This weekend, our Open House, again. Our eighth.

I first thought about an Open House eight years ago, I was in a very different place than I am now in so many ways. I was somewhat famous then, books had a different place in the world than now.

I had a different place in the world than now.

I was a best selling author, and TV crews often came to the first Bedlam Farm, a much grander and more dramatic farm, almost a movie set. it was a beautiful setting, but a loveless life, a lonely life, and broken life.

I went on lavish book tours, spoke to large crowds of people, famous Hollywood producers came by to meet me, they wanted to tell me about their dogs, they invited me to their mansions.

They were fascinated by my move to the country, my escape from my ordinary life. They thought I was a dog whisperer who could tell them the secrets of their Labs and Newfoundlands.

They were invariably disappointed, I was not what they were looking for, and they looked elsewhere, as rich people can do.

Maria and I had just come off of a horrendous couple of years, we clung to one another like shipwrecked people bobbing on the ocean in one storm after another waiting for rescue.

When the mask I was wearing cracked, I lost faith in it, and I regressed into the darkest parts of my psyche. Campbell called it a wasteland situation, my life had become a wasteland and I was dying in pieces every day.

Joseph Campbell was still wildly popular then, and one of his books, Pathways To Bliss, became a kind of bible to me, made me see that I was on a Hero Journey, not just a trip to the country, or a mid-life crisis, the term used to put down men who wish to change.

I began to understand that I was gripped by a calling.

“Mythology begins where madness starts,” he wrote in Pathways. “A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you he clue when he says, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

I did sacrifice all of those things, and while that sometimes frightens me, I take full responsibility for it, and would do it again in a moment. So would Maria. Every year, in the days before our Open House – this Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 4 – I try to stop and remember the idea of the Open House, to be faithful to it.

Maria and i found love in one another, we share our calling.

We live creative lives, we live for encouragement, for ourselves and others, we live to share what we know and understand and what we do not know and understand. To work only for money is just another kind of slavery, and we have freed ourselves from that awful bondage.

We did all of this together, we share a closeness what was once unimaginable to me.

The idea  was to celebrate our reborn lives together, and open them up to the people who share them with us. Part of that idea was to honor the art of rural life, the creativity we see all around us,  and to celebrate Maria’s miraculous resurrection as an artist, a calling that had been lost to her, but then been found.

We both survived our Hero Journey’s, we traveled through dark and unfamiliar places, we lived to return to the ordinary world. On that journey, we awakened. We answered the Call to Adventure.

There was an a wakening of the self to an  unknown, unexpected world. The hero, wrote Campbell, becomes aware of a new, unusual, exciting, forbidden and foreign world, previously closed off from us.

That’s what the Open Houses were really about, we had survived and returned to the ordinary world. We wanted to rejoin our world, we had come out of the darkness.

We also sought to acknowledge the importance of our lives with animals, to share our wonder and love for them. I sometimes have lost sight of these ideas, but I always come back to them, and find them again.

These ideas remain the core of the Open House. Poetry readings, gifted artists showing and selling their work, sheepherding, Belly Dancing, donkey tours, meeting Bud and Red and Fate, Lulu and Fanny.

We honor our own personal revolution.

So the hero outgrows his old world. The old concepts, ideals and emotional patterns no longer fit, no longer make sense. The time for passing the threshold has come.

Revolution,  wrote Campbell, doesn’t have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth.  You have only to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

This is what we have done, this is what we have called our brothers and sisters in this world to celebrate with us this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 4.