Day: June 14, 2016

My blog has helped raise a lot of money for people in need, especially through crowdsourcing, a new and very democratic way for people to decide for themselves who they wish to help and who they don’t wish to help.

Today, our neighbor Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm, another creative and independent outcast who abandoned conventional and corporate life for the country, has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $3,500 to fend off the looming foreclosure of her farm and bring her what she calls a “cushion of liveability.”

She says the letters from the bank are threatening foreclosure. Jenna gets a lot of warning letters.

I donated $50 to Jenna’s campaign, and I wanted to share the project with you so that you can decide for yourself if you wish to contribute. My miraculous blog, as I call it, has raised more than $120,000 for various people in the past year (including me once, a gofundme project helped me to buy photographic equipment.)

I am very careful about the gofundme projects I share, if I share them I feel some responsibility for them, so while I hope Jenna gets her “liveability cushion”, and I am happy to try to help.  I also need to be honest and share the complexity of the decision for me.

To me, it is important.

My blog and my ability to help other people works on trust, and trust is built on honesty.

Jenna and I have an emotional connection. She calls me a mentor and I have tried to help her when she asks and it is possible. I’ve helped her find a literary agent, given her a computer, sometimes taken photos of her farm, sometimes promoted her many workshops on the blog.

We used to visit with one another and have lunch, sometimes dinner, but I have not actually spoken to Jenna, other than to wave to her as she passes in her truck, for a couple of years now. Our friendship didn’t really work, although we both have good will for the other.

My sense is I made her uncomfortable, I like to talk about things – especially struggle and drama  and decisions involving friends –  and she doesn’t, at least not with me. People seek advice from mentors, and Jenna is not interested in advice from me. I have worried about her a lot – she asks for help a lot – and that is not a healthy basis for a friendship either. When a friend tells me they are in trouble and may lose their home, it is hard for me to chit-chat or play cards.

My disease, says Maria.

And Jenna knows a lot of ways to ask for help.

Jenna’s troubles are a backdrop of life here.

Jenna’s farm has been a spectacular and wrenching soap opera since the beginning, she is always in trouble, always sounding the alarm, always chasing her sheep up and down the road, rushing to fix fences, shooting raccoons, picking up body parts, repairing busted heaters, cracking a tooth, fixing a truck,  sleeping on the floor downstairs to save on heating bills,  and always coming out the other end.

In our time, and with a farm and scores of animals, and no job or outside income, an amazing achievement.

In a sense, that is a great part of her appeal.  People are drawn to struggle and rebellion, especially these days. And Jenna thumbs her nose at the system and to the very idea of a conventional life.  As afraid as Jenna often says she is – and I believe her – she has a lot more than nine lives, and access to many more. I shudder to think of all of the disasters she has survived at Cold Antler Farm.

Stability and predictability are not very exciting. Drama works.

Jenna has been in struggle and drama for almost every day of the six years she has lived on her farm. She has survived numerous personal, God-made, animal and financial disasters. And many decisions, good and bad. And she has always asked for help, the mark of a survivor.

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In many ways, as some of you will guess, we are talking about decisions.

Decisions are critical things, they are the foundation of life.

I have worked very hard to learn how to make good and better decisions for my self.  And I am proud of the decisions I make now, I love making good decisions, just as I once loved making bad ones.

I also had a lot of animals, also used to buy old farm trucks with character until I was broke and counted up the repair bills and bought a Toyota SUV instead. And got rid of many animals.  That decision has saved me thousands of dollars I did not have to spend on hay, farriers, vet bills, grain and fences. I believe our farm is now secure and stable. I could not always say that.

I often thought of what I wanted, not what I could afford.

Jenna is much younger than I am, I’m not sure good and wise decisions are for the young. The world would be a boring and stale place if there were no young people in it. We each own our own decisions.

But there is a moral issue for me. I am okay asking for help in buying a camera and sharing my photos – that is worth a lot of money over the years – but I am not comfortable asking anyone to pay for my bad decisions. You can support my photography and art, but not my life.

