Lenore loves it when I write, she hops up onto her couch – she has her own private couch in my study, no human or dog ever uses it – and goes to sleep. If I get up or turn around, her tail starts to whirl and thump. She knows how to play, roll in mud, eat and rest. And love, she is the Hound Of Love.
There was a lot of banging, hammering, drilling outside of my study window all day, Jay Bridge is working his way around the house to put storm windows on the downstairs windows. This is bad news for the giant moths and mosquitoes and flies that have been storming their way through our porous small wooden screens for two years now.
Jay Bridge is a quiet man, but he does like to sing and whistle, it was melodic compared to the banging outside of my window. I asked Jay if he thought John Updike had to put with this when he wrote Run, Rabbit, Run, and Jay just laughed at me and kept on whistling. He is a quiet man and a conscientious worker.
My wife is a pagan, she sheds shoes, socks and jackets half the year, she has already thrown every window in the house open, there will be plenty of fresh air in the house until November after Jay gets done. Bad news for the moths, good news for us.
I’m going to New York City Thursday to do something I’ve been doing for three decades – pitching book ideas to a publisher. Last week I decided to leave my long-time publisher and set out into the Emerald City to find another publisher who will buy my books and publish them. It was very tempting to stay there, it was very necessary to go. It was frightening and exhilarating, something I knew I had to do several years ago.
I have no idea what the marketplace will make of me, who might want me to write about them. Five years ago, when the recession hit and publishing as I knew it ceased to exist, my agent at the time suggested that I might be over. Mid-list writers, she said, especially older ones who didn’t have 20 more books to write, were not selling well any longer, publishers were cutting back. Perhaps I might go and get a puppy and write about it. Books like that, she said, were selling, the editors would love a book like that, she could definitely sell a cut puppy book.
She was shocked at my response, I said it was a surprising and offensive thing for me to hear. For one thing, I said, puppies ought not be bought so somebody can write a book about them. It’s not a good reason to get one. For another, I don’t want to write a cute puppy book. I suspect I would be moving on soon enough. It’s not their fault, it’s mine, I have just not ever been able to jump in the river and flow with the current.
I decided then that I was not ready to be over, I poured my heart and soul into my books and into my photos and my life with animals and my blog. bedlamfarm.com is getting four million views a year now, my photographs are shared all over the place, I am cruising towards 20,000 likes on Facebook.
I am going to New York to discover the next chapter in my writing life, to see if there is an editor and a publisher who wants to get married. You never know. One or two seem excited about me, I have a new agent who likes and respects what I do. I was stung by what my agent said five years, I sometimes do wake up in the night and wonder if I am over. But that is just middle-of-the-night craziness, it does not last, fear is just a space to cross, a geography to nowhere.
I always seem to end up in New York when I seek to give rebirth to life, it has always seen the city of promise for me, the Emerald City.
I am still not ready to be over.
I choose to remain relevant.
I am just learning how to be creative.
I have important books to write.
People exploit animals all of the time for their own purposes, and I don’t wish to do it, but the carriage horses have been good for me, they are angels come to refresh my creative spirit, make sure the creative spark is shining brightly inside of me. They remind me how much I love what I do, how precious it is to be a writer, to search for the truth, it is the only thing I have ever wanted to do.
The horses have shown me that my creative spirit, the spiritual force by which all human accomplishment – my writing – will be attained and accounted for. Like my donkey Simon, I hear from the call to life, I intend to answer it.
The Hebrews and the Iroquois called it Orenda, it is magic force, it is my song. Tomorrow I will take it to New York and see what I see about my life as a writer. The horses, like all the other animals I have know, teach me acceptance.
I choose to not be over. I am just beginning.
Maria had an afternoon Maternity Meeting with the ewes, we felt badly about Kim, her lamb was stillborn about a month ago, we found it lying dead in the snow. Kim has moved on, but since then she seems especially attached to Maria, the two of them seem to talk often, I have no idea what the conversation is about, I don’t ask.
C.S. Lewis wrote that friendship is born at that moment when one man or woman says to another: “What! You too? I thought no one but myself…” I think that is so. Friendship requires, I think, the ability to give love and receive it, a willingness to be vulnerable, to share one’s soul with another. Somewhere, there needs to be a connection of the soul.
In my life I have had a number of challenges, none more enduring and difficult than love, friendship and money. I first felt the power of love when I saw my daughter Emma being born, I think, and then, once again when I got to know Maria and we fell in love in the most powerful and enduring way, it continues every day. I do not believe I was able to love outside of those two people, a sad thing to know about myself.
I have always struggled with money, I either spent too much, made too much, gave it all away, or in my present phase, simply had none. When I was young, and for most of my life I had no friends, or friends that came and went, or friends that disappeared when there was trouble, or friends I simply did not know how to love and understand, or who understood me.
I am the living embodiment of the therapeutic idea that when you are not available, people cannot get to you, and for so much of my I was simply not available, not really. So in my sixth decade, I am not only discovering that not only can love come at any time, but friendship as well. I have good friends now. There is my friend Scott Carrino, a musician and the co-owner of the Round House Cafe, there is my friend Jack Macmillan, a former country transportation manager, neighbor wise in the way of life in the country, machines, gates, tools and rifles. I am good friends with Tom Wolski, a veterinarian who shares my views on animals and their nature, and who is also a gifted photographer.
A few months ago, I noticed a man- eating lunch almost every day at the Round House Cafe, he usually ate alone, but seemed to know everyone who came in. Somehow, I got the feeling he lived a creative life, and I was correct. We started joking with one another and made small talk for months, and I finally saw the foolish nature of me and and I asked him to have lunch with me, I had the C.S. Lewis moment, more than one, I kept thinking “What? You too?” We both had gotten divorced after long marriages, were trying to figure out how to be fathers to our daughters, we both worked alone and rejected the corporate path, we both had love in our lives.
Rod is a gifted carpenter, he makes wonderful cabinets and other woodwork, he works out of a barn he rebuilt and lives on the bottom floor of it in a small and simple and beautiful space he restored himself. He cautioned me that he has a compost toilet – I think he thought I would be repelled – and we immediately got into a good-natured dispute about gluten. We had Rod and his partner Stephanie over for dinner, talked easily for hours, I went to see his studio, we are going to see them this weekend.
I am different from all of these men. Tom has planned for retirement and pined for it for years, Scott has built houses, bakes and cookies, is a Tai Chi wizard and loves camping in the woods, Jack understands how the world works and I do not, Rod is a skilled artist and craftsman who finds the idea of blog disturbing, he has chosen the same kind of life I have – we are on our own, we understand where we can’t be and where we must be. But we are all similar as well.
This is the first time in my life I have had so many and such good friends and I trust them and appreciate them. People tell me all the time they can’t find love, they can’t find friendship. I am here to testify that it comes when one is ready, when one opens to it.
To love at all is to be vulnerable, to risk great pain, to give and receive friendship is an act of love, and of vulnerability. I am still learning how to do it, I began to think it was impossible for men, yet men make wonderful friends, I see. They do love to talk, they can be open, they come running when needed.
Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll even have a lot of money again.
Lewis wrote that friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauty of others.
I had given up on friendship, I had given up on love, and here both are, right outside my door, waiting for me to be aware enough and brave enough and open enough to let them in. It is the most wonderful thing to have the beauty of others revealed.
