Day: May 19, 2013

Jack Metzger is a friend and an artist. He is well known and loved locally as “Outback Jack,” he has spent years driving around the country and collecting beautiful and compelling things from businesses and farms, from old signs to this pulpit like desk that came from a hardware store in Troy. Every word I write is written on an old farm or tavern table I bought from Jack, who is making many of the old and discarded things he find into sculptures that are shown in art galleries and sold from his business, “Jack’s Outback” on Main Street in Cambridge, N.Y. He is gifted and seems to know every house, person and farm in the county. Jack had a warehouse sale this morning and half the town turned up and when I pointed the camera at him, he knew just what to do.

Florence Walrath didn’t seem to skip a beat in her memoirs, she not only lived life fully, she grasped the  lessons of live even as she lived it, which suggests, to me, a person of unusual insight. She had her homilies about life and death, work and family, responsibility and manners and those ideas and values became the foundation of her life. She didn’t wonder about the right thing, she seemed to have a sense of what it was, and she just did it. I imagine her to be as inflexible as she was admirable. In her writing, there is a strong strain of athleticism, from work to riding to dancing. She seemed to pride herself on being a caretaker, a good girl who followed the rules and took care of others. I met a woman recently who was a friend of Florence’s and had a photograph of her dancing when she was 100 years old:

“Although pretty as a baby, Bill turned out to be a beautiful boy, deep red hair, brown eyes and a complexion to go with it. I helped take care of Bill (her nephew) when Blanche went somewhere. The two of them (niece Betty) were a hand full. One day they were sitting on the lawn by the road. I could hear them laughing and each time I looked, they were just sitting there. I would hear a car toot but still they seemed to be just sitting. Then one man stopped and told me they were throwing stones at the cars. They both got the whip on their legs for that and they stayed away from the road…I often laugh thinking what a good time they were having.

   Since I was a small girl I loved to dance. I could do all the square dances, but Mark’s mother used to pay me a dime to dance the round dances with Mark. This was at the Lauderdale dance hall. Later I thought I would die if I did not get to the dances at Hedges Lake each week. I most always went with Alfred Becker and his girl. After the dance I came home with Percy Morris and his wife. Now Mother liked that idea and always let me go. Later one morning, Mother said who was the stout fellow you were dancing with, he is a beautiful dancer. I was surprised and said how did you  know who I was dancing with? She told me then she had been over nights watching, you see she was making sure she could trust me. She need not have worried as up to this point, I thought boys were good pals to dance with. I always had all the dances, some good, and some I helped teach. Boys asked me out on dates but my love was still dancing and sports. One night Roy Armstrong and  Hap Bottom came over. Hap wanted a date with Blanche. We had a good laugh when I told him he better ask her husband.  I went out with Roy often. He was a wonderful dancer. He worked at Hedges Lake. he soon learned my interest was more on sports and dancing. He married one of the girls who had a camp at the lake. No hard feelings.”

There is something affirming and deeply spiritual about meditating with dogs. It is a part of my spiritual practice.

This Fall, I’ll be teaching a four-session course in “The Art Of The Blog,” a subject I have been immersed in for some years and which I feel very strongly about. Blogs have become a profoundly important of our evolving culture. They are, in many ways, the new newspaper, the new book, one of the most powerful means of affirmation and expression in human history. They are a critical element of the contemporary creative life.  My blog has become the most important element in my creative work. Blogs are also feared and misunderstood by many people.

Many people are reluctant to start a blog, they are anxious about losing their privacy, about exposing themselves to ridicule or hostility, about seeming presumptuous, about sharing too much of their lives with strangers. They have lots of excusesThese concerns generally occur along generational lines and they also raise a lot of gender issues. Older people are not often at ease with this kind of exposure, this putting oneself out in the open. Blogs are not dangerous, but many people are anxious about the climate online.

Most of the hostility online comes from men, and the combative and war-like political blogs are almost always conceived by men, who bring their aggressive style of interactions online. Women write nasty things, too, as I can testify, but I think many of the better blogs are from women, who communicate more naturally and understand that the best blogs share emotional and experience, not just opinion. I have worked hard to keep my blog free of conflict and hostility, and I am proud it is a safe place for people to come.

I believe blogs are essential for creative people, the Internet has become the dominant media in the world, and people who wish to remain relevant and share and sell their work need to understand them. They are the most effective way to reach the people who buy books, art and who are curious about ideas. In the course of writing on this blog, scores of people have written me to say bedlamfarm.com has inspired them to begin their own blogs, and I have also seen my students in the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop learn the power of the blog as a creative, not a technical tool. Their blogs are thriving. I love those messages, they lift my heart.

Blogs for me are not about technology, I am not a technical person. They are about individual expression, and about empowerment. It is easy to toss up a blog, they are free, hard to create a good one. That takes faithfulness, hard work and persistence. It took three or four years before bedlamfarm.com really began to grow, and it’s growth involved time, photography, social media and old fashion blood and sweat. I resolved at the beginning to be open, to share my life, not just be another site selling stuff. I also committed to posting regularly and frequently so people would see something new when they came here.

I have always refused to post comments on the blog, this is a monologue, not a dialogue or an argument. I do allow comments on Facebook they are interesting, useful and almost always civil. Social media is important, but I believe the blog is more important. The blog feeds Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and most recently, my podcasts. The blog is the engine that drives the rest, the center of the work. Bedlamfarm.com received more than 130,000 visits last month.

Social media is very useful, very important, but the vast majority of comments and notifications are not useful, thoughtful or necessary. Social media is communistic in that everyone’s pages look more or less the same. Blogs are fiercely individualistic, each one is very different from. The blog’s true fathers were Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, two patriots who did not believe in big media but saw media as democratic, personal and individual. The first journalists were farmers who posted pamphlets up on their pasture fences for people to read as they past by. Media became hopelessly corrupted when corporations took over our communications networks and made them all about marketing information for profit.

Media was never conceived to be noxious corporations marketing anger and violence and conflict for profit. Media was always meant to be us – individuals who care about their world and are willing to express their own values and opinions. Blogs teach writing, expression, the development of thoughts and ideas.

Jefferson’s dream sounds like a blog to me. The corporatizing of media – cable news networks – are a nightmare, not a dream. I’m looking forward to teaching the art of the blog, to discussing notions of blog writing, creativity, integration with social media and issues relating to privacy and community. Blogs are not about software. They give each of us the opportunity to express our selves, our lives, our faith and our values. They are about the growth and preservation of ideas and values and their free expression in the world. And done well, they are art in the truest sense.