That is my boundary, and it might just be another rationale. But it feels right to me, solid.

Supporting Jenna’s mortgage is a different kind of decision. In the case of Joshua Rockwood, I felt very clear about asking for help for him. He was unjustly accused of something he didn’t do and his life and farm were on the line. I had no ambivalence about supporting him.

Every animal, every vehicle, every fence repair or new tree on my farm is a decision, and Maria and I must sustain it, especially after our bankruptcy last year. This crisis was not caused by our overspending, but by getting caught in the collapsing real estate market, but it made us even more sensitive to the impact of every thing we did, purchased or wanted. To  me, that is the essence of being responsible. We both agreed that if we could not sustain the farm, we would leave it.

We made a lot of painful and hard decisions, we got to a much better place.

Is that a fine line, a self-serving rationale? Maybe, but it is where I draw the line. Jenna, who I admire in many ways, is free to draw her own. And you out there reading this are free to make your own decisions about it, that is the beauty and refreshing thing about crowdsourcing.

You can help or not, it is really as simple as that. And it is nobody else’s concern.

Jenna is an articulate spokesperson for the sustainable life, for  homesteading and rural pioneering. I looked up the meaning of “sustainable,” and the dictionary says it means being able to maintain something at a certain level, as in sustainable economic growth, or to be able to uphold and defend a property or a life.

She has to decide for herself if her farm is sustainable. She seems to work like a demon to keep it, offering workshops, lessons, visits, graphics and sketches, pigs and chickens, rides, talks, lessons of every kind, including private visits. Her blog is festooned with ads and donation buttons. Only she and the bank knows if a “liveability cushion” will give her the security and sustainability she wants.

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Why is this complicated  for me?

Jenna and I have an emotional connection, at least on my end.

Some of our relationship speaks to the best parts of us – we are creative, strong, determined to live our own lives, outside of the corporate web of alleged security and stability. We both love animals and are both writers. I know that  some of the connection, as Maria has sometimes pointed out to me, is unhealthy.

I know well what it feels like to be alone to be afraid, to sometimes live in delusion. And I have a sorry history of falling into co-dependent traps, where I give great chunks of myself away to people in trouble, or people who are users. I’m not precisely sure where my issues end and hers begin.

I know the boundary. I don’t rush over to Jenna’s farm to help when there’s trouble, I don’t do things for her that she can do for herself. I am not into her stuff. It feels like drama to me very often. In my own life, I am wary or projecting fear and drama into my own life and blog, it can be a manipulative way of getting people with little or less money than me to send me some of theirs. That is a big moral issue for me, even when I ask for help in buying a camera. It’s not something I want to do regularly.

The best help I ever got was from a therapist, not from people sending me money. My therapist helped me to make good decisions.

So I am protective of the people who read my books and blog and contribute to the funding campaigns I present. They helped Joshua Rockwood, they helped Ken Norman, they helped Scott Carrino, they helped George Forss. They have done a lot of good.

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There is a lot of drama here.

In our time, trouble and drama do not turn people off, trouble and drama draw people like flies. Living on a farm is a fantasy for many people, and Jenna strongly urges everyone in the world to drop everything and do it, whether they can afford it or survive it or not. It is a new and different way of looking at the world, and I do not presume to tell other people whether they should embrace it or not. In a way, she is as much an argument against the sustainable life as she is in favor of it, but I don’t think she is aware of that.

I do not believe a farm is a panacea for everyone, I think it is actually a terrible idea for many people, who seek a more secure and balanced existence, closer to the conveniences of the modern world and a more diverse and secure social setting. It’s been a good thing for me, and Jenna is fighting very hard to keep hers.

I wish her the best luck. I hope she survives at Cold Antler Farm. She has made a lot of great noise out there. I hope this helps her.

