Day: February 8, 2015

A shrink once told me that I needed to integrate the different parts of me. The small child who lived in terror, shame and panic did not know the adult who wrote books and took pictures. They needed to meet. They did, in fact, meet and the adult told the boy that it was going to be okay, things worked out, he was safe, he got the girl.

But I have always had a fractured self. One of the separations involved the body and the mind, I have always lived a life of the mind and ignored my body, Anna Freud writes that this is a classic formula for anxiety and trauma. My father was an athlete, he wanted me to be an athlete, he thought I was a sissy and often told me so.

I responded by rejecting any kind of athletics or structured exercise. I lived out of my head, active and healthy. Things changed. My grandfather passed along his diabetes, that caught up with me, and I had open heart surgery in July. My relationship with my body changed. I knew I needed a different view of my body, I could not ignore it any longer.

And I have not, I have been walking, exercising, reconnecting my mind, body and soul. I have enjoyed it. I did not quite know that this integration is a spiritual thing, it is not only healthy, it is important for balance and well-being. Today, a big step further, I found and joined a small gym in my town, it is different from any other gyms I have known.

It is privately owned, it is a co-op, the people who go own and maintain it. It is still, right near the center of town. It has good equipment that was sold by the previous owners, who could not make a commercial gym work. It is quiet, members are given a key and a code for the front door, we can use the equipment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Red is permitted, even welcomed. He walked in with me, lay down and waited until I was done. Red is a remarkable creature, a partner in my life. I went this morning, it was snowing, I opened the door and switched shoes, found a treadmill, set it high and fast and worked out there for 40 minutes, and then on the bicycle machine, this is not a day I could have walked outside.

I brought my Iphone, and my earbuds and I had good company besides Red – Amy Winehouse, Sam Smith,  Yusef Islam (Cat Stevens), Vance Morrison, Tove Lo, Taylor Swift, Itzhak Perlman, Spoon, A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Nina Del Rey. It was dark and windy, the snow was blowing outside.

Finally, after so many years, my mind and my body were meeting, I was integrating my disjointed self. The gym was quiet, no TV’s, not music, it was a good place to think. I see that a healthy body can be a spiritual thing, a grounding thing, a beautiful thing. I am getting to know it, we are finally friends.

I love my new gym, I signed up, it is just a few minutes from our farm,  I will be there nearly every day, Red also. I love the quiet of it, the comfort of it. Amazing to find it in my small town. The man who watches over the gym is the son of Marion, one of the most beautiful and wonderful hospice patients that Izzy and I saw before they both died. Life is really a circle, it comes around and around.

And this is the story of men, yes? Most of them sail through life in oblivion, you literally have to sometimes nearly kill them to get their attention. Perhaps this is what my father was trying to tell me all those years ago when he shouted at me and call me names. You hear things when you are ready, and when the right people are telling them to you.

Lisa and Scott Carrino are good friends, it has been a joy to watch them work so hard to put their Round House Cafe together, serve good and fresh food, offer Open Mic Nights and concerts. We went to the Round House today for a Bluegrass Jam, a perfect thing on the eve of the next great storm. But the musicians canceled due to the weather.

Scott and Lisa were there, though serving chicken soup, chili and a dozen other things. As much fun as it has been watching Scott and Lisa hatch this new cafe, it has been hard seeing how hard they work, how harrowing it is to start a small restaurant in a small town in upstate New York, how many difficult and unpredictable things happen almost every day.

Scott has been an especially good friend to me this year, he teaches me Tai Chi, I give writing lessons, most of the time we bullshit. The cafe had a tough winter, the weather was awful and business always declines in the winter, lots of people stay home. But Scott and Lisa have weathered their storms, Spring is just around the corner, even if it doesn’t yet feel like it. These two are transplants, they came upstate from elsewhere, they have spent their lives trying to do good, to teach, focus on the community and yes, make a living. It was nice to see them together – Lisa is often at the bakery, Scott in the kitchen. They radiate connection and community, the Round House has become the soul of our town.

Looking for my color and light photographs, I came across this photo of a joyous Rose, standing with her sheep in the big pasture on the hill at Bedlam Farm. I loved Rose and loved the first Bedlam Farm, and both are gone from my life now. What does this mean to me?

It is easy – simple – to be grateful for what you have, it is quite another thing to be grateful for what you have lost. How I loved learning about nature and herding and beauty and animals with Rose, my partner in my evolution to a different kind of life. She made so much of it possible.

And here, today, more loss, of course, Simon and Lenore. And more life – Red, and soon, some new animals to come here for us to live with or learn about. I have never understand why I should feel badly about all of that, even as I acknowledge the pain and struggle of it. This, of course, is life itself, what shapes my work, tests my soul, teaches me the true meaning of spirituality and life.

Hey there, Rose, I hope you are free now, I hope you are sitting in your endless pasture, your golden fields, sheep stretching as far as the eye can see. I hope you are living your wonderful life, as I am living mine.

Sometimes, our runaway media/marketing machine causes us to fear the world, expect the worst, feel unprepared and vulnerable. It is good to be prepared, awful to be perennially alarmed. This morning, I was reminded to look for the beauty amidst all of the hype and storm-selling that goes on. It seems we are coming to see the very earth as our enemy, as a danger. It seems we are being constantly manipulated to be afraid, to be prepared, to be watchful.

Ours is now a culture of alarms and fear. There is big money in fear, and the corporate ghouls who have taken over our culture understand this well, they make certain we are frightened and disturbed all the time, they know this binds the spiritually bereft to them, and makes them fat and swollen, like ticks on dogs.

I don’t wish to be turned against Mother Earth, she needs me as much as I need her. If we travel across the earth to rescue dogs and animals, why, I wonder, can’t we look up at the sky and think of her? She is heartbroken and bleeding.

We check our weather alerts, go online for up-to-the-minute details. Really, all I need to know this morning is that a winter storm is coming that will last a day or so and drop a foot or so of snow. I have dealt with this many times, we will deal with this together. Maria and I are keeping up with it, we are shoveling, raking the roof, keeping the cars clean, making paths for the animals. Tyler will come by each day to help keep up with the snow.

This morning, my camera gave me yet another gift, I look over to see Red in one of his favorite watch positions, keeping an eye on the sheep from under the apple tree where Simon is buried. I stopped, it was a beautiful scene, touching, it reminded me to stop and breath and remember the beauty that comes with everything, even a storm. It is my job to find it, I take it seriously, share it.

The camera caught the power of the new storm, the sense of being inside of it. I saw something else. Red and the tree were connected, they were twin elements of the natural world, they seemed to be communicating, working together, existing in tandem. They seemed to be partners. All of these elements seemed to be one thing, I was fascinated by them. I am not feeling like complaining about the weather any more than I wish to speak poorly of my life or work.

We have suffered this winter, as have many people, and we feel the cold and the storms every day, life has been hard this month, as so many of you know. Yet this storm seems to me to be a beautiful thing, Spring is really not far a way and I am reminded to seek out the beauty around me, it is even more meaningful now in this white landscape. I feel close to Mother Earth today, grateful to be in her beautiful world, grateful to share a life of love and purpose.

This is my purpose, the purpose of the writer. To share the light and color and mystery of the world, to prod and provoke, to touch and inspire. This is the message of my apple tree and my dog, both sentinels in a storm. And my spiritual quest. God says in the Kaballah that he never promised us a perfect world, he only gave all of us the gift of grace, of responding to the world with love and growth and compassion.