Search Results for: Open house

I think, at the core, that the Open Houses we host are about friendship and love. It was very difficult for me to agree to open up my life to strangers – more than 1,500 people came the first time.

The Open Houses are smaller now, more intimate, quieter, as is appropriate. A lot of people come, but there is nothing  frantic about them. I realized after a while – Maria agrees – that the Open Houses are our holiday, our faith. We celebrate creativity, independence, and encouragement.

I have also come to see that the Open Houses – this weekend, ll to 4 – are about something else, friendship and love. For the most part, the people who come are not strangers at all, but friends. They come in love and friendship.

When I really believed that I could be loved – Maria showed me this – then I was finally able to permit my friends the freedom and respect to respond to love in their own way, even if it is sometimes different from mine.

They have their own histories, emotions, values, their own characters. But they come to show us their love for us, our farm, our animals, and our faith in self-awareness.

My ability to respond corresponds almost precisely with my own belief in my goodness, a wildly fluctuating belief over the years.

When I can give freely and spontaneously – I am learning to do that – then I can receive freely and spontaneously.

We have been astonished over these years to see how much our lives mean to others, this is a hard thing to accept and believe.

But The Open Houses have  become our sacred holiday, our celebration of us, and one reason that is so is that we allow our friends the freedom and courtesy to respond to us as they want and are able to do.

This is what we worship, this is what we believe in.

That is the foundation of learning how to feel true gratitude, and we are nothing but grateful for our Open Houses and the people who come to share our holiday with us.

This weekend, I will share my life and Maria will share hers, and we will share our lives together. We will share Mary Kellogg’s final volume of poetry, my herding with the dogs, our donkeys, and a long list of gifted artists who represent the art of rural life.

And Maria’s Belly Dancing Group will be here Sunday at 1 p.m. On Saturday at 1 p.m., Liz Lewis, who has been shearing sheep since she was 8, will come her to shear ours. Poetry readings both afternoons, and I will gas on briefly about my work and life.

Maria will be having a wondrous time hold  up in her very beloved Schoolhouse Studio selling wonderful art at very affordable prices.

This weekend, our Open House, again. Our eighth.

I first thought about an Open House eight years ago, I was in a very different place than I am now in so many ways. I was somewhat famous then, books had a different place in the world than now.

I had a different place in the world than now.

I was a best selling author, and TV crews often came to the first Bedlam Farm, a much grander and more dramatic farm, almost a movie set. it was a beautiful setting, but a loveless life, a lonely life, and broken life.

I went on lavish book tours, spoke to large crowds of people, famous Hollywood producers came by to meet me, they wanted to tell me about their dogs, they invited me to their mansions.

They were fascinated by my move to the country, my escape from my ordinary life. They thought I was a dog whisperer who could tell them the secrets of their Labs and Newfoundlands.

They were invariably disappointed, I was not what they were looking for, and they looked elsewhere, as rich people can do.

Maria and I had just come off of a horrendous couple of years, we clung to one another like shipwrecked people bobbing on the ocean in one storm after another waiting for rescue.

When the mask I was wearing cracked, I lost faith in it, and I regressed into the darkest parts of my psyche. Campbell called it a wasteland situation, my life had become a wasteland and I was dying in pieces every day.

Joseph Campbell was still wildly popular then, and one of his books, Pathways To Bliss, became a kind of bible to me, made me see that I was on a Hero Journey, not just a trip to the country, or a mid-life crisis, the term used to put down men who wish to change.

I began to understand that I was gripped by a calling.

“Mythology begins where madness starts,” he wrote in Pathways. “A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you he clue when he says, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

I did sacrifice all of those things, and while that sometimes frightens me, I take full responsibility for it, and would do it again in a moment. So would Maria. Every year, in the days before our Open House – this Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 4 – I try to stop and remember the idea of the Open House, to be faithful to it.

Maria and i found love in one another, we share our calling.

We live creative lives, we live for encouragement, for ourselves and others, we live to share what we know and understand and what we do not know and understand. To work only for money is just another kind of slavery, and we have freed ourselves from that awful bondage.

We did all of this together, we share a closeness what was once unimaginable to me.

The idea  was to celebrate our reborn lives together, and open them up to the people who share them with us. Part of that idea was to honor the art of rural life, the creativity we see all around us,  and to celebrate Maria’s miraculous resurrection as an artist, a calling that had been lost to her, but then been found.

We both survived our Hero Journey’s, we traveled through dark and unfamiliar places, we lived to return to the ordinary world. On that journey, we awakened. We answered the Call to Adventure.

There was an a wakening of the self to an  unknown, unexpected world. The hero, wrote Campbell, becomes aware of a new, unusual, exciting, forbidden and foreign world, previously closed off from us.

That’s what the Open Houses were really about, we had survived and returned to the ordinary world. We wanted to rejoin our world, we had come out of the darkness.

We also sought to acknowledge the importance of our lives with animals, to share our wonder and love for them. I sometimes have lost sight of these ideas, but I always come back to them, and find them again.

These ideas remain the core of the Open House. Poetry readings, gifted artists showing and selling their work, sheepherding, Belly Dancing, donkey tours, meeting Bud and Red and Fate, Lulu and Fanny.

We honor our own personal revolution.

So the hero outgrows his old world. The old concepts, ideals and emotional patterns no longer fit, no longer make sense. The time for passing the threshold has come.

Revolution,  wrote Campbell, doesn’t have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth.  You have only to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

This is what we have done, this is what we have called our brothers and sisters in this world to celebrate with us this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 4.

Sarge is a tough old Army Truck from the Vietnam War, he lives on Pompanuck Farm, he belongs to my friend Scott Carrino. He comes her once a year, when it’s time to dispose of our pungent but valuable donkey manure pile.

We give a lot of it to our friends, we use it in our own gardens – it is amazing – and Scott takes a truckload for the Pompanuck Farm gardens. There is no charge.

We let Scott know when Vince is coming to work on the gravel with his tractor, and Scott or his helper Wally drive it out to the farm and leave it near the pile.

When Vince is done leveling the Pole Barn, he drops most of the manure into Sarge, and then Scott comes and picks it up. It goes into the very beautiful Pompanuck Gardens.

We’re thinking of selling bags of our manure ($10) at the Open House, both as a souvenir and something useful for gardeners. We sell the mature manure, it’s the stuff close to the grown, powdery and easy to spread. Something new.