Nearly seven years ago, when I was living alone on the first Bedlam Farm and going to pieces, I wrote about my disintegration in one of the first posts on this blog. A few days later I got a letter from Marjorie, a widow living on a small ranch in Wyoming with three children. She worked two or three jobs day and night to pay her bills, her husband had been killed in a truck crash. Folded neatly inside the envelope along with a  letter was a rumpled $10 bill.

“I am worried about you,” she wrote. “I hope this helps.”

It was clear from the letter that Marjorie had a tougher life and less money than I did. I sent the money back. Unless it’s for a subscription to pay for the cost of the blog, I always send the money back, I believe I have no right to take money from  Marjorie or from anyone for anything but my work.

Every time I am in trouble – when I gave all my money away, when I had my crack-up, when I got divorced, when I couldn’t sell Bedlam Farm, when the recession hit, when publishing collapsed, when I had  heart surgery, I got a letter from Marjorie – and often many others –  with a note and some cash, usually $10, $20 when Marjorie was flush. I always send it back, just like I sent back the $40 she sent me when I went into the hospital  in July.

I don’t like to take money from people, and Marjorie is one of the reasons why. It is always the Marjories of the world who send you money if you let them, it is always the people who have little who grasp suffering and need the most, and respond to it. It is very easy to manipulate people on the Internet – often a very emotional medium –  into sending you money to clean up  your own messes and to pay for your own life. I am always uncomfortable taking money from people, I hope I never get comfortable doing it.

Whenever I write about any trouble I am having, I always think of Marjorie sitting out there on her ranch, still working seven days a week, raising those kids by herself, hauling wood into the house every night to save on heating oil, getting clothes for her kids from neighbors and relatives. If there was any justice in the world, I would be sending her money.

Marjorie has a lot of troubles, and she does not ask me or anyone else to pay for them. She would be quite stunned, perhaps outraged, if I did. She does not have things she cannot afford, and the first thing I will do if I ever get money is send her an Iphone and then a big screen TV.

In the past few years, the ethics of receiving have changed for me.  The recession, the collapse of book publishing, the decline in advances and royalties for books, digital publishing has altered my ideas about receiving. I started a voluntary subscription program on my blog. I launched a Kickstarter project, “Talking To Animals,” and helped my friend George Forss launch his, “The Way We Were.”  For my book project, I needed a new camera I could not afford, Kickstarter helped me to buy it.

For most of my work life, my books paid for everything I needed, things are different, change is precious and necessary.

I like the Kickstarter idea – everyone who contributed gets something back – a book, updates, photos. It seems both democratic and just to me. People can ask for whatever they wish, people can decide to give  what they wish. It is up to them, it is their business, it is not for me or anyone to tell them what they should or should not do.

The Internet has radically altered the dynamics of taking money, people like me now talk directly to people like you, the middlemen are vanishing, the Internet is obliterating the barriers between us. it is easy enough to take advantage of that, people are so good-hearted and eager to help. And to rescue.  I have to think how I present myself, the Internet is a boundary killer.

I have changed. I came to see it was appropriate, even essential,  to be paid for the work I do,  if I was to be able to keep doing it. That was a tough decision for me. But the ethics of money keep appearing and re-appearing in the new world. Two weeks ago, the members of a creative group I started – the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm – got together and gave me $5,000 for Maria and I to go to Disney World for a week in the winter. There are wonderful creative people there and we are making something special on the group every day. An astoundingly generous gift for me, I was stunned and disturbed. How could I accept this? I had asked them not to send any money, I planned to refuse any sent to me. So they decided on giving me a vacation.

They made sure I couldn’t return it, they gave it to me in non-transferable Disney gift cards in my name. It was one gift for another, they said, the gift of a trip to Disney World after my surgery in exchange for the gift of creating the group. One thing for another, I said yes, I accepted the money. If felt right to me, and to Maria, although don’t we always find a way to rationalize what we wish to do?

But I think a great deal about the ethics of taking other people’s money. I do not ever plea or beg for money because I am in need, it seems manipulative to me.  People like Marjorie will feel compelled to respond. People can subscribe or not, I only wish them to subscribe because my blog is valuable, not because I am needy. I take money for my work, I am entitled to that.

I do not ever ask for or permit people to bail me out of the decisions I make. The first Bedlam Farm has been on the market for several years and not sold, a challenging and unexpected problem for me. But it is my problem, not yours or Marjorie’s. My name is on the lease, I spent all that money fixing it up. Marjorie would send me money in a flash if I said I needed it to pay for two farms, but according to my sense of right and wrong,  it is not her problem. It is mine to solve. When it is solved, I will look in the mirror and respect what I see there.

