Day: July 4, 2016

Maria and I are holiday-phobic, I suppose it’s because of our family histories. Holidays meant elaborate, long and sometimes unpleasant family gatherings and we have always wanted to spend holidays quietly and by ourselves. We have become good friends with the Gulleys, dairy farmers who live in White Creek, N.Y.

Ed and Carol are both writers now, and Ed is also an artist, and we have a lot in common, sometimes surprising to us. We are so comfortable with them, we talk so openly and easily. Maria discovered Ed’s original and striking art, and she is helping him.

Carol always invites us to her holiday family dinners, and we decided it was time to accept. Carol and I met in Cardiac Rehab, that’ show we became friends, the cardiologists would have fainted dead away if they saw the food she had assembled – buckets of clams, hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage, potato salad, bean salad,  green salad,  macaroni salad, pies and cakes.

It looked like an instant heart attack to me, but the doctors say you need to step out once in awhile, so I had a hot dog, some green salad, a thin slick of homemade cheesecake.

The family talked of tractors, haying, weather and farming, much of it in a language I did not understand, the grunt and grumble of farming, talk of tractors, hay bales, the cost of things, gossip. We were surrounded by tractors and barns.

The Gulleys are real and warm and hospitable, it is easy to feel at home there.

I know how farmers and farm family’s are by now. I am something of a strange creature to them, and they are very welcoming but it takes them awhile to warm up to me, to know what to talk about, or what to make of me and Maria. I appreciate being inside of this warm and connected farm family, they have been through a lot together and are close in ways I can barely understand.

They live in a separate world, I feel connected to it for reasons I don’t grasp. By the end, they were ragging me and Ed about being old men, having to go home and get to bed early. I was at home.

Maria and I were not blessed to be close to our families or spend much time with them, we were blessed to share the Fourth of July with the Gulleys and some of their children and grand-children.  The Gulleys are becoming like family.

Carol and Ed set up a tent for the food and set up chairs in a circle. Their cows were mooing in the background, their six dogs lolling around waiting for crumbs to fall. The food was almost frighteningly caloric and inviting. I would not last a week eating like that, but it was great on a holiday afternoon.

We stayed for an hour or so, we were happy to be invited.

Last week, a bear was hit by a truck in front of our farmhouse and grievously injured. The 247 pound male managed to crawl over our fence and into our pasture where he collapsed, and was eventually shot and killed by a state environmental police and game officer.

Our friend Ed Gulley, a diary farmer, happened to be visiting us at that moment. He wanted to take the bear home, for the skin, for the meat. He is perhaps the only person we know who would know how to do that or want to do that and we all are still asking ourselves why the bear – bears are spirit animals to us and many others – came to us at that time and place and why Ed came to us as well.

The bear was a beautiful animal, Maria and I were deeply moved by his coming and his death. Also by Ed – I call him our own Daniel Boone – who was deeply affected by him.

There is such a thing as an accident and many things happen randomly, but this one seemed to have meaning to us, a number of different elements seemed to come together seamlessly.  Somehow, it felt it was all meant to be. We all believed the bear came to our pasture for a reason.

We went to see the Gulleys today, they were having a July Fourth dinner and clambake with their family, and were kid enough to invite us.

Maria and I sat down next to Ed and he said he had been thinking about the bear – he cried while going to work on it at home.

“I was thinking,” he said, “the bear, a young male, was looking to find and mark his own territory, that’s what they do when they leave their mothers, he was crossing the street and heading into the woods and hills across the road. You and Maria have been helping me to do the same thing, I want to expand my territory as a writer and an artist and that’s why he came to where I was, we both are doing the same thing. I think that’s why he came.”

We don’t know for sure why he came, of course, but Ed’s idea made sense to Maria and to me. It was so curious that he came at that time, when we were all out, when Ed was here, and when Ed could take him home and honor his death.

Ed is a remarkable man and a good friend. He is big, gruff, profane and colorful, yet he has the heart of an artist, a poet and a mystic. He is a spirit creature  himself, and his idea makes sense to me. You can see his and his wife Carol’s blog here.

