31st, the students in my Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop will be showing off their art, poems, photos and drawings and reading from their very powerful works. This will happen at the Hubbard Hall Arts Center, Cambridge, N.Y. Details will be coming from them and from me. I’ll be introducing them and talking about the remarkable success of this workshop. You can meet them and see their work at a reception at 6 p.m. From what I hear, most writing workshops are about as much fun as an enema. This one has been a blast. They are very gifted.  In the fall, I will be teaching a four-class workshop at Hubbard Hall on “The Art Of The Blog,” lecturing and talking about the centrality of blogs for creatives today. The class will be given on four consecutive Saturdays, details to follow.

My first e-book original of 2013 will be titled “Listening To Dogs,” and is a manifesto by me urging people to pay less attention to gurus and more to themselves and their dogs when it comes to training. You can do it. An empowerment book. Details to come. The book is being copy edited now and will include a bunch of my photographs. My next e-books will be “Love And Light From Bedlam Farm,” a collection of bright and loving photographs, and “Talking To Animals,” about what I am learning about communicating with them. These books will not be available in paper form, just like “The Story Of Rose.”

That’s enough for now. Thanks for being here.

It has perhaps never been true that everyone could find work that they love. In many ways, that is a fantasy.

Life intrudes on dreams, in many ways. But for me, there is no life without dreams. I think what was once true is that people who wanted to love what they did had a fair shot at doing it. Our needs were simpler. The nature of work has changed, as has the nature of life. People work today for security. To be able to buy health care. For retirement. For the newest devices. We are told every day it is expensive to get old and die in America, save up for it. And for good credit. A lot of things are considered essential today that didn’t exist a few years ago – cell phones, computers, cable and Internet, long-term care insurance, big IRA’s.

Loving what one does has dropped far down the list since Thoreau’s time. He believed that since we have a limited time here on earth we should not waste that time doing work we do not love and that is not important to us. Slavery is slavery, he wrote, noxious in any form. Corporations did not exist in his time, nor was there the idea of health care or IRA’s, but I imagine he would have found working for health care or retirement funds a form of slavery, as I do. Work did offer security once, and also meaning. The mew corporate economy has done away with such inefficient notions. Start saving.

As a father, I understand why people work for health care, and I do not judge anyone who chooses to do it,  there is enormous pressure on people, America’s media, medical, political and legal fear machine works day and night to keep us too anxious to do what we love. Our Orwellian media tells us hourly how dangerous life is, warns us about what we need.

And the list of things we need grows long and dire, and for most of us increasingly out of reach. A federal official gave an interview yesterday in which he said studies show 70 per cent of Americans over 65 will need at least three years of long term care, and since it is so expensive, they will surely lose all of their savings unless they buy long term care insurance. But, an interviewer prodded, long term health care insurance is so expensive few people can afford it. Only the people who don’t need it can afford it. Yes, said the official, that is true. And even if most people could afford it, it will probably not cover the things they need when the time comes. This is how the White Rabbit might have explained “security” to Alice. You have to have it, but you can’t afford it.

I thought of the person who stays in an awful job for years to have health care, gives up her dreams for life, only to find her savings vanish when he gets older because doesn’t have long term care insurance. Or to end up living in a way they hate and never wanted. What a price to pay for life, for security. What is his or her epitaph, what goes in the obit? He gave his life up to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, but he almost had enough insurance to pay for it? The tradeoff from Hell, for me.

I never tell other people what to do, I know better than that. But Thoreau speaks for me, as usual. Life is too short. We should, he said, be as covetous of our time as other people are about their money. My grandparents did not escape from Russia with nothing but their lives so that I can surrender my life again to other people’s expectations. I am greedy of my time. I am saving up love and creativity and meaning so that at the end of my life, even if I am living in a tent, I can put this on my tombstone or on the jar that holds my ashes: he loved what he did. And pray that studies of the future don’t report that 70 per cent of Americans over 65 threw their lives away for the promise of security they never got to have.