When I went into the hospital all sorts of people messaged me saying they wanted to send money, they knew I would need it for all of the medical bills, I was very clear about refusing it, that is not a problem for other people to pay for, not in my mind, not in my notion of the ethics of taking money.

My life is not a good cause or a charity, people are not obliged to do what I do or support me because I chose to live on a farm in upstate New York and write about animals. There is nothing heroic about that, there is no reason for people to empty their cookie jars or tape four quarters to a card, as one person did,  to feed my donkeys.

These are my ethics, they are not meant for anyone else, I do not tell other people what to do, or presume to know what is best for others. If I can’t make my life work, I need to fix it, or change it, not ask Marjorie to pay for fixing it or take her money. Other people have other ideas about that, and they are as right as I am. I respect other choices, there are many paths to take in the world. We all need to do what we need to do.

But these are my ethics, in the Internet Age, it is important to state them out in the open, to be transparent,  to know how I feel about it and to say how I feel. Lord, there have been so many times when I wished some angel would show up with a big check and bail me out of my own messes. I am grateful he never answered those prayers, I am thankful I never succumbed to that powerful fantasy. I am prideful, I think it has saved my life.

At the first Bedlam Farm, I gave more than $200,000 – all of the money I had – to someone who squandered and wasted every cent of it. I was sick, but still, shame on me. I would not take one cent of Marjorie’s money to pay for that. Responsibility is healing it is cleansing.

I wish to be a fully-realized human being, not a dependent one, I do not wish to be anyone’s rescue dog.

I have learned through Marjorie and others that there are many people out there who identify very strongly with suffering. They send quarters and dollar bills, checks for $5 and $6 dollars for their subscriptions. I respect that, but otherwise, their money should go to the frightened children at the border, or the starving families in Iraq or the battered children of Gaza, it ought not go to me. There are lots of good people out there, and lots of enablers, drawn to suffering and drama, eager to keep crazy people like me in the crazy life, I’m not sure why, I think perhaps so they can be a bit crazy themselves without jumping off the bridge.

I do not accept money or gifts from the enablers, they used to surround me like a platoon from the other side of the world.They have all vanished, gone elsewhere for what they need.

My own ethical sense, my own sense of self,  has taught me it is both dishonest and arrogant for me to suggest or believe that my troubles are worse than theirs, or worse than yours. Look at the news, talk to your neighbors. My problems are neither, that is one of the hardest lessons I have learned in my hero journey. My life is not one whit nobler or more painful than anyone else’s.

A life lived well in Cleveland or Jersey City- or Laramie or Dallas- is just as heroic and deserving as a life lived on a farm with donkeys and sheep and dogs – often, much more so. It is just not as photogenic.  That, and this: I cannot have the things I cannot pay for. I remember staring stupified one winter day at Bedlam Farm staring in a blizzard at a $25,000 Kubota tractor I bought to move round bales of hay for a 3,000 pound steer I should never have gotten and could not afford. I stood in the snow weeping. “What have I done?,” I shouted to the wind in a great panic, I suddenly knew how much trouble I was in, but there was no answer.

It was the beginning of my breakdown and my great awakening, both of which occurred almost simultaneously. I ran into my farmhouse and called my local farm and tractor supply company, and told them to come and buy it from me. I got $12,000 for it, it was two months old.

Am I more entitled to have my life than the father of four children working in Denver to get his kids through school? Does he have the right to go online and ask Marjorie to pay his bills? Does he have less need than me? Mine was not a noble life worthy of taking the money of other people.

I sent  Elvis to slaughter, and people hate me for it still, it was a wise move, he was a sacrifice to my arrogant and battered self.

But I did learn a valuable lesson from that steer, one that helped give rebirth to my life. I cannot have the things other people will have to pay for, and neither can you, or your children or almost all of the billions of people in the world. And I don’t want them. It is a deal with the devil, it always returns to haunt and jeer, it haunts me still.

“I am in no way superior to you or more worthy, I am you.” I wrote those exact words to Marjorie in our now long-running correspondence about the ethics of taking money from people. She said they made her cry, and she sent another letter when one of the lambs got sick. We have been quarreling about money for years now, she says she might come to the Open House in October,  I would so love to meet her and give her a great hug.

It was a good and big step for me to make the transition to the new writing life – it is hard for writers and artists to survive, I sympathize with almost anyone who lives a creative life – it is good and just to be paid for my work. But I pay for my life. That, I tell Marjorie,  is the boundary, that is my ethical line.

When I went into the hospital in July, Marjorie’s was the first letter I got, her cash folded neatly inside. “This time,” she wrote, “I hope you will let me help you.”  Thank you, but no thank you, I wrote back. My greatest lesson on the hero journey, I told her,  was to learn how to help myself. Even if it ruins me, it will save me. Love, Jon.