Day: June 12, 2018

A hanging basket on the porch. What can I say?

The family farm created a special culture and value system in America. The great migration of people and farmers from the farms to our cities in the past half-century has dealt a devastating loss to rural America, which has never recovered. What  remains is precious. Yesterday, visiting Ed and Carol Gulley, I saw his son Jeremy, above, and his grandson Jaiboy, below, working different ends of a hay field. Ed, no longer able to walk steadily on his own, came out with a walker.

While so many of our children spend their youth in front of screens, sending often meaningless messages to one another for much of their lives,  Jaiboy and his father were cutting their hay-field. This is a hot, dirty and complex ritual of Spring.

Jeremy was harvesting square bales and Jaiboy, who is 13, was on the other side cutting hay for the larger round bales. Touch is difficult and complicated work, something I have never done and have no idea how to do.

There were three generations of Gulleys in that field, Jeremy, Jaiboy, and the grand scion of the farm, Ed Gulley, watching from the across the road.

It must have been  hard for Ed to watch others do what he did for many years, but he was proud of his family, I could see it in his face. A beautiful thing to see, a painful thing in so many ways. Ed has brain cancer, he has perhaps taken  his last ride in a tractor.  But his blood and soul were out there in the field. And that is something.

The best farming, writes Wendell Berry, requires a farmer, not the oppressive social and mechanical system taking over the family farms.

The best farming calls for a husbandman, and a nurturer, not a technician or CEO or businessman.

“A technician or a businessman, given the necessarily abilities and ambitions, can be made in a little while, by training” writes Berry. “A good farmer, on the other hand, is a cultural product; he is made by a sort of training., certainly, in what his time imposes or demands. But he is also made by generations of experience. This essential experience can only be accumulated, tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their own ground, in which the past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.”

We are losing real farmers, in droves, and by the day. Milk prices are now so low that milk producers are handing out suicide prevention pamphlets along with milk checks, while our political leaders grow ever fatter and more corrupt. The swamp never seems to drain, it just swells.

The new dependence on moving farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and  fewer hands – with the consequent increase of overhead, debt, and dependence on machines, has staggering cultural implications, and none of them are good. What is being lost can never be  replaced.

it was a privilege for me to stand between these three generations of farmers with my camera. I hope they all stay with us forever, but if and when they are gone, they will be missed beyond imagination. Americans have always taken them for granted, and  one day they will not take them for granted any longer.

 

I’m calling the “Refugee Liberation Van,” because it will free Ali and I and the soccer team up for many important things. At the moment, we have been using a small 7-seat van for trips outside of Albany to soccer games or trips to parks or lessons or the Powell House retreats or visits to the Mansion.

Ali didn’t own the big white vans, he had to get permission, and increasingly, that became difficult, there were many bureaucratic and scheduling problems.

So we traded in the small van even for this bigger one, and the only catch is that we will have to make about $800 in repairs. When they are done, today or tomorrow, we will be liberated, we can take the refugees and immigrants and soccer team players anywhere we wish.

We can over furniture for refugees moving into new apartments, we can get groceries for families on weekends, we can crank up special tutoring program, the kids can visit parks, playgrounds, farms and ponds this summer. They can also come to Bedlam Farm whenever they wish.

Our trip to Great Adventure this summer is a bit in turmoil, the person who arranged and negotiated the trip seems to have vanished, retired or fired, and I will have to get our tickets online, which means no discount will be available. The park won’t actually speak to anyone bringing fewer than 100 people, and we are only bringing 12. So we’ll see. It just got more expensive.

Negotiating with public and private institutions for the refugees is a grinding and difficult part of this work, and seems to get only more difficult. They will need about $550 to escape to the Great Escape.

But the big news is the van. We are free and liberated now, no one can tell us where to go or how to spend our resources. Good times ahead, hard perhaps but meaningful. Thank you Army Of Good, this van will soon be sporting an “Army Of Good” bumper sticker. We can do more, and do it faster and more efficiently.

If you wish to help this work with the refugees and immigrants and with the refugee soccer team, you can send a contribution in any amount to Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz, P.O Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or to me via Paypal, [email protected]. We have about $1,600 in the refugee/Mansion account.

I like to keep things small, but not that small.

Today is our 8th wedding anniversary, we were married in a big barn on a rainy in the first Bedlam Farm in West Hebron, N.Y. Lulu and Fanny were the bridesmaids and they ate the flowers on each other’s neck. My brother came to see me for the first and last time in many years, the dogs were my best men and women.

This day, June 10 th, turned out to be the most important day of my life, the only other day  that comes close was the birth of my daughter Emma. I can still hardly believe that this loving and radiant and gifted human wanted to commit to sharing her life with me.

All during the wedding, and in our vows, I assured her that she could leave at any time, no strings attached.

It took me five or six years to accept that this is not  likely to happen. She seems to want to stay with me.

Maria transformed my life, in so many different ways, and I am humbled to say I love her more today than even back then. Our love just seems to grow and deepen.

I want to dedicate the day to our marriage, I want to write about it and share some photographs. First, she is taking me out to breakfast, and then we are going to pick up her new Hyundai, it itself a celebration and new symbol of our connection to one anther, the ways in which we know each other, and the fiercely beautiful partnership that has come to characterize our relationship.

I am so fortunate, and so grateful to be married and to mark this day, so full of sunshine and happiness for me.

Breakfast first. Maria gave me a present of some wildflowers, which are on my desk, and I gave her a Chakra bracelet from India, she seems to love it.

Thank you all for sharing in this great good fortune of mine, and in witnessing it and honoring it. Love changes everything, it saved my life.

Many of you saw it long before I did, and thanks for sticking it out with me. When I had finally given up on love, I found it, and I leaned to never give up on love. It is everything.

I took this portrait of Maria, the other day, like all good portraits, it captured a piece of her soul.  I had to say something dirty to get her to smile like this, but it is a faithful glimpse of her radiance and powerful spirit. It takes a lot of heart to power a smile like that, I can’t do it myself.