Among my favorite Woody Guthrie New Year resolutions (see below) was Guthrie’s determination to stay glad and keep fighting for what he believed in. I think of that when I write my bi-monthly (more like quarterly) plea for support of the Bedlam Farm Journal, the blog I began on Memorial Day weekend in 2007.
31,240 posts later, we have come a long way and crossed many boundaries, but I feel that 2022 will be one of the most critical years the blog and all of you reading it has faced. The Army of Good has done an incalculable amount of good to thousands of people. I never imagined it would go so far or so so much.
I also realize that the blog is essential to many people for different reasons. I think it does some good, and I hope to do more good and offer some hope, clarity, and perspective in the coming years, which look like they will be pretty turbulent, if not apocalyptic.
I am grateful to sometimes be able to use my experience as a journalist, political writer, spiritual seeker, media critic, and author to support my blog myself. I think that mix works.
Our work together – the Army of Good – is more important than ever. The farm journal blog writer’s work is also more critical than ever. This work has led me to publish books, which was my primary income. Now the blog is my primary source of income.
I feel like the blog is just getting started. It has meaning and relevance. I will make sure of it.
I hope you can support it as the blog is the focal point for all of our work and my work. Maria and I work hard day and night to do our job, take our photos, share the lives of our animals and tell our stories.
The blog is free; it will always be accessible to those who can’t afford to contribute to it financially. But the blog lives on support from the people who read it. This is how I make my living, and I am at peace with asking for my time and work.
Publishing a blog is an expensive thing to do, and the cost never seems to go down. I pay domain and maintenance fees, and every time someone’s e-mail subscription pays, I spend $25 to get it going. If my blog is essential to the people reading it, they are important to me. I paid $300 last month to get people’s subscriptions re-started, and $200 the month before.
In addition, I pay monthly fees to the software company that mails out the free subscriptions. This is an important service to offer, and it binds busy people to my site.
No one knows why a few – a small number – stop. But we fix them. I’m not complaining, I’m grateful that people care.
The people reading this know what I do and what the blog does and must decide how important it is or isn’t to them and how they might contribute to it. I have learned that it is essential to be paid for my work, and I work hard. I never imagined that the blog would be so potent, widely read, or versatile.
Except for a few days off, the blog is new and diverse every day. Our support for the Mansion residents only deepened, as my love and respect for the refugee students and their teachers at Bishop Maginn High School. They are symbols and metaphors for our country, and what it means to be an American.
People write to me often telling me how much the blog matters to them, and thank you. If that’s true, please consider contributing to its continued operations. You can donate any amount.
I so love the idea of people beginning their mornings with stories of our lives here on the farm and our struggles to be better humans. I will always write about my deep love for Maria; it is an integral part of me.
At the bottom of every blog are two buttons. One is for contributing to blog support, the other for supporting the work of the Army Of Good. You can make a one-time donation, or you can contribute small amounts monthly, or you can contribute via Paypal, [email protected], or by Venmo, jonkatz@Jon-Katz-13, or by check, Jon Katz, Blog Support, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 1286.
I sense that the work we do will be more critical than ever in the coming months and years. So will our continuous discussions about staying grounded and positive in a time of hate, sickness, rage, and the growing challenges of climate change.
We will need one another more than ever. I am committed to doing right by this blog, writing almost every day of every week, sharing my struggles to do good and find meaning.
I am also committed to writing about my dogs and animals and the issues and challenges of loving animals in this complicated world. My photos are never bookmarked or copyrighted. They are a payment to all of you for supporting me all of these years, and they, like the blog, will always be free. Use them in any way you wish.
The blog is expensive to maintain. And it will always be free. No money or financial information of any kind is stored on my blog. I have no control over what you do or contribute to your protection. Beneath the support the blog button is cancel the subscription button. You will see it prominently displayed on very few blogs or websites. I am committed to making it as easy to stop contributing as it is to contribute.
Just push a button to do either.
I balked for some years at the idea of asking for blog support, but I see how important it is. Without your consent, there would be no Bedlam Farm Journal. Please help if you can. You can support the blog here, or via Paypal, [email protected], or via Venmo, jonkatz@ Jon-Katz-13, or by check, Jon Katz, Blog Support, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
I thank you for helping. We have a lot of good work to do.
Jon,
I have sent your amount of $75 for annual membership and usually do not read additional pleas for new readers, etc., but this time you caught my attention and I am glad if it. A contribution of $100 dollars will be in the mail for you–the amount I spend with out thinking on orders for food items which are luxuries , or for books on and off Kindle.
If I were wealthy, I would send more. Your writing on line is a new field in literature and you explore it to the max. I have only found one other such person who I will mention here as she has her name on her site , as do you, and writes as Devon Dreaming. An extremely modest woman in Engkand. Maybe some of your faithful readers will give her a look in. She had not thought of charging but it is certainly time that she did. There was a third but she disappeared without warning and now only posts on Facebook. I have continued with her as a personal friend, by snail mail.
To me you are starting a new “Book” here and I eagerly await its chapters
My very best wishes to you, Erika W.
What a wonderful message, Erika, I have no love for asking about money, but it is good to be paid for my work and appreciated. I consider my blog my memoir, my great work, its the story of a life, really this is a new kind of book and I saw it from the first. Thanks so much for the contribution and the note.
Thank you Jon, for your reply. I know so well how it is to ask for things. Back at the end if the 1980s
I was president if a university’s foreign students’ association and every Fall I had to beg for homes to house these students for a week or so when they arrived–sometimes in very strange countries to them. We ended by frequently taking them in ourselves, often starting long relationships with them Two, both Ukrainian, were with us when the USSR began collapsing. My husband speaks Russian and this was so helpful as this was the first time that students from there were allowed to come here.. Of the three of them, two are now in the US, with their families and remain firm friends. I tell you all this because it makes your accounts of the school so vivid for me. One of our Ukrsinians had, in fact , been a soldier in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. He had become a raging pacifist.
Thank you Erika W. for the wonderful comments. I, too, will contribute to the uplifting and informative blog this weekend.
I am constantly astounded what Jon and Maria do for their little corner of the world.