Month: April 2016

I think I know how lonely everybody is.

Always the struggle of the human soul is the break through the barriers of distance and silence and anger and fear into community, connection, and companionship. We rush towards friendship, love, art, faith, even politics pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our struggling souls.

This, I think, is why I have ended up on a farm.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, take a sweet photo, finish an honest chore, walk with a dog, give an apple to a donkey or a horse, and if it were possible, see some beautiful things.

This what a farm makes possible for me.

I love living on a farm, more than any other place I have ever lived, and I have lived in many different places. I sometimes see the farm as Mother, sometimes as a continuing game of chess, sometimes as a laboratory for working out issues of identity, endurance, love and strength.

A farm will enchant you, challenge you, in some ways define you. And I am not even a farmer, just a writer with a farm. A farm is a fluid thing, it changes with the seasons, with the nature of the animals, with the weather. Some things are in our control so many are not. It is not an idyllic life, it is not a life for everyone.

Much of the time, it is not even a life for me.

This Spring, a new challenge, managing our pasture with a big pony, seven sheep, three donkeys.

We have about eight acres of grazing land. In a normal Spring, if there is such a thing any longer, the grass would be four or five inches high – four inches is optimal for grazing (sheep and ponies and donkeys eat low, goats eat high), between the dryness and the cool weather, the grass is just beginning to come up, we are still putting hay out, about a month later than usual.

Chloe, like most equines will graze day and night, horses kill off the grass by pulling up the roots and buds, they need to be confined in paddocks and given limited access to grass (it can make them sick in the early Spring) and usually, some hay supplement.

Before Chloe, we had enough pasture for the summer. Now, and because of climate change, it isn’t so certain.

The sheep will eat until they are hungry, and then rest. They are slugging in the summer, their wool coats leave them tired and hot. Donkeys will graze, but not as intensely as a horse or pony, they do rest, they do pause.

So how do we manage this on limited acreage? We are installing a short 200- foot fence to block off the grass on the South side of the farmhouse. That will give us three fenced in areas in which to graze the animals and allow for rotational grazing. Some farmers rotate the grass daily, we do it every two or three days.

If we are disciplined – three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening – and give the pastures a chance to recover and grow – we should last through the summer, although if it is as dry and warm as the forecasters predict, we might be on hay again as early as late July or August. We’ll wee. Climate change doesn’t only affect polar bears.

Every farmer knows in his  heart that it is real, he or she can see it every day. You have to think about a farm,  you can’t just live on it. You have to think about fences, grass, weather, animal health, hay and grain fresh water and worms, vets, medicines, farriers, shearers,  ticks and flies and weeds and rabies and a dozen other diseases you haven’t heard of, but are common on a farm. Any of these things can affect animals.

People often tell me I am living their dream, or that I have the perfect life. But most of us know better than that, no life is perfect, and many a farmer that I know dreams of a life with more sleep, shelter, money and less brutal labor. There is no perfect life, only a live lived in purpose and self-awareness.

Joseph Campbell says that a good life is one hero journey after another, and I think I love the farm because it is one hero journey after another. You are never done, it is never finished. You are never there, things are never really settled, no two seasons are ever the same, the animals themselves change and evolve.

The Spring is the animals favorite season, and in some ways, ours. The smell is of fresh sweet grass, the flowers are bursting up in the garden, the animals are excited to eat what they are meant to eat once a gain. Winters seems the farthest away, perhaps because it is. The peepers and crickets are beginning to define the night again, a time of color and light, birth and rebirth.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song.

For the first time in 2016, we opened the gate at Lulu’s Crossing and led all of the sheep and equines in to graze. It’s been cold and pretty dry this Spring,  so the grass isn’t up as high as we’d like it to be, but it’s time to stop feeding hay and start rotational grazing.

Red got the sheep together and the rest of us walked in. We’ll leave them out there for several hours, then back into the central pasture, which we will use as a paddock. Horses can’t be left to graze all day, they can get sick, so we’ll use the area behind the Pole Barn as a paddock. Come and see.

Anyone who lives on a farm is a multi-tasker. This afternoon, we combined blogging and grazing with mowing. Chloe and the donkeys came out to eat some green grass and spare me  hours of mowing. Maria and I took turns sitting with the equines, we put up a mesh fence near the road but it would not stop a determined much so one of us has to be nearby to keep an eye on things.

I read, Maria came out and blogged, I took Red back out for some herding.

It is a lovely way to spend a few Spring hours. Come and see.

“Rather than love, than money, then fame, give me truth.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

I decided to write a letter to Thoreau this morning, c/o of Walden Pond. In case he has a post office box there, like I have here, or lives in the trees and hills. I get the most wonderful messages, and perhaps he does as well.

Dear Henry David Thoreau, i think of you from time to time, Walden was an important work for me, it was part of the inspiration I need to set out on my own and live in the country, to understand the power of solitude and the joy of the fulfilled life. It took me a lot longer to find the life I was seeking, and it was a lot harder and more circuitous than I imagined, but I am here, not finished yet, but making steady progress.

