Day: July 17, 2013

I started an Open Group For Bedlam Farm on Facebook last month – we have closed off new membership for now –  and now there are 800 creative people on it, sharing words, photos, ideas, poems, love stories, blogs, animals, nature, art and writing. We call the group a Ministry of Encouragement, and I have never seen so many gifted people open up and lift up everyone else in such a positive and infectious way. This is the promise of the Internet, delayed by the angry and the greedy for so long. One of the Open Groupers is a young man named Andrew Sigler, one year sober, taking what he calls another stab at life.

Andrew didn’t know it when he wrote about this, but this is precisely what I told a psychiatrist a few years back when I was in the midst of my long overdue and inevitable crack-up: “I want another stab at life.” I wanted to live outside of panic and fear. I wanted  to take a stab at responsibility, at being honest, at facing myself. This, is turned out, the was the point of my hero journey, the crucible. A few challenging years later, I have love, am not in panic and am learning who I am, learning to be honest, to be responsible for my life, to be authentic. Hard lessons, battles, the combat of the awakened. This struggle is, I think, the pathway to the meaningful life. If there is a way around it, I couldn’t find it, and I tried. You can be addicted to alcohol, or you can be addicted to drama, delusion, impulse and addiction, the life of the struggle story people. There are so many ways to lose your life, so few ways to get it back.

Andrew isn’t sure he is going to make it yet, but I am sure he is going to make it. I know what he doesn’t know, he’s done the hard part, he’s faced up to himself. We are a community, the awakened, the take-another-stab-at-lifers. The rest is just life in all of it’s pain and glory. The perfect life is not without suffering, the perfect life is about how you suffer, and how you find joy and meaning and stand in your truth every single day.

The Dahlia garden is blooming, and each morning, there is a new surprise for me, a different kind of Dahlia. We groan about the heat and humidity, they love it. These flowers are sexy, evocative, lush, I can almost see them dancing.

__

Note: Wednesday mornings, Fromm Food nutritionists answer your questions about nutrition for your dog or cat. You can post your questions on my Facebook page right now, thanks.

A few years ago, I would never have considered opening up my farm to visitors, to strangers as well as friends. I hid my address, my location when I good and jumped in the river of mistrust that has replaced the American sense of openness and community. I am different now, I feel differently. I have great bounty here. People often tell me they are sad that I left the first Bedlam Farm, but I am not sad, I love our new life here, I love the new farm.

We have great bounty here, sweet donkeys, wonderful dogs, an Irish border collie who puts on quite a show, there is Maria and her art, even our erupting Dahlia garden. Great bounty should be shared, not hoarded or guarded, so Maria and I held two open houses at Bedlam Farm – we drew up to 2,000 people here – and we want to do it again here, this Sunday (and September 1) from noon to four p.m.

I will be honest, being a public person, a celebrity if you will, is complex. Being a public person online is especially complex, social media promotes the idea that we can all be friends, but you can’t be friends with 20,000 people, the vast majority of whom you do not know and can never meet. Holding an Open House is way to meet some, look them in the eye, share the experience that is primarily communicated in screens. I love introducing people to donkeys, I love showing Red off, people should see what dogs like this can do, I love seeing how much Maria loves sharing her art with the people who buy it and wear it and have it in their homes and in their kitchens and on their pillows and walls.

I am opening the farm up to them, but I am also opening up myself, that is, perhaps, the real point of an open house. We have been preparing in earnest, Maria cranking out scarves and potholders to sell, me mowing, the two of us passing posters around. I’m going out to shoot a video of Red herding for those who can’t make it. In the digital age, open houses can take different forms.