I spent most of my life closed up. I lived in a house in New Jersey for more than 20 years and we never invited a single human inside of it.  I lived at Bedlam Farm for seven or eight years and it was mostly a moat, few, if any people, ever got inside. I was closed to love, friendship, spirituality. Some people believe I began opening up after Maria came into my life, there is certainly truth in that.

But the process began for me many years earlier. I saw an analyst in New York City when I was working there and i said I needed to conquer my fear of opening up, being vulnerable, letting people in.

I worked in therapy for years to open up. Animals helped me to open up. Maria helped me to open up. More therapists and spiritual counselors helped me and so did meditation and a breakdown that nearly cost me my life, and a recession and a collapse of the publishing industry and a divorce. A shrink told me he had never met a man my age who was undertaking so much change at once.

Life, I told him, was upon me. I would not die like that, being all closed up. That was not how the story was going to end for me, I told him. And I kept my promise to him and to me, and I am still keeping it, still working on it.

Good thing too, I remember being closed up like a walnut and I was reminded this week that I was opening up. The photo above is a bunch of people standing by the Pole Barn watching Red do his thing,  herd the sheep. This is something people love to see. It started off when our friends the Gulleys, dairy farmers from White Creek suggested we have lunch and we happily agreed. We met at the Burger Den up the road.

Ken Norman was coming to trim the donkeys’ hooves – one of his first jobs since his knee surgery. I invited him to join us for lunch. After lunch Ed and Carol Gulley came over to see Red and the sheep, Ken joined them and then trimmed the donkeys’ hooves. We all watched, cheered Ken on as his new knees did the job for him.

While he was there, his sister came by and his wife Eli and daughter Nikilene and his mother-in-law. Maria was here also. Then Paul Moshimer from Blue Star Equiculture came into the farm with his big new truck and trailer. He was staying over, he was going to Vermont the next morning to pick up Sarge and take him back to Massachusetts.

That evening Paul and Maria and I went to the Bog to dinner, then Paul and I went over to Scott Carrino’s farm to sit in the sugar house with him and hold the first-ever meeting of the Fabulous Old Men’s Club. We talked for hours in Scott’s sugar house, filled with steam and bubbling and the sweet smell of sap turning to maple syrup.

I was exhausted at the end of the day. A day of friendship. I am not used to it. I would never  have permitted so many people to enter my life at once, it was still an astonishing thing for me to see.

It is not familiar to me, it drained me.

I told Maria that the day reminded me of the hard work I had done over the years to open up. I have been trying to open up for decades, it is not simple or quick. You have to chip away at the rust and undergrowth bit by bit, is long and tricky and beautiful work like the work on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel. Meditation. Therapy. Tragedies and shocks, epiphanies and magical helpers, hard time and beautiful ones.

One by one, day by day. Suddenly, there was love. Then, friends. Then animal helpers. Then a blog. Then photography. Then donkeys and more dogs. More books. Then moving to a farm that fit us, the size of our lives, not bigger. Then challenge and struggle. The circle of life, joy and travail. Crisis and mystery, just around the corner.

To have a spiritual life it is essential to open up. To stave off the anger and cruelty in the wold, it is necessary to open up. To feel compassion and empathy, one must open up. Otherwise, there is  no way for the good things to get in. it is never too late to open up, it just gets harder the longer you wait.

Opening up is my faith. The journey began many years ago. Life closed me up in a brutish way when I was young, it is hard still for me to open up, it will be hard until I die, I imagine. The thing is, to never quit on it. To be open to yourself, and the minds and hopes of others. I think I close up every night like some flowers and have to take care to open up again every morning, when I write on my blog, take the first photo of the day.

When the door is closed, life is shut out. When the door is open, life – love – can flow in, like a stream in the Spring. You just can’t ever take your eyes off of the door.

Looking up the hill at all those people on my farm, in my life, watching Red, I saw them as witnesses to my opening, like a creaky old door in a haunted mansion. Look at them, I thought, all of those people, my friends, my wife, all right here with me, all day and into the night.