Big news from Bedlam. This morning, the first Dahlia bloomed in the Dahlia garden, and it was shockingly beautiful and stylish and sultry, just as promised. I see why this flower prospers in South America, it has been loving the heat and humidity here. I love the Dahlia garden. More opening up. Album going up on Facebook.
The Pig Barn at Bedlam Farm is a place of secrets, an old barn where pigs were once kept and slaughtered, and which became an art gallery, a locus and focal point to the commitment to creativity that Maria and I share, and is at the heart of our support for one another. I went inside this beautiful old restored barn yesterday – I always saw it as an office or a studio – and sat with Red for a few minutes. This old barn has seen a few lives, it was a wreck when I found it, it had no windows, a disintegrating roof and one solid wall when I bought the farm, it is a good place from which to look at life and meaning.
There is this idea in our culture that to have a meaningful life, you have to get dramatic, be bold and brave, leave yours behind, run to a mountain, buy a farm, live off your art, becoming a writer, get to a mountain. I’ve contributed to that idea in several books, and for me, there was some truth in it. I had to leave myself, my life, to find it. There was no other way I could see.
It is easy to wrap such an adventure in glory, I think everyone wants to run from their life sometimes, that is the nature of human beings, one of the many enormous differences that separates us from animals. They accept their lives, live within their lives. But sometimes I wonder if people like me don’t unintentionally promote the idea that you can’t find a meaningful life right where you are, within the confines of your own existence. Our society does not celebrate ordinary lives, there is no glamor in that.
Sitting in the Pig Barn, it occurred to me that perhaps the people who have to run off to find themselves are among the most troubled and disturbed, perhaps they have no choice, it is a question of survival for people like me. But that doesn’t make me noble, and it doesn’t mean that people who don’t run off and live out their lives every day – Bruce Springsteen’s idea of the true American heroes – are not the noblest of all. Maybe the bravest and most admirable. It does not take nearly as much courage to walk through the woods as to go to a tough job day in and day out and navigate the complex boundaries of life and responsibility. In many ways, such people may have some of the most meaningful lives.
Publishers like to publish escape and fantasy books – stories of people who run off to farms, wander in the sylvan dell, commune with animals, walk in the mists, find love. Does this sound familiar? I squirm a bit as I write it. People who stay with their lives rarely write books about it, are not on TV, are not considered by others to be living perfect lives. I don’t see any books out there called “Running Nowhere: Finding Meaning Right At Home.” I have moved a lot of times in my life, and the problem with all of my moves – each one to the fantasy of a better and more meaningful life – is that that I came along too. Until I dealt with me, it didn’t matter where I lived, I was frightened and miserable.
Sometimes it is liberating and life-saving to run off to a mountain or a farm sometimes it is destructive and delusional. Sometimes it is liberating and life-saving to stay right where you are and meet life on its terms.
People ask me all the time why I’m selling Bedlam Farm since I love it so much and it is so beautiful a place. Well, I say, because I can’t afford to live there anymore. Is there something wrong with living inside of your life? Interesting that this rarely occurs to people. I used to be ashamed to say that, now it is nice to speak the truth.
I suppose this revelation isn’t as dramatic, but is seems pretty exciting to me. If you read the news, you may have heard that publishing is changing, and 92-acre farms with big old houses and barns are not the story for book writers these days. I’m fine with that, I love our new home just as much, I love my life even more. I am figuring out how to be a writer in the new world, and it suits me fine, just like writing in the other world did. It doesn’t really matter where you live, I want to say, you love one place, you can love another. If you don’t love the person living in it, it doesn’t really matter. If you do, anyplace is good.
All of this has made me think about the unheralded nobility in staying where you are. Perhaps you don’t have to run off to a farm or a mountain to find yourself, to open up to love, to be connected to people, to be creative. Maybe that isn’t the only way. Perhaps an attic will do, or a basement. You can meditate in a basement. Take photos anywhere or paint your pictures. See your family, know your neighbors, do your work.
Some of the happiest days of my life were spent in a heatless New Jersey attic sitting in front of one of the first Apple computers, my breath clouding the monitor in the cold, my fingerless Dickens gloves pecking at the keyboard as I spent years writing my first novel. I guess the point of my Pig Barn meditation was that is so easy to cloak ourselves in this mantle of heroic adventure, lonely and committed wanderer on the hero journey fighting for the good and independent life. Definitely something to it. My other happiest days occurred further along when I decided to stop running away from life to escape it, but stand my ground and face it. That means getting help, facing reality. Those days are now.
But I like Springsteen’s idea of the real heroes in our world. The people who raise their kids, take care of their aging parents, try and put a few bucks in the bank every now and then, plop down in their unglamorous neighborhoods and rub their sorry feet. They know nobody is going to bail them out of their lives, send them money, pay their bills, contribute to their lives, wave any magic wands. To live sustainable lives, they must sustain themselves. Is that any less meaningful?
I have a fantasy that there is some urban or suburban Thoreau out there, perhaps in Middletown, Ohio, who is up in an attic, or a corner of the basement, or a tool shed in the back yard clacking away, writing a book about the seekers and mystics and heroes who stand their ground, committed to where they are, unable or unwilling to walk away from family and obligations but still committed to a life of meaning.
It might be hard to find a publisher for such a book these days, but it would make a great subject for blog, and one of the most meaningful hero journeys imaginable. If I were writing a blog or book like that, I have a title in mind, the Pig Barn whispered it to me: It isn’t where you are. It’s who you are.
For Maria and I, the flowers here have become a big part of our life on the new farm, which we love very much. Yesterday we went to Stannard Farm, they are offering a flower sale soon, most people’s gardens are pretty much set, as are ours, but we are replacing the withering pansies in the windowboxes. I was drawn to this shot of the emptying greenhouse at Stannard’s, and of Maria picking out flowers in the background.
