Day: February 17, 2016

This morning, I had the pleasure of turning down an award from a prestigious national blogger’s association that gives out supposedly prestigious awards for blogs that are special. It had no appeal for me, I didn’t want to be ungrateful, but I just wasn’t interested. It seemed just another kind of self-serving marketing idea to me, I see blog awards all over the Internet, and I have no idea what they mean or what they are worth.

Many of them can be bought outright.

Awards are another path to narcissism to me, the best award any blog can possibly receive is a lot of readers who read it every day, and so far, I am blessed. That is the only reward I think I need. When you get into the business of worrying about what others define as good, you are heading towards the bog of marketing, not creativity. The problem with marketing is that it crushes individuality, everyone gets the same advice, which make sit worthless.

The blog has become the locus of my creative life in many ways, the outlet for my thoughts, my madness, my passion, my creativity and my occasional good idea. The award offer (for $50, you can get a widget installed on your blog to make the award a permanent feature there. Why, I wonder, did I wince at that idea?)

I love my blog and I think one of the reasons I love it is that it is a reflection in so many ways of the part of me that celebrates not doing what I am supposed to do, am told to do, am advised to do. My blog is the reflection of an individual, not a corporate idea.

The blog is essentially a creative construction that is based on things I am not supposed to do on a blog:

1. No ads. People have been telling me for years to put ads up on the site, but apart from one ad for Fromm dog food for a year (it went down a month ago), I won’t take ads and don’t want them. People are drowning in ads, I have nothing against them and could surely use the money, but the blog is an escape from some of that, in many ways, There is a purity about it that I love and wish to keep. No distractions from the ideas.
2. Long posts. The Internet wisdom is that blogs must have short blocks of text. People won’t read long things. Blessedly, that is not true. Some subjects – the New York Carriage Horses, my life, spirituality, recovery  – require more than 500 words to be meaningful or useful to people.  To stick to their bellies. I have almost never gotten complaints about the lengths of some of my posts, and people are not shy about complaining here.
3. Good spelling and good grammar is not the same as good writing. My choice has always been clear, to offer a lot of content and photos, to write a lot or proofread a lot. More and more I am proofreading, with the help of some new proofing programs. But I don’t want the blog to be constipated, I don’t believe the text has to be perfect before it goes up, that is just another way of censoring myself by writing less. And online, writing frequently is important, people have many places to go. Spelling is important, so is grammar, but I don’t have editors or assistants on the farm, it is all me, and generally, I choose productivity and relevance or anal obsessing about perfection. I am not a perfect man, why should my writing be perfect? I want my writing to be a reflection of me, and where I am now, I don’t wish to present a phony or scrubbed image of myself.
4.  The marketers have always told me that people want cute photos of animals, not provocative reflections about spirituality, culture, movies, philosophy, or life. Nuts to that. My focus will always be on the animals I live with and write about, but that is only one focus. My blog is a memoir, it is about a whole life, not a single topic. The dogs and donkeys are a big part of it, but only one part. I keep broadening my subject matter, but not too much. This is not a political or news site, there are plenty of those, not too many who do what I do. There is no such thing as a perfect life, and I don’t have one or want one. You will not find one here.
5. Cream rises. I reject marketing notions about content, attention spans and style. The good blogs have good content, offered regularly and frequently, they respect their readers, they do not insult them by treating them as stupid or witless. I love the dialogue I have with my readers, their messages stimulate, inspire and educate me. I will never patronize them by dumbing down my site, making it cute, turning to marketers for creative direction. If I am to succeed, I want it to be on merit, not somebody else’s idea of a reward or an award.
6. Coherence. There is a big video revolution out there, and blogs are supposed to be visual, not textual. My blog is both, equal parts words and images, but I like the coherent format, it is basically about words and images, it doesn’t move or shout too much. I like it that way. I don’t think it will change much. I want it to be familiar and comforting to people.
7. Blogs will kill books. When I began my blog in 2007, my publisher went berserk. They dissed my photos (“Hallmark Cards,” one editor said) and told me if I wrote too much on my blog, nobody would read my books. That was wrong. The blog supported my books and now, the blog is my book in important ways. One supports the other, it isn’t one or the other.
8. Arguing. I don’t argue my beliefs or ideas. My life is not an argument, people are free to agree with me or not agree with me, I do not wish to spent my life arguing with strangers online. If you wish to argue, get on over to CNN or Fox News, that is not what I am about.  I don’t tell other people what to do or think, only what I do or think. I don’t preach or persuade (okay, except about the carriage horses). In the age of raging arguments, I believe we all have the right to present our beliefs without continuous challenge and anger.  People often tell me they enjoy the blog, even though they sometimes disagree with it. That’s the way it ought to be, that is what a writer in a free society ought to be doing. I don’t need worship, adulation or agreement. If I can get somebody to laugh or think or feel, it’s a great day for the blog.
9. Facebook and social media. Both require discipline and boundaries. I go on Facebook once or twice a day to answer questions that are offered in a civil and rational way. I do not answer questions about how my dogs are, where my farm is, what the weather is in upstate New York, or how I’m feeling. People can read the blog for that. I want to share my life, not turn it over to strangers who are sometimes rude and invasive, and very often supportive and interesting. I want to keep my head clear for my writing and photography and life, I don’t need to tell people when I am going shopping or in a bad mood. I know many good people who have been damaged by what I consider a social disease – obsessing on digital messaging.
10. Finally, my blog is a monologue, not a dialogue.I don’t permit comment on the blog, moderated or not. Comments are permitted on Facebook. I don’t need to know what everyone in the world things about everything I wrote. No one has the moral right to come into my spaces – material or digital – and be rude and cruel. My Facebook pages are generally civil and respectful, and I love to do something else I am not supposed to do – boot obnoxious, intrusive, self-righteous and nasty people off of my sites whenever I find them. It is God’s work.