I believe in spirit dogs, and I believe in spirit people, so I think you are around somewhere, in some form, doing your work, living your life. These are much different times than yours, of course, they are much more complicated, expensive, fearful. I hate to even think of what your little cabin would involve now, or how many forms you would  have to fill out, or what the animal rights people, environmentalists, zoning officials, dieticians and government bureaucrats would say about your despoiling Walden Pond and eating squirrels and fish right out of the pond.

Not to mention tearing up all those bushes in search of nuts and berries. We have Facbook now, and I think Facebook might have driven you right off of the pond. You celebrated privacy and independence, we are becoming a nation of busybodies and fear mongers, there are lawyers everywhere,and people who love to hire them. And there are legions of angry and broken people sending out angry and hateful messages to people who are different from them.

We no longer celebrate risk and adventure, or any idea of privacy. We do not mind our own business, or respect the right of people to make their own mistakes.

You practiced the ancient craft of minding your own business, but everyone with a keyboard (this is another story) believes they have the right to tell other people what to do and what to think. I am warned many times a day about ticks, the sun, different foods,  health, the weather, money, riding with my dog on a nice day. We do not celebrate the freedom to live our own lives in the way that you wrote about so beautifully. A farmer in Long island is getting death threats every day because he is killing his two-year-old beef cow Minnie in order to feed his family. Thousands of people are demanding he buy his meat instead at a trend organic grocery store.

You don’t want to know…really.

I want you to know that I am very much in the process of figuring out who I am, facing the truth about myself, seeking solitude in some part of every day, working hard to re-connect with nature, something of great importance to you. I have to say that 90 per cent of Americans live  in cities and towns along the coasts, we have lost touch with nature. Hardly any of us can name trees, plants, birds. Walden is a tourist attraction, a park. Nobody is heading out into the woods for a year to figure themselves out, they are all too busy working in jobs they hate for people who care nothing for them and saving up for a long and costly death on the other end of life.

Presidential candidates praise God and brag about their penises.

In New York City, now our greatest city, people actually believe it is cruel for working horses to pull people in carriages. I imagine this is hard to explain to you, but there is a rich and powerful and strident movement that seeks to take animals away from people and lock them up on private farms and reserves, where they will never be seen again.

You would never get five feet from Walden Pond today. I went to Home Depot yesterday and tried to cost out the materials you listed in Walden to build your tiny house, or cabin, for $28.12. A counselor at the Depot told me it would cost about $700- $1,000 for those materials, not including furniture.

And what, he asked, about the foundation and heating system?

You would mostly likely need to fill out some paperwork for a bunch of permits, and I don’t think your cabin would pass zoning or safety muster, to be honest.  You’d probably need an alarm system now also. The man at the Home Depot laughed at me when I showed him your building list. “Is this for a dog?,”  he asked with a sneer.

A lot of people live in fear now, working in jobs they don’t like, saving up their money for a way of life they don’t want, living so far from solitude, nature, and animals.

In your time, it only cost a few dollars to follow your zeal. In our time, it is staggeringly expensive to be unhappy, and live lives we don’t wish to live, and give up our dreams so we can give up more dreams later. That is what I would call a conundrum. I refuse to do it.

I think you and I would have things to talk about. I don’t like being told what to do, I like to make my own mistakes, I love solitude and practice it daily, I am living the life I want, doing the work I wish to do.  I need to live in nature, I need to be around animals. You felt the same way.

As you know, this is not easy, but it is a source of great joy.

And I have found something that was a struggle for you – love. That took the longest and may even mean the most. You said love was more important than truth. I paused a bit at that.

“I learned this,” you wrote in Walden. “at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

If we were to sit down by the pond in the deep woods, I would tell you that I have advanced steadily, if not always confidently, in the direction of my dreams, I endeavor every day and often in the face of much challenge and doubt, in the direction of my dreams, and and I am close to living the life which I have imagined. I’m not sure about the success, I’m not sure how to measure it. I supposed having written 29 books, my life is already successful beyond my dreams.

I think in my time, people who do this are rare now, even freaks.  They are not celebrated, they live on the fringes of our world. The system in which we live pulls us in many ways, but rarely towards our dreams.  Most everyone lives for money, not fulfillment. Writers are called to find new ways to live, but their basic story is unchanged.

You wrote many things that touched me, but one that stands out was this: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

Here’s to standing up to live. And thanks for everything. You matter still, perhaps now more than ever.

I write this in honor of the Fiber Chair (a/k/a the Rapunzel Chair) completed today by my wife after two years of work. It will take up a place of honor on the back porch or in the yard, or wherever Maria chooses to put it. It celebrates the idea that for us, there is really no separation between our work and our art and our lives.

Every day we cut the baling string from the hay and give it to the animals. Maria noticed there were some discarded old chairs up in the barn, she is going to make each one of them into a piece of art. She did this in pouring rain, freezing cold, the dark of a winter morning. Making art is as natural to her as breathing. I honor the Fiber Chair on its completion, it has great spirit. so does my wife.