Until I developed a sense of place, which was late in my life, and learn to care for it, I was not able to care about others or other things..  A sense of place not only affects who we see , but it helps us determine what we are and what we feel.

In part, this comes from the very things we look at, the world around us.

I see now that early in my 60’s, I found my place, first I hoped it would be the first Bedlam Farm, and then, when Maria and I bought the second Bedlam, we both knew we had found it. Almost everything in my life changed at once.

Finding one’s place is transformative.

Before, both of us has wandered our worlds looking for the place for us. We were outsiders, everywhere we went. Some people find their place in a park or near the ocean or in their apartment in the big city, or a studio where they paint or sew or write.

It can really be anywhere.

I moved nearly a score of times before giving birth to my daughter, and then I stopped moving at all and could never find of mind peace in the New Jersey suburb where i was living. It was not my place.

A sense of place was transformative to me. I stopped yearning and began to live.

I don’t see much hope for politics in its current form, like it or not, I’m ready to move past it. I’m seeking a different kind of space beyond my own.

I always wanted to be someplace else, no matter where I lived until I found my place. It opened me up to love, to my blog, to my pictures, to a sense of caring and belonging that I had never had.

I will never voluntary leave this place.

I’ve come home, and this has freed me  up to heal and grow and love and think.  I have everything I want and and need right here.

The farm is the first place I really wanted to care for, and rather than hire people to do it for me, I always tried to do it myself, and now, I do it with Maria. In caring for my place, I began to care about others, includings birds and trees and donkeys and Mother Earth.

The importance of this is now clear to both of us. “Love is our true destiny,” wrote Thomas Merton, “we do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone.”

So Maria and I found it together.

When we saw this  somewhat homely old farmhouse on a busy highway, we knew we had found our place. Like us, our house was very real and somewhat battered. We fell in love with each other.

We were free to begin our cultural-political-technological recuperation, recovery and recomposition. Jenny Odell says this is learning  how to do nothing.  She admits she doesn’t think anyone who read her book actually wants to do nothing. I don’t. I have never been busier, my life has never been richer or fuller.

But these days, I feel smothered and uneasy in the space that surrounds me, the one the politicians and the corporate world has built for us and polluted and corrupted. There is less and less for me all the time, and I am  beginning to think about what I can do about it.

For Odell, the idea of “doing nothing” can be helpful, for her it means disengaging as much as is possible from the information economy, which is all about money (too much money) greed (too much greed) and power (too much power and domination.) Increasingly, there is no place for me in this world.

I’m not going to fight about or fret about it. I’m going to alter my life, something that offers a different framework and foundation.

We use the fancy new tools all the time to tell our stories, earn our money, transmit our work, they have their hooks into us, we are not living virginal lives.

But that has never taken us over our defined our lives. We have no TV and spend most nights reading, cooking and talking alongside one another.

The ethos of endless thought of money, the logic of capitalism and more and more money now threatens both our democracy and life on earth and the ideas of human being. So does the mindless and suffocating argument of red and blue, progressive and conservative.

Our politics doesn’t inspire us, it just asks us not to think for ourselves. Why, then, would we need a democracy at all? Or maybe that’s the point.

In the long run, those terms – progressive and conservative – mean nothing.  They are failed ideas, useful to a handful of greedy people for their benefit, not for ours. They are all distraction, a different way to funnel money into the same pot. T

he progressives have failed to raise up the lives of millions of people, the conservatives don’t want to.

So I suddenly have realized that I am entering a post-political period in my life. I’m not going to yo-yo up and down for years over this outrage or that, this election or that, this lie or that one. In all of this chaos and turmoil, what has actually changed. Something new is on the horizon, there is no other way.

Politics has little use for me, or meaning for me, or for my place in the world.

Our political stucture no longer works for people like me, so I have no reason to follow it blindly or feed it they money they all ask for a hundred times a day. In a political sense, I’m drawn to “doing nothing,” because there is no longer anything meaningful to do within the confines of our social system.

It’s up to me, and I’ll need to be creative.

We no longer have a soundd social network to live peacefully within, writes Odell in her book This is true.

When I try to imagine what a sane social media network might look it, it means first, disengaging from the one we now have.

It is unhealthy, dangerous and riddled with rage, lies and endless argument, which can never be resolved because while we were all asleep, social media was literally built on the idea of argument, not connection or resolution.

If you read any of those whistle-blower leaked papers, it’s clear that Facebook never worried about truth or honesty, they only worried aobut money, and that is what corporations do. Now, they are bigger and more powerful than Congress, and they won’t likely change.

Facebook demonistrates this in a powerful way.

It offers us the world’s biggest and most popular insane social network, good only for one thing: sucking billions of dollars from us so billionnaires can have more than they could ever spend.

As prophesied, the corporations bought up our political system and left it paralyzed, weak and useless.

They are happy to let their platform be consumed by liars and conspiracy theorists, they’ve even found a way to make more money from them.

Odell thinks of a sane social network is a space of appearance, a hybrid mix of meditated and in-person encounters, or walks with friends, phones conversations that are gentle and supportive, closed group conversations, town halls, true conviviality.

I would add to the search for doing good, for real love, a space were we show up online or off but always in person, a space where we fight for things with each other, rather than arague about what we want.

For this to work, it would have to be non-corporate, a decentralized networking technology. a place that creates numbers nodes and opportunities for support. A place with no ads.

I see it almost as a coalition of blogs, individual spaces. My farm is my space. My blog is my space. My photography is my space. My wife and my animals are spaces. My friends are my space, and my family.

The social system – the network of shared community and values – that I see on the news all day is breaking down, piece by piece. There is no stopping the corporations. They will kill off te world before we get to kill them.

First truth, then love, then honor, then decency. The more vile and corrupt or violent the idea, the more it is celebrated and rewarded. It can be done, it has often been done.

The Mansion offers me that opportunity, so does Bishop Maginn High School. The good life full of meaning is right out there, we can all touch it from the comfort and safety of our own places.

Our morals and peace of mind have been upended. Whatever is evil, is revered, whatever is traitorous is the new patriotism. It’s almost as if the Devil as envisaged in all of those old Bible stories was real after all, send by God to come to  come up to the earth and punish us for our greed and disregard for our home, the earth.

When a culture’s only value is money, it is valueless. When a culture’s only leader is hateful, then love hides.

So I think of my new space as post-political, beyond our narrow ideas of two political parties, I don’t say a path for me in either of them, but I see a world full of spaces for me to help make and choose from.

I have no interest in doing nothing. I want to cast a life of something good.