If I can’t live on my farm, I can’t keep my farm, and the decisions Maria and I are making have been good ones, we are standing on much firmer ground. I know I can’t buy the $2,000 lens I want. I’m not asking for any more help with my equipment, that would just be a bad decision for me right now. I found a good used lens for $800 and that, I think, is a good decision.

I do not presume to suggest that I make better decisions than Jenna, and none of this is offered as a reason not to support her funding campaign, or to support it. She is living her life, as I am living mine.  I know what it’s like to fear foreclosure, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and Jenna is someone I care about and consider a friend.

I think Maria is concerned that my interest in helping Jenna is neurotic and perhaps not grounded – she has no qualms about sending a contribution, she is worried that these troubles tap into my own. It’s a good caution, and I am taking it seriously. That’s why I spent a couple of hours thinking and writing about it. I have learned to take Maria very seriously, she knows me far better than I yet know myself.

I just want you to know what’s in my head, so you can make your own decision. So it’s up to you. Here’s the link. I will be curious to see what you decide.  I look forward to her hitting the $3,500 mark, my guess is when all is said and done, Jenna will be one of the last people standing.

I hope so.

When I was a little boy, I was very frightened, and also a bedwetter, and I would make up stories every night to help me sleep, I knew my father would be coming in later to scold me and lecture me on my weakness.  He couldn’t bear to have a son who was such a mess.

It was a gift, of course,  the birth of my life as a writer, this story-telling, although I could not have known it during that very lonely and dark time. One of my stories was about the Old Man and the Good Witch.

In my story, an old man lived in a house deep in the woods, he was disconnected from the world, living in peace but also isolation. He was lonely and loveless and very frightened. Later in my life, this kind of fear would be seen as a disease, but then it was just considered life.

In my mind, desperate to create fantasies to help me escape my own torment, the man was sitting alone in his dark house, shrouded by a dark and colorless forest. He wore drab black and brown clothes, his socks were threadbare, his house unkempt, he had no reason to clean it up or make it look presentable.

The walls were drab and moldy, there was no color or light about him, his clothes, his home. In my story, he wrote poems all day and once a month, he would trek into town to send them off and sell them and that is how he lived.

The Old Man had given up on himself, embarrassed to be so grim and joyless that he hid himself from the world and avoided anyone he might love or who might love him. He ate soup and bread and sat alone at night and read and wrote his poems, then cried himself to sleep. After his beloved old dog died, he vowed to be by himself for the rest of his life.

One day a Good Witch appeared in his yard with a magic wand, and she made gardens appear, and opened up the spaces between the trees so that sunlight could appear. And she cleaned his windows and opened the blinds and shutters and let the light in and waved her want, and vases appeared full of flowers, and bright stones and crystals on the windowsills and beautiful paintings and sketches on the walls.

And then she painted the drab walls yellow and red and blue and the bright colors of the rainbow and made his drab old clothes disintegrate, replacing them bright blues and yellows, even colorful socks.

The color and light brightened his life, and changed him. He became a kind of flower himself, opening up to the world, smiling and laughing, he could almost feel the cobwebs coming off him when she was near. He went into town more. People came to see him. His poems became beautiful and wise and generous, people wanted to buy them.

He fell in love with the Good Witch and got married, and had several happy children, even a new dog and some cats. It turns out she had always loved him from a distance, but could never enter his dark space.  She saw what was inside of him.

They lived happily ever after.

I called the story The Old Man And The Good Witch and I wanted to get it published, but I never wrote it down.

I think the stories made me feel less alone, and after a few years, my stories became the stories of adolescent boys – brave cavalry officers leading his troops into glorious battle, saving the day. I forgot about the Old Man and the Good Witch.

Today, a startling revelation, as I put on the new socks Maria bought me from the Over The Moon Beads And Gift Shop on Main Street in Cambridge. She and Heather have been plotting this for a while. I can’t tell you how much I love my new socks, my feet, for 68 years, have been covered in black and brown and grey, socks were simply something to keep my feet covered and warm, now suddenly – Maria got me several other pairs as well – my socks are something else. They  bright my feet, make me smile, change the way I look at myself. Really.

