Yarn, the studio barn, at dawn

  March 15, 2009 – One of the many things I dislike about the social catacylsm awkwardly called “The Economy” is that I am beginning to see the world more narrowly, dividing it between people who are “positive,” and people who are not.
   The news media has mostly become an instrument of social hysteria, turning anxious people in bad news addicts, and the rest of us, many not necessarily inclined to be all that cheerful, are forced to tell people all day that the world is not coming to an end, and that there are quite a few good and important things coming from this sad mess, including a reevaluation of the values of life on a scale I haven’t seen in my adult life.
  Media, like politics, doesn’t seem to be functioning all that well anymore, and it feels like we are often left on our own to stick our fingers to the wind, and decide what kind of people we choose to be – advocates for the idea that we will survive, even prosper in different ways, or gloomy hysterics turning the radio and TV on all day to see how the market is doing.
  Like everyone else, I have lost a lot, and changed a lot, and it’s a good thing I don’t ever want to retire, because it ain’t gonna happen. I am also conscious of the good it’s doing for me – simplicity, responsibility, maturation, different forms of creativity.
  From the odd perspective of the farm, whose daily routines transcend markets and scandals, things appear challenging but it does seem as if we will all be around next year, whining about this or something else. My neighbor Carr, a crusty farmer who often stops by to yell at me for the dumb things I am doing on the farm, came by again this week and he told me he finally took his old TV and brought it into his dairy barn, and plays it for the cows, who, he believes, find it calming and are dumb enough to survive it.
   “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve always been poor around here, and now we’re just a bit poorer.”
    I am torn between an instinct to comfort the gloom-and-doom addicts I hear from regularly, and growing desire to avoid them altogether. One way or the other, I believe we will write out own stories, and if the animals here have taught me anything, it’s some measure of patience and acceptance.
  I don’t really like the narrow choice of being positive or gloomy. It’s just as suffocating as the narrow choice of “left” and “right”, two self-righteous and rigid points of view that are incapable of listening or communicating.
   Life, it seems to me, is in the middle. I think I’m going to stop trying to cheer people up, and let them wallow in their own misery. It is, after all, a personal choice.