Day: August 6, 2018

I admire my wife, which is, I think a good thing. It helps a marriage to both love and respect a spouse. Every morning, I revel in her fashion choices for shoveling manure. Sometimes she does it in her wedding dress, and always wears her $8 imported rubber  French boots.

“Your wife is not like the other farm wives,” a neighboring farm wife told me once. That, I thought is quite an understatement. Maria is not like anybody’s wife. She is herself, her same self all the time.

I want to say humbly, that I believe this is something we both share. I believe I have also learned to be my same self every time.

A woman at a reading last year said a wonderful thing to me, she said, “you are always the same when I see you, you are always yourself. You don’t put any false hats on…”

That is a high compliment for me, and I hope it is true.

Maria is always her same self, whether she is climbing on a ladder, planting in the garden, making her art, or shoveling shit in the pasture.

To me, finding out who I am was one of life’s most important and cherished experiences. Every day someone writes me to urge me to be someone else, to be softer, easier, sweeter, to have fewer opinions and express them differently.

“I love your writing and your blog,” someone messaged me the other day. “But sometimes you are cranky…”  I laughed at this, I wrote her back right a way. “You bet, ” I said. “I am often cranky and have been since I was six or  seven. It is called being human. The thing is, I don’t ever pretend to be something I am not, if I am cranky sometimes, which almost all of us are, you will see it, you will never have to wonder who I am today.  I don’t put on a false hat. You may get the good me or the bad me, but you will always (I hope) get the real one.”

I’m surprised at how radical an idea that is.

It is a gift to me when people scold me for being me, because it allows me to reaffirm myself. My identity is precious.

Believe me I have changed, more than most people can imagine, and as many of you have witnessed for yourselves. You are the most loyal people I know.

But at some point in life, we either get to the core of ourselves or we don’t. We find our center or we don’t.

“You have to trust the inner voice that shows the way,” writes Henry Nouwen. “You know that inner voice. You turn to it often.”

I believe I have more changing or growing to do, that will never stop, but I am now my same self all of the time. I have found my center, it is my safe and enduring place, it always tells me if what I am doing is right or wrong.

And I’m not putting on any other hats (except the red ones from Etsy). Every day, Maria inspires me to be me, and she is always her same self.  She doesn’t ask herself what to wear when she goes out to shovel manure, or what she should change into when she goes to work in her studio.

She accepts me the way I am, and I accept her for who she is, and I can’t say how much that means to both of us.

I think of all the people in my life who told me there was something wrong with me or have scolded and lectured me for being too this or too that. I am done with them, sick of their messages, and good riddance.

This is the path to freedom.

I barely took a photo in my life before I met Maria, and have been taking pictures every since. She says they bring out the artist in me. They certainly touch something deep inside of me. I’m not a person who has pursued too many interests in life for too long, but my photography is a deep art of me, and I take photos every day.

I have learned a lot about photography, and have a lot more to learn, lately I have been playing around with perspective, using my growing knowledge of lenses and light to create a feel for a place, not just a literal digital image.

Digital photography is all about being literal, too much for me at times. This morning, I wanted to capture the feel of the farm on this yet, another hot and uncomfortable day. The farm is a beautiful, colorful and peaceful place, thanks in great part to nature and Maria.

This image captures that feel for me. People write me all the time and say the blog is a peaceful and comforting place for them in turbulent times. I hope so, and I hope the images coming from here are a part of that.

This is a perspective image, it is about nothing except color, light, and nature’s own natural beauty. The hanging basket is graceful and colorful, the aged birch tree is graceful in its own right.

I’ve never had a really good relationship with the chickens, I admire their industry and energy, but they seem kind of dumb and dirty to me. I realize that is a short-sighted and narrow way to look at them, so I am trying to get along with them on a higher plane.

I take my stewardship of the animals – all of them – seriously, and I just need to do better.

They chickens know how to rattle me, they are crapping on the porch all the time, and I found myself yelling at them and chasing them off with a broom – they make an incredible mess sometimes, and with a whole farm to run around, why do they insisted on dumping on the slate porch?

The dogs love to eat chicken droppings, some of which are impressive, and often vomit them up. They sometimes have worms and the dogs are permanently on worm preventives.

In addition, the chickens love to sneak up on the barn cats when they are eating and steal their food. That also ticks me off.

But I’m sucking up to them now. I want to do better.

I’m off to a good start. I bought a giant bag of dried mealworms and every morning when I come out, instead of cursing at them or telling them to get off the porch, I go over to the big barn, cluck at them and dump a couple of handfuls of dried mealworms on the ground.

I  have to say my chickens are not complicated. They have forgiven me my sins and grumpiness, they come running when they see me, and I dump the worms on a big flat rock next to the bar. All seems to be forgiven, they are happy to be around me.

Every animal is different, but they do share some common traits. They tend to like people who feed them.

It’s strange to find myself seeking the approval of chickens, but I do want the animals here to be content and at ease with me. The mealworms are my way of saying I want to do better, and the chickens do not hold grudges, they are not demanding.

It is always a great joy to work with Red and to watch Fate’s great joy as she runs in circles around the sheep to no particular purpose. This morning, the sheep were stubborn. It is hot and buggy and the sheep didn’t want to go  out of the pole barn.

Red dug them out and got them into the side pasture. We didn’t stay out long and Fate, as usual, has a blast. A great pleasure to watch these two very different dogs, we love them both.