Day: August 30, 2013

Things are heating up in Bedlam ahead of Sunday’s Open House, the second in our new home. Motels around Cambridge are booked and I’ve run into Open House people at the Round House and at Battenkill Books, where they have been popping in all day. I found a favorite crew from Ohio and they are coming over for some private time with Simon and Red this afternoon. Jeff Anderson and Jay have been here to check out the site of the Open Group At Bedlam Farm table, where will be showing some of the great work from that group on a laptop. I’m going to do some mowing this afternoon, Maria is crazed tearing about her Studio for the art display.

We are raffling off a signed galley of “Second Chance Dog”  Sunday and then online Monday and Tuesday (details to follow). I’m selling four photographs which Maria is hanging in her studio. She has some beautiful scarves and potholders and pillows done for the show. I’ll be giving a talk or two on our new life here, perhaps reading a bit fro the new galley, also doing herding demos with Red and also a demonstration of his therapy dog training.

We are pleased to share our good fortune in finding this wonderful place to live, opening up our creative lives to the people who make them possible. I call it Bedlam Farm 2.0, it fits us well right now, we are happy Bedlam Farm is going to occupied by some nice renters. The Twitchell family – the new residents of  Bedlam Farm –   will be the Open House Sunday in between football and soccer games. Mary Kellogg will be reading from her books poetry and also some new poems. A full four hours, we are getting excited. Got some mowing and about 1,000 small chores to do. The donkeys will be very happy, they love Open Houses, I suspect Flo may be out to get her belly scratched.

Kim Macmillian will be making scarves to order in Maria’s studio, showing how they are assembled, her husband Jack will be helping out with traffic and crowd control.

Please, no dogs and don’t let your kids chase the chickens. Thanks. More details on Maria’s website.

I  vaguely remember when male barbers had those cologne smelling ships with the red striped poles in front them, they were male bastions run by some guy named Vince, the air was filled with smoke, the talk of sports and politics. Times have changed, my barber is Liz Osterhaud a/k/a Elizabeth LaFlamme Osterhaudt –  a spectacularly larger than life human being exploding with ideas and energy and local news. Liz is a Jersey girl to the core, flamboyant, lots of tude, lots of fun.

She is a transplant, seeming out of place in the country but really right at home. Liz’s shop is out in the sticks of Shushan – her shop is right in the middle of nowhere – but people come from as far away as Albany to have her cut their hair, she is a witch, a psychic and sorceress married to my friend Ben Osterhaudt, who has done so much work on Bedlam Farm One and Two.

Her shop is filled with lamps and mirrors, usually crowded with neighbors, friends and family. Maria and I usually go together, Liz is a great haircutter but more fun than most movies. She and Ben are biological opposites. He is a quite homebody, shy and predictable, Liz is a portable volcano. When I left and she Fiona waved goodbye, this is the portrait I was waiting for.

I had my morning conference with my inner lover today,

he said, look, if you want the truth, I’ll give you the truth.

Listen to your secret sound, the real sound,

the voice deep inside of you.

Now that all your worry and fear

has proven such a useless business,

Now that all your anger and regret,

have proven to be no more concrete

or substantial

than a wispy cloud,

Why Not Find A Better Job?

Like looking for love,

others and you,

and setting me free?

The Brothers Grimm knew their stuff. The best fairy tales come out of life. Last week, I told a friend at lunch that I felt as if I had been asleep my whole life, and then Maria and I found one another, and I was awakened, and yes, with a kiss. Yesterday Maria came back from coffee with a friend and she told me she told her friend that she felt as if she had been asleep her whole life, until we met. How wonderful we told this same wonderful tale about each other.

I would have found this story sappy just a few years ago, but  not any longer, it is the sad,  strange, exhilarating  reality of my life. I remember the first time Maria and I went out together, we went to a somewhat ratty restaurant near Glens Falls, N.Y., we had a drink and sat and talked and I remember this sensation of understanding what it meant to be alive, perhaps for the first time in my life. The only other time I felt anything like it was when my daughter Emma emerged into the world and opened her eyes and I was the first thing she saw.

Like the princes and princes asleep under the spells of powerful witches and wizards,  I had been sleepwalking through life, my feelings shut off, closed to new experience, lonely and confused, living in a dark, fearful and angry space. I had been living that way for so long I lost touch with the idea that there was any other way to live.  I can’t speak for Maria, only for me, I awakened to life, to color, to light, to love most of all. I began to open to new experience like a Sunflower in August, I just blinked and began to see the world. I saw what love could do, began to understand the power of authenticity, the meaning of friendship, the healing power of animals and the natural world.

Our world is obsessed with talk of health and money,  of pills, of tests and surgeries, but I learned, entering my sixth decade that there is nothing in the world healthier than love, more productive, more uplifting, more nourishing to the heart and soul, it restores and prolongs life.  Whenever I glance at the news from Washington, I see that a wizard has cursed our capital, it is a loveless place, it’s inhabitants under an awful spell, angry, fearful, cruel and unforgiving. When I encounter people like that elsewhere, I want to drop to the ground and give thanks that I did not spend all of my life like that. Perhaps a Princess is on the way to save them, bring them back to life.

As it happened, the Gods had other plans for me. A sweet and loving Princess made her way to my castle, poked through the walls and moats and animals and vines that surrounded it, found my lair high up in the old farmhouse,  carried a beautiful basket of flowers,  leaned over my bed and kissed me on the lips. It had been so long since I had been kissed on the lips, I could not understand it at first, but then I opened my eyes for the first time in so many years, I saw the light and color bursting through the curtains, knocking them down, and the thorns and vines and moats melted away, dried up and I began to see the world anew, it was so beautiful I had to capture the images of it and began taking photos.

And in this story, with all of its twists and turns, there was another. I got to kiss the Princess back, and saw her eyes flutter and open and saw her awaken to the world too. And then our great adventure began, we took one another in the hand and heart and see out to see and explore this world together, and for the first time. It is a timeless journey, it will never be finished, never end.  Long before therapists, the Grimm Brothers understood the idea of the Awakening, the hero journey into life. They saw that nothing is more powerful than love, truly it can really lift the most powerful spells and being one back from the dead. I know.

The best fairy tales are about life, and they are also about happy endings, I always said this about Maria, she  is my happy ending.