It’s like having a Spring garden on your feet. (I highly recommend them as a gift for men, who sometimes get drab and crabby and closed up in their maleness. Heather will send them to you.) Color heals. I can’t bear to put old gray socks on my feet any longer.

And then it hit me, and this kind of jolted me, gave me chills. I suddenly remembered the story of the Old Man And The Good Witch. I was living it, I just wanted to cry and absorb it. My story had happened to me, there is a mystical side to the world and it is real. I was living alone on big farm in upstate New York, I was lonely, falling apart. There was no color  or light in my life. I had given up on love and hope, I  had descended into a bleak and dark place.

Then this Good Witch arrived. She encouraged me to take photographs, she told me they were beautiful and she looked at every one and praised them. She was sad too, but we fell in love and became happy together. When we had to move to our new, smaller farm, it was tired, drab, dark, even barren.

She brought her magic to the farm. She waved her wand all over the place. She let me cook and shop and buy her books. Every night, she still looks at my photographs and tells me how good and interesting they sometimes are.

She built gardens, tended the flowers. She became a warrior for color and light. She painted the living room white, then yellow and red. She turned our dark little bathroom into a gallery of the rainbow, a work of art. She picked out tiles for the shower, then for the kitchen floor. She put crystals and flowers and rocks on the windowsills, turning every dark spot bright. She invited me into the woods, found crystals in the earth, talked to the trees and birds.

She pulled up the crackling old strips on the counter tops, she painted them a classy black. She eyes the few remaining colorless and ugly patches of the house. She will pick them off, one by one.

She tells me I am handsome, sexy. Once in awhile, I even believe her. But she did agree to marry me, and she does seem happy here.

Sometimes I laugh at her, when she cries over a dead tomato plant, or re-homes a spider, sometimes shake my head in wonder as she tells me the story of the mushroom. But I always listen, I never want to be anywhere else.

Everywhere she went, she created color, art and light.

Walking around the farmhouse this morning, I saw the dimensions of how she had transformed our farm over the past couple of years. There are flowers everywhere, a fiber chair, statues and pots filled with flowers, gardens ringing the old farmhouse. I love this, I support it in every which way, I could never have done it by myself, not in a million years.

I help scrape, I paint, I water, I dig, but I am not a witch, Good or Bad. I am the Old Man in the story and Maria is the Good Witch. I love the magic, but I don’t have the magic in me. The Good Witch wears beads and necklaces, scarves and leggings, vests and skirts, she trails art and color like a shooting star sometimes.

She talks to flowers and communicates with donkeys. Animals follow her like the Pied Piper.

Sometimes, she makes me nervous. She eyes my blue shirts and jeans, clothes I wear every day and last year bought me a canary polo short, too bright for me still, I feel like Tweety Bird. I can hardly believe these powers were hidden in her for so long. They are out now, they are never going away again.

And then, there were the socks, another wave of the wand, and more color, more light, and do you really know, good readers, how much of a difference color and light and art make to a human being, and a house, to a life? I do not have magical powers, but I am a warrior for color and light and hope.

I am changing.

I can tell you, it is mystical, unimaginable. I will never take it for granted. I wish for all the Good Witches to go to the angry men in power and put beautiful and colorful new socks on their feet, the world would be transformed.

I sat outside on the rocking chair this morning and closed my eyes and went back in time, as I had done so many times before, and went to see the little boy, huddling and quivering in his bed, and I took him in my arms, gave him a big hug, and I said, “hey, there, it’s me. I came back to tell you that the story comes true. The Good Witch is real, and she will come back to find you. Look out for her. You got the girl. Go to sleep.”

So maybe the cornballs at Disney are right after all, maybe dreams do come true, maybe stories are as powerful and important as I believe they are. Mine came true. I wish the same for you.

There is something deep and beautiful about reflections on a pond, I’m not sure what it is, but it evokes a spiritual feeling, a calm and sense of hope and peace.