“Old stone walls ran into the woods, and now and then, there would be an empty barn as a ghostly landmark. The night grew frosty, and the ground underfoot was slippery with rime. The bare birches wore the stars on their fingers, and the world rolled seductively, a dark symphony of brooding groves and plains.” –

E. B. White, One Man’s Meat.

When I ran to my mountain in the year 2000, one of the books I read was by E.B. White, the brilliant author and New Yorker writer who had moved to Maine bought a farm, and wrote about its life on the farm and in the country in a series of columns. The book, a collection of his columns from the farm, is titled One Man’s Meat.

I loved White’s writing style, it was simply, ironic, thoughtful, and descriptive. Reading it, you just wanted to go somewhere and buy a farm and write about it. He made me think.

So I did buy a farm and write about it. I had never set foot on a farm until I bought the first Bedlam Farm in 2003. My family thought I had lost my mind, and they were more prescient than they knew.

First I wrote several books about my farm, then I started a blog because I wanted and needed the freedom to write what I wanted, and on my own.

My publisher had very narrow ideas about what I could write about.

I wanted to be free. And I was also cracking up at the time and needed a more personal place and space and a free hand to write about my life. Because that is what the blog is, the story of a life, a living memoir.

Sometimes White’s columns were quite serious – full of thoughts about World War II and democracy – much of the time, it was warm, gentle, and insightful.

White had a quarrelsome, prickly streak in him,  and often complained to his impatient and nit-picky readers (sounds familiar) and the letters they sent that there was only one of him and thousands of them. He had a dry sense of humor which always pulled him back from being too heavy.

The retired English teachers who stalk me would have loved him, the New Yorker fact-checkers made his writing shine. I can’t afford that, I have a software program that looks for typos and misspellings.

I can only imagine how Smith might have reacted to writing for three billion people on Facebook as well as his magazine readers (his version of a blog at the time.)

When I read his book, I called my wife, Paula Span, at the time, and I said I had just read this excellent book and this is what I wanted to do.

I want to buy a farm and write about my life, my animals, the country.

I am not, alas, the writer E. B. White was, at least not yet, and time is running out. But I love my blog and it is a success. Lots of regular readers and visitors. I know that some people hate it and hate me for writing it, but that’s life, and I won’t get stuck in that.

Recently, and primarily because of the faithfulness of some of my most faithful readers – many have stuck with me since 2007, when the blog was launched – I realized the blog is changing.

Again.

It is, after all, the story of an all-too life, a radical literary experiment, and it reflects the changes and evolutions in that life, which is mine, and in the readers who read the blog. I promised to be as open as I could and as authentic as I could. I believe those promises have been kept.

In the beginning, I wrote about depression and loneliness. Since then, the blog has evolved in several ways. One of them is that an awful lot of people read it. This has taught me to believe in myself and stand up for myself. I needed that.

As the Internet gets nastier,  I’ve struggled with the endless corrections, second-guessing and pure hostility that comes with writing online. I haven’t always handled it well, but I am learning to deal with it in a more positive and yes, gentle, way. I also appreciate the praise and goodwill.

This has all been good for me.

Most people don’t like change, and every time my blog has changed, some people storm off in a huff, often leaving angry messages and dramatic goodbyes in a trail behind them. They seem personally offended as if I owed them never changing.

After 2016, I thought I should be writing about politics more because it seemed to comfort people, including me.

Lately, I have the feeling that I was losing some of the magic of being here, living on a farm with Maria and animals. I was taking myself too seriously, and forgetting the magic this place holds for me. Some of this is the world around me, some of it is growing older, some of it comes from a mind that is easily distracted and always hungry for something new.

Beyond that, there is a lot of anger still in me, and I have worked hard to move beyond it. Sometimes I even succeed.

I am, after all, living a fantasy of my own and many other people. My life with  Maria here on Bedlam Farm is the dream of my lifetime: fleeing the madness and frenzy of urban corporate life to live in danger, surrounded by animals, and with someone foolish enough to love me.

I don’t want a single thing that I don’t have.

But I think I had wandered too far off the track. The magic is coming back to me, I can feel it in my soul and my bones.

I think I was being pulled into the hateful poisons that are now infecting the country instead of writing my own truth.

I was so anxious to help people – and be liked –  that I drifted a bit too far off of my One Man’s Meat idea, which is why I started the blog in the first place.

I think the Amish helped me make this transition back to the blog’s original roots. Their lives have a lot of magic in them.   So did my work at the Mansion and Bishop Maginn High School. This work has grounded me and given the blog some heart and meaning.

The life in nature and on farms touched me and opened me up, taught me so much. When I decided to back away from writing about the Amish so much, I realized that I had changed once again. I need to write about my magic, not just theirs.

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder,” E.B. White wrote. “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in the whole one.” I am on the lookout for wonder every minute of every day.

That was good news for me to hear.

White often wrote that the problem for a writer is learning how to establish communication with oneself. My meditation and contemplation and experience at writing have helped me to do that.

I want a kind and gentle blog. I want a blog that makes people smile in the morning, not gnash their teeth. I reserve the right to mouth off any subject whenever I want; I want to change the past, not wipe it from my life. Most of all, I want to make people think. I could care less if they agree with me, it is not a need I have.

People tell me I am lucky to live this life, but I have trouble with this idea; it offends me. Luck is not something you want to mention in the presence of self-made men and women.

Very few people in my experience find meaningful lives through luck. A meaningful life is often marked by blood, sweat, and tears. Stubbornness and courage doesn’t hurt either.

Like White, I love writing about animals and dogs. Like White, I love living in nature. Like White, I sometimes have the gift of making people smile.

I don’t know all the details, but it feels to me as if the ghost E.B. White has reached down out of the mist and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “remember me? I’m why you started to do this.”

I apologized; I said I have a head that is so full of stuff I’m prone to distraction, my mind is difficult to handle.

I love E.B. White; his soul passes through me at times. “Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about nineteen.’

White wrote that he would feel a lot more optimistic about a bright future for humanity if we spent less time proving we can outwit nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. I taste her sweetness here on the farm with Maria, both of us do, every day.

Like White, I wake up in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and enjoy the world. This makes it very difficult to plan my days.

I do see and feel that I drifted too far from the magic I feel at living this life with Maria, my dogs, and the people around me. I’m changing, and so is the blog. It feels right. It feels good.

I loved and saved this letter I got from Marjorie the other day, one of the messages that alerted me to the changes going on without my quite realizing it.

“You drive me crazy,” she said. “When you stopped writing so much about dogs and wrote a lot about politics, I was angry. I don’t care about politics, but I came around when I started quoting your columns to my blockhead husband. Then you stopped writing about politics and started writing about the Amish every day, and I was upset again. I don’t care much about the Amish; they have nothing in common with me, but I got hooked on your friendship with Moise. And now I see that you are not writing about the Amish or politics, but about dogs, donkeys, and old barns. You are very frustrating. You don’t seem ever to stand still or give me a chance to get used to you.”

I thanked Marjorie for her excellent note, and I said I only had one comment to make about it.

I never stopped writing about dogs.

Oh, and neither did E.B. White.