This will be a big move for me, in so many ways. I can’t speak for Maria, she has her own voice, but my life will change today in more ways than I have fully absorbed. My life will be simpler. The new house is much smaller than this beautiful roomy farmhouse. My photographic equipment and computer detritus and manuscript junk spreads over two or three rooms, several tables, many closets.

I will be buying many fewer things. I will be wearing fewer clothes. I will be storing food in much less space, with fewer shelves. I will not have a long path on which to walk the dogs. They will have to walked behind my pastures, driven to paths in the woods. There is less money, so I cannot simply re-order and re-build the farm to my whims and specifications. It will take years, if ever, before we can do all of the things we would like to do in that house. I used to be able to do them instantly. There is only one bathroom, one toilet, and it is in the rear of the house, in the customs of old small farms.

I think the pilgrim on the path lived on Bedlam Farm. Also the big shot. He is staying behind.

I will need to think of space differently. Clean up every day. Organize my things differently. Buy food differently. Organize my mind differently. And what will be the same? My shared and wonderful life with Maria, who lights up my life every time I see or hear her. My life with the dogs, the donkeys, the animals of the farm. My writing about my life, my search for self-determination, my life with animals, talking to them. My blog. My photography. My search to grapple with the new kinds of community online that shape and influence our lives. My struggle to be a better, more knowing, more aware human being. My search for a spiritual life.

My determination to avoid a life of fear and anger and to shed those ideas and the people who advance them from my life. Got to go pack up the bedroom.