From B: “The photos today are breathtakingly beautiful! Thanks for them, Jon. I resonated with your poem on hate. A neighbor came to visit and said that he was so full of hate it was keeping him awake at night and filled his thoughts during the day. I reminded him that hate only hurts the person who hates. It wounds their heart and spirit. We have bigger things to do and ready ourselves for what comes next.” Thanks, B. Blessings to you. Thinking always of what comes next. Sometimes, I even know.

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I have a nightly bed wetting to thank for my life of storytelling. Lying in a wet bed in summer and winter triggers the mind and challenges creativity. I rarely slept, awaiting the nightly lecture and disappointment from my father. He insisted it was a character flaw.

Pretending to be asleep while he lectured me, I told stories to myself, most often about a brave and handsome U.S. Cavalry Captain who led his soldiers into the wars against Native Americans (then called Indians.)

Unlike me, he was courageous and confident, a hero. I wanted to be him, in life and in my dreams.

I had plenty of time those nights to work on my stories; they got better all of the time. Once I started telling stories, I never stopped, from writing letters to the newspaper to sharing short stories at the local library, to writing books (26 of them), essays, and magazine articles, and now, to bedlamfarm.com, my new pride and joy. My farm is an excellent source of stories; there is one or two all the time, and people like to hear them, especially if there are animals involved.

A love of animals is one of the few things they haven’t figured out how to label as woke. I’ve spent much of my life telling stories of other people and of animals,  I don’t have to go far any more.

I tell stories every day and love it every minute, from that wet bed to now. It was always a fight, thanks to my Dyslexia, but that too is a gift. I became a determined and resourceful storyteller; words were my life and my challenge. I was very sad that no one else ever got to hear them. I swore I’d never give up telling them.

I’m fortunate to have a blog that people want to read; it means I can tell stories all the way to the end, and I am grateful for that. Becoming a reporter was perfect for me; all I did was listen to and tell stories.

A few years ago, I discovered that my older generation was in the center of a culture that does not care for storytelling, unless there is blood and violence in it, and does not seek or listen to stories told by the very people who have the most stories to tell – older adults like me. We make poor superheroes.  I have many stories to share, some of which have already been on the blog. I was amazed to find people listened.

Older adults possess a wealth of knowledge that the young have yet to acquire. Our lives reach back further into the past than those of anyone young. We know what it means to be in a family, parents,  free, enslaved, impoverished, successful, humiliated, and disappointed. We’ve seen all of it, including the deaths of many people that we loved.

Most importantly, we know stories of how the world can develop and what the room for development and happiness is. One of my greatest gifts to the world could be my ability, my call, to pass those stories on to those who come behind. Even as a young reporter, I loved to hear the stories of older people,  now often ridiculed and ignored as windbags and blowhards, something I always thought was the purpose of Congress. (I was right.)

I loved writing my books right up to the day my editor called me up to say the publishers wanted young book writers who would live long enough to make a lot of money. I was nearing 70, and most of the other writers my age were disappearing, too. I rushed to build a blog 15 years ago, and I’m still telling stories there – and more people than ever are listening.  God bless my blog.

Being a teller of tales is the very essence of being old and having survived life, a witness to its passing. Tale-tellers are our witnesses to the past, and often guides to the future. The burden of tale-telling is to believe that by hiding from our responsibility to pass on what we know and have seen, we can pretend we are still young. But not telling my stories in any way that I can, I abandon the rich harvest of a life and fail the newly planted life of others.

And here is the good news of the storyteller. When I tell my stories, I know deep inside that I have done my duty to life and honored myself.

The new dream from the old bed wetter is that they might be helpful in someone younger; some still listen, and I’ll keep telling them until I can’t.