So those are some, not all, of the things I am not supposed to do on my blog. I guess it is a good reflection of who I am and want to be. I believe the best blogs are the most authentic,  for better or worse. I love recognition and I love success, but I think the best award I could possible get is for you to read me and feel like you have taken something away from what I write. It can be a smile, a feeling or an idea. And yes, you are welcome to support my work if you feel so inclined. Another kind of reward.

Maria and I were coming back from our morning walk in the woods. As we pulled into our driveway, Maria said “there’s a fencepost in front of the  mailbox.” This was puzzling. People throw all sorts of garbage out of their cars and onto the road every day, usually beer bottles, coffee cups and fast food bags,  but no one has every thrown a fence post out on our lawn. Not a big deal, I thought, we can toss it at the dump Saturday.

When Maria went to get it, I saw the lettering and I knew it had to be from John Greenwood, one of the first and most committed students in the writing workshop I had begun to teach.  And also one of the most thoughtful and creative people I have known. John has the gift of being generous without ever being intrusive, of being thoughtful without ever being dogmatic.

His mission is to capture feeling and emotion, he is very good at it., because he has a lot and is in touch with it.

A former milkman now working as an executive at the Stewart’s milk and convenience store chain, John came to me on fire, with a yearning to write and unleash the very powerful creative forces inside of him.

He loves his job and his colleagues, but it was not an environment where creativity was much pushed or talked about it.  It just wasn’t on the agenda. There was a loneliness inside of him in this way, he was in need of some direction and encouragement.

John was looking for help, something inside of him needed to come out. John was the reason I began teaching, he is the kind of intensely creative person who lived much of his life outside of the creative villages we call culture. He really had no way in as a working-class man with a tough job and much responsibility. He had no idea where to begin. He just needed to know he had as much right to do it as John Updike did.

It is a curious thing about teaching. Some people – John is a great example – are hungry for learning, grateful for it. Others come for fuzzy reasons. Many want to be writers, but they don’t want to work at it much, and they are often discouraged to learn it isn’t a magic or dramatic process.

