I love taking photos of Flo on the back porch, don’t know why, a lot of things happening in the photo. Just came back to the farm for a few minutes to drop things off, going back to help Maria clean up the bathrooms. We have been vacuuming, mopping, dusting all day there to get ready for Spring showings. Took the dogs on a walk on the path there, got some photos. Hard to me to be there sometimes, lots of emotions stirring around. It’s quite a wonderful place.
Kristin Preble, our realtor suggested we go over to Bedlam Farm to “shine it up” a big for the Spring sales season. We are gussying up our beautiful place. Painting it, getting some mowing and trimming done. Today Maria and I are taking the dogs over there and we will vacuum and dust the place, tidy it up, walk the dogs on the path into the woods. It is an emotional thing, going over to the farm, stirs up a lot of stuff in me, so much happened to me there. Maria too. I’ll take some photos.
Okay, I’m just kidding about Florence. Just getting your attention. But if you come to the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop Readings this coming Friday at Hubbard Hall, you will encounter something precious and worthwhile: six writers (and me, too) who are enthusiastically and creatively exploring the new life of the writer as the very foundations of publishing, writing, reading and books explodes and evolves all around us.
This workshop began in 2011 and was supposed to last six weeks. We are heading for our second year, and I don’t think we will ever disband. I asked each of the writers to create their own blog, and they have, and this has unleashed a wonderful river of the imagination – writing, animation, stories, poetry, essays, a flowering of imagination. Friday the Hubbard Hall Writer’s are coming out, sharing their work, meeting with you, talking to you, answering questions about this wonderful experiment, one of the most meaningful of my writing life.
At 6 p.m., there will be a reception where you can meet Diane Fiore, John Greenwood, Kim Gifford, Dr. Jen Baker-Porazinksi, Rebecca Fedler, Rachel Barlow. And me and Red, the workshop dog. This is an amazing group of creative and mutually supportive people, fusing technology and ideas to build new kinds of writing opportunities and careers. You can learn a lot from them, I have. You can learn about pugs, the agony of caring physicians in the health care morass, family farms, family care and Alzheimer’s, bugs and spiders, poetry, drawings and technology. A feast. I will be reading from my new book “Second Chance Dogs,” out in the Fall, and each of the Hubbard Hall writers will share something from their work. We will all be available to answer questions and have a discussion after the readings, which begin at 7 p.m. Contributions to the Hubbard Hall Summer Scholarship Fund are welcome, admission is free. Advance tickets can be purchased at the Hubbard Hall website for $10.
As I teach it, writing is a process of coming out, being authentic, finding your voice and your zeal, following it. These very wonderful people have all done that, and it is really working for them. I am so proud of them, I am eager for you to meet them and hear about their work.
The readings will be held in the Hubbard Hall Freight Depot and I know tickets are selling quickly. Hope to see you on Friday. If you care about the future of writings, stories, publishing on the Internet and blogs, you will find it worthwhile. In the fall, I will be teaching a course on “The Art Of The Blog” on four Saturday mornings at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, N.Y. Details to be announced on Friday.
The young often equate information with wisdom, they soak up information obsessively on devices all day long and come to believe they know everything they need to know about their world, even as much of the meaning of life seems to baffle and elude them. They are so busy collecting data they have no time or space to ponder what it means. Their bodies are strong and ascending, and they are far from mortality. Google encourages the idea than one can find all of the answers to life in a smartphone or tablet.
Meanwhile, the old have learned somethings about life, but nobody is asking them what they know or interested in their messages. They have become symbols of ridicule and irrelevance, short on buying time, headed for memory homes, edited out of music, movies, television and books. In our society the elders have been almost relentlessly trivialized, reduced to dependence on aid and insurance programs, fussing with one another about their medications, encouraged only to take their pills and tests and talk to their friendly doctors about sexual stimulants and diapers and plea for their long-term insurance benefits.
What I love about aging is that even though I feel my body sometimes beginning to fade, I have only begun to come to consciousness, begin to awaken the possibilities and mysteries of life. Life is more fascinating to me than ever, especially as I have begun to learn something about it. This is lonely process, most people are too busy worrying about their numbers and hopelessly dwindling bank accounts. We are manipulated into living forever, bankrupting ourselves in the process, and then getting blamed for not being able to afford it. Nobody can afford it, it seems, the great conundrum.
In the full moon of life, writes Joseph Campbell, you have to find the zeal in yourself and bring it out. Marx taught us to blame society for our failures, religion teaches us to blame our sins, Freud taught us to blame our parents, the left blames the right, the right blames the left, we blame health care, the economy, banks, China, Congress, the Internet. But the point of the hero journey is this: if we fail to honor the meaning of our full moons, the only place to look for blame is within: we didn’t have the guts to bring up the full moon and live the life that is our potential.
This, writes Campbell, is the mystery of life and its masks. What are you doing to do when the thing breaks, when the mask is taken away. Are you just going to become an old dog getting older and older, sinking back into your body? Or in the moment of the full moon have you made the jump to the light?
As always, Campbell is writing my story. My consciousness is growing as my body weakens. Every day, I am making the jump into the light.