 

Life at Bejosh farm is never dull. Last week, Ed Gulley was haying out in one of his fields and the tractor mowed over a nest, empty except for one jake (we think he is a male). The mother fled the nest, and turkey’s wont return to a nest if their cover is taken away. So the baby was an orphan.

Ed, an animal lover and animal mystic, brought the baby home and he and Carol have been caring for it every day, they named him Rudy. They have it in a glass incubator in their house. They give him water and regular chick starter grain. They have also begun putting crass in his new home and he has begun picking at it.

Ed and Carol also talk to Rudy, sing songs to him and hold him in the enveloping way a mother would cover the nest. He is doing beautifully and will one day return to nature and make his own way, although knowing the Gulley’s, they might just have a turkey hanging around the farm. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Farmer’s are the worlds most fervent animal lovers, they know animals in a way few people ever get to know them. The Gulley’s are are veteran, hard-working dairy farmers, they have started their own very popular blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal. It is honest, original, poignant and entertaining.

After the sheep are shorn, if the wool is to be preserved and used or sold, we skirt the sheep, that is we trim and clean the outer mats of the wool mat and then sent the wool of to a knitting mill in Vermont. Maria sells the wool as yarn and roving, it takes about four to six months on average to get the wool back. She should have it for Christmas.

This is perhaps our favorite farm chore, it ties us to ancient customs, to the sheep, and also to the dogs, who love to be near anything associated with sheep. We sit in opposite chairs and go through the wool, bag by bag. We pick out dirt, debris, trim the caked outer layers.

We label the bags and stuff them into plastic bags. There are lot this year, and we are getting wiser about keeping the fleece clean.

We usually have tea and apples or snacks while we work, and then we will drive together up to the knitting mill. This chore also connects to the farm, to sheepherding and to the way we live. As I write this, we are halfway through, we’ll get it done before dusk. We’re going to the Gulley’s for clams around one, then will finish.

Because a converted infrared camera can see light that the human eye cannot see, the photographer is surprised by many of the photographs.  I think viewers are also.

The hard thing to grasp is that the camera is seeing real light on a different spectrum than the human being can see, so things that seem ordinary to us are not ordinary when captured in this way.

This country lane, on a route called 313 is one I’ve photographed a dozen times and I’ve never bothered to post one of the pictures because they seemed so ordinary to me. There was nothing special about them. In IR, there is.

But really, this is difficult and challenging photography, every photograph is a completely different experience, requiring different thought, preparation and settings.

Yesterday, Maria drove me along 313 near dusk, the late afternoon sun was directly on this path with its always open gate, this country lane leading off into the woods.

The camera made the scene look as radiant as nature really is, but that we, with our limited eyesight can only rarely see. I call this “Holy Light” or “Glory Of God” light because is captures the radiance of the universe.

To me, these are spiritual photographs, they touch me in a way few photographs do. I was reading the Kabbalah last night, before sleep, and I came across this passage on God describing creative withdrawal.

“Wisdom is the end of what you can ponder in thoughts, the greatest wisdom fills more than the mind can conceive. It contracts the essence of of its presence into a handbreadth, and darkness appeared over everything, for the absence of light is darkness. Then, from the source of all, it emanated the bright light of Wisdom in thirty-two paths, each path penetrating the darkness. With them the engraver engraved the darkness.”

The passage goes on to say that before the creation of the world, the holy spirit withdrew itself into its essence, “from itself to itself within itself.” It left an empty space, in which it could emanate and create.

This passage is especially relevant, because it shows that absence of light is darkness. From there, comes an engraving, the bright light of wisdom. That is how some of these pictures shine for me.

So this new photography, like all photography, is helping me see the world anew, a country lane I have passed 1,000 times without look becomes something else. The radiance and beauty of life, which we so often fail to see with our weak eyes and small imaginations.

And then, because I am shooting with the sun behind me, I see that the camera does pick up color, in this case the later afternoon light of the sun. Very cool.