I’ve been getting a powerful Christmas message this year, and I am hearing it in a different way, and perhaps for the first time.

I do not always listen as carefully as I should, I am hearing the real story of Christmas.

A few weeks ago, Connie Brooks and her mother Marilyn took me aside, and each told me that “you have the nicest people on your blog, it is such a pleasure to deal with them.” Marilyn and Connie ought to know they’ve communicated with more than a thousand of them in the past few months as I launched the tour for “Second Chance Dog” and Battenkill Books sold  more than a thousand copies. Many of these people call Connie when they are buying other books, they sent her birthday gifts and holiday messages. Many have become her friends.

A few days later my friend George Forss, the photographer called me up to say that “you have the nicest people I have ever met on your blog.” I had posted some of George’s photos for sale on the blog, and a score of people contacted him to buy his beautiful and inexpensive prints. He was struck by how nice and generous they all were, he loved hearing from them, dealing with them.

Scott Carrino met many of you at the Round House  Cafe last July and October during the Bedlam Farm Open Houses and he told me several times now nice they were, how wonderful it was to meet them and talk with them. My town’s mayor came by the farm to say the same thing, she runs a B&B in town and loved meeting many of the blog’s followers. When I linked to the blogs of my writing students from Hubbard Hall, hundreds of bloggers went onto their sites, encouraged them, signed up to read their work. On the Open Group at Bedlam Farm, our ministry of encouragement has changed lives, created blogs, sparked poems and photographs, it is the most generous and creative thing I have ever seen.

There are so many examples of the goodness of this community, a counterpoint to the world we are told we live in by the so-called “news.” This is my news, my message, my big story, there is so much compassion and kindness in the world, you will never see it on their news, I see it every day.

The people reading the blog have sent me hundreds of kind and loving messages to my new Post Office Box (Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816). Many include very touching contributions to my blog – $3, $5, $10 in lieu of the subscriptions they cannot  afford. (These are not necessary, the blog is free to those who can’t afford to pay subscription fees.) A number of blog readers have sent money for me to give to my friend Mickey, whose photos I have been posting to the blog. They want him to have cigarettes or coffee if he wants either.  There are also beautiful messages of support and appreciation for me, for my writing, my photography, my life with Maria,  stories of people reading the blog at breakfast, with coffee, or at night, before bed. Mickey says several people who have seen photos of him on my blog have driven to Cambridge to say hello and buy him a cup of coffee.

Christine sent me a Christmas message yesterday in my Post Office Box (it was overflowing with messages, some had to be put in a different box). She sent me $6 in cash, her daughter is paralyzed with depression, she is caring for her four-year-old granddaughter, “your blog helps keep my heart happy through my own problems, I just join your joyful troop of fellow animal and human travelers for a while each day and set out again renewed.” Me, too, Christine, me too. Jeanine is 26 and she reads the blog each morning at work, it inspires her to think of finding work she might love and a life of meaning.

Every single day for months, packages have arrived – in boxes, envelopes – for Maria, they contain beautiful vintage hankies, old scarves, beautiful fabric, they come from good-hearted people who want to share in her journey as an artists and most loving human being herself. How wonderful to see this, a series of miracles, goodness and generosity traveling through the ether, a world of goodness.

These are wonderful messages for  me to get, to hear. They make me proud and swell my heart, even as they sometimes puzzle me. I do not think I deserve them.  Why, I wonder, are the people reading my blog so nice? I believe they are nicer than me, they inspire me to be more patient, loving and generous. They challenge me to be as nice and generous as they are. I am working on it. Perhaps it is because so many of these people – not all –  are animal lovers, and perhaps it is true that if you learn to love animals, you can learn to love people as well.

It is true that nice people are coming into my life – my wife, good friends, the people reading my blog, even the animals here, so many of them are just gentle and nice and loving.

So that is my Christmas Message – you are nice and lovely people, I think compassion might be a virus, it is infectious, it can spread, a powerful meme, I think, good things can spread virally online as well as bad things. So Merry Christmas, to you, and thank you for all of this goodness. It lights up the world, it has brightened my world.