I had a very gifted student once who took my classes for more than two years, she came a long way. I noticed after awhile that she was not following any of my advice or direction, she was almost doing the very opposite of what I taught, and she had stopped contributing much of anything to class.

I didn’t want to be criticizing her, but I wasn’t comfortable with the work she was doing. I could tell something was off, we were just not connecting. This didn’t mean she was wrong and I was right it, it just meant there was some other reason than learning that brought her to me, and I was not the right teacher for her.

So I told her that I didn’t ever want to be a source of discouragement, that we weren’t on the same page and she deserved  a teacher she was more in sync with. It was the first time in my teaching that I ever felt I had to do that.

She said that was fine, she dropped out of the class and we lost contact. I asked if she was angry, she denied it, but there was no doubt in my mind that she was furious, when she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear, there was nothing much left. I guess I felt as if I had failed, but that is a dangerous response in teaching.

People come to class for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes the teacher connects, sometimes you can’t. The teacher learns after awhile that there will be successes and failures, all you can do is celebrate the successes and let go of the failures. Teachers are not Gods, not even close to it. I have a student, a gifted artist named Rachel Barlow who has been in my classes for five years, and every year she gets stronger, more confident and her work radiant. She is selling art all over the place, something she thought impossible just a few years ago.

I used to teach my class in four sessions, I realized that was not nearly long enough to really know a student and connect with them. My classes go on for years now, the current class may go on for the rest of my life, we are all so much in sync with one another. They might tire of me, but I will not tire of them.

Rachel has grown and changed each year, she has written poignantly about her struggles with depression, and somewhere in our class, she figured out that the best way to deal with her depression was to paint beautiful and evocative things. She is transformed, and by her own determination, not by me. Four weeks would not have been enough.

For John Greenwood, it didn’t take much. If I mentioned a blog, he started one. If I said he needed to share his work, he did. If I advised experimenting with different forms – words photos, video – it just happened. A revelation to me, sometimes  you can teach a ton with a whisper, it doesn’t have to be a drama.

The creative spark is in everyone, it just needs permission to come out. Teaching is not about telling others what to do, but seeing the bliss or passion in a student and helping him or her to bring it up.

I quoted Joseph Campbell to John, I told him to follow his bliss, something he still remembers and wrote about on the back of the Bedlam Farm sign post he left at my mailbox this morning. It is typical of John not to knock or disturb me. He is always convinced that he is bothering me, when he never is. People are funny that way, the people you want to see are usually too sensitive to come by, the people you don’t necessarily care to see have no compunctions about coming by.

John and I are very close, even though we rarely see or speak with one another. This weekend, he may be joining my new class at Pompanuck Farms, and I can’t say how happy that makes me. John understands that learning is a long process, it sometimes goes in fits and starts, depending on the rest of our lives, our distractions, and the teacher.

I love John’s sign and am grateful for it, but his real gift to me is the torrent of beautiful writing, videos, photographs and feelings he has expressed on his wonderful and much loved blog, Raining Iguanas. It was born out of my first teaching class in Cambridge.

The 12th and final step of the hero journey is that the hero returns to the ordinary world, bringing back what he has learned, sharing it with others. It’s about John Greenwood, really. He is already inspiring and teaching others. True creativity is infectious.

On the back of his fence post, John wrote, “You Gave Me Direction To Follow My Bliss.” And he did. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

I love the part where the pupil becomes the teacher. The fence is a wonderful gift, it points the way, it is the path.

Border collies, like draft horses, are born to work, bred to work, need to work. It’s been impossible to do herding work in the ice, cold and raging windstorms, so I find work for them to do, or they will find work to do, and it usually won’t be work that I want them to do.

Yesterday, a compromise. The sheep were holed up in the barn out of the rain and wind, I told Fate and Red to “hold the sheep,” that is, keep them where they are, and they took to it, taking up their positions and giving the sheep the full eye treatment. Nobody moved, sheep or dogs, for about an hour.

The sheep still give Fate a tough time sometimes, but Red backs her up. She is very tough when Red is right behind her.