Today, another chapter in the great adventure that is Bedlam Farm, the destination and departure point on my hero journey. This morning, at 11:30 a.m., I’m meeting with Kristen Preble of Preble Realty to sign the papers to put the first Bedlam Farm up for sale once again, this time for $329,000, about $180,000 less that our original asking price.

This time, all kinds of inducements – assumable mortgage, bank financing – are being offered, and the 90-acre property can be split into parcels. Buyers can just buy the 40 acre parcel that is the farm, barns and pastures.The path in the woods is being offered separately as a hunting or camping space.

For me, many lessons to be considered and learned, that is the point of the hero journey. When I announced two weeks ago that the farm would be put up for sale again, I braced myself for the barrage of advice, messages from the boundary of superstition and reality. Superstition teaches that one can alter reality with magic –  chants and meditations, sacrifices and totems, good thoughts, crystals and shrines.

There is this growing spiritual movement that believes if you want to do something like sell a home and can’t, it is your fault: you aren’t letting go, you aren’t ready, you haven’t talked to the property, done the work you need to do to convince it to leave  you, thought thoughts that are positive enough to magically draw the right buyer, the right rescuer. This is human nature, of course, superstition has always been important to people dealing with the disappointments, terrors and challenges of life. Superstition is simple and comforting, spirituality is hard work.

“You need to bury a St. Joseph’s statute,” was the first message. There are three nestled in the garden and front lawn. “You haven’t let go, made your peace with leaving,” was the second. “Once you do, the farm will summon the right buyer.” Then, this: “you need to talk to the farm, tell it why you have left. That will bring the buyer who loves the farm as much as you do.”

These are not the messages for me, not the lessons Bedlam Farm has taught me. It is not our fault when fate intervenes and life does not always go our way. Life happens. Frieda dug up the first little St. Joseph’s statue – it was planted in the garden – and ate it. Is it her fault Bedlam Farm has not sold in three years?

I worked very hard at selling the farm. I tried everything that could be tried, from advertising in New York to spending even more money to get the place to shine. Time and again, I went there in good faith to take people on long tours, I answered a million questions, only to learn that none of them were really interested in the property, they just wanted to meet me or ask where Rose herded the sheep. I began to dislike many of them – the woman who said she needed an attached two-story garage, the man who claimed to be a septic tank authority, the woman who pretended to want to live on a farm with her dog but who didn’t. I stopped going on showings.

What I learned was this. Spirituality is not magic, it does not alter the course of the universe, bring cash or good fortune, offer potions to lure a rich New Yorker in search of a second home. Spirituality does not bar disappointment and struggle, if helps us weather disappointment and struggle.

I love Bedlam Farm very much, and the very idea that it has not yet sold is viscerally painful to me, it is worth so much more in so many ways than the asking price,  yet I remember, as I prepare to drive to our realtor once again, and sign more papers once again, what my long and challenging spiritual pursuits have taught me. A good and meaningful life is not one without struggle, it is one in which we respond to struggle with grace and acceptance.

Another chapter in the hero journey, another lesson to learn again.

I have always been honest in my journal of life here on this blog, I promised to be open and honest when I started bedlamfarm.com, and I have worked hard to keep that promise. We cannot afford to keep two farms any longer, we have exhausted our resources trying.  Bedlam Farm, the most wonderful and creative place in my life, is no longer sustainable. That is the reality I have come, at long last, to accept. St. Joseph can’t do one thing about it, neither can the crystals we were advised to put on the windowsills and did. I can talk to the farm all I want, but like the great poet Omar Khayam wrote, the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all your piety and wit can change a word of it.

Some people say they doubt it when I say that I love my life and have no regrets about changing it. I imagine that is difficult thing for some people to accept. Still, it is the truth. At Bedlam Farm, I found myself, met Maria,  learned who I am, what I want, how to live. I am so grateful for that, for once, I do not really have the words. If I had a magic wand, I would never go back. At the end,  I was dying there.

So I am letting go of the farm at long last, in a number of ways. This will not produce a loving buyer out of the mist.  The economy and the real estate market and the bank will have something to say about it. He or she will appear in their own good time for their own good reasons. There is nothing more I can do about it than I have done. I do finally accept  that is not my fault, for all of the many mistakes I made there.

Maria and I are in this all together, yet this is really my responsibility, my journey. I bought the farm, my name alone is on the lease. I must deal with it in an honest and direct manner. I don’t want her to come along to be with me when I sign the papers, this is for me to do.

I am not planting any more statues, or have any more conversations with my farm, or working on my emotional issues with a beautiful piece of real estate. Later today, the farm will be listed on the Preble Realty website, and it is a multiple listing, it can be seen anywhere.

When spirituality meets superstition, it is life,  not magic, that wins every single time. People get sick, people die, the world changes. I believe that – acceptance – is a very spiritual thing for me to grasp. It is, I believe, wrong to blame ourselves for the nature of life. Life is so much bigger than we are. Life happens, to me and to you, and the best we can do is bow our knee to it and give thanks for what we have had and what we have now.