Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

While I was in Brooklyn visiting my daughter and granddaughter, we went each morning to a dog play and exercise community in Fort Greene Park, which opens up a huge stretch of parkland to off-leash dogs every morning.

This was a testament to the adaptability of dogs  and the love and responsibility of some dog lovers. There were at least a hundred people there with dogs,  and it was clear that the dogs had adapted to their life in the city.

When I lived in New York City (I lived there at three different times in my life) the notion of dogs in the city was controversial and widely frowned upon.

People didn’t like dog poop on the sidewalks – there was a lot, nobody picked it up then – and many people thought it cruel to have dogs in confined urban spaces. People who walked dogs and didn’t clean up were fined heavily when caught, and very few apartment houses accepted dogs in all.

In Emma’s neighborhood three different new condo and apartment buildings actually have dog play areas build onto the basement, the roof, or on lower floors. Most apartments happily accept dogs.

The old resistance to dogs have changed. Dog owners are a powerful political force in the city, and few politicians will mess with them.

There are dog poop receptacles everywhere and many city parks have off-leash running times. Emma’s dog Sandy had some regular pals she hooked right up with and the dogs took off and roamed widely and freely through the dog areas of the park, which are huge.

The dogs were surprisingly well-behaved, they all came when called, treated one another respectfully. Emma said there are occasionally some yahoos with untrained or aggressive dogs, they are quickly shooed away by the vigilant and surprisingly responsible dog owners.

I know there are many dangerous and poorly trained dogs (and people) in the city, hundreds of children, mostly in poorer neighborhoods, undergo facial reconstruction and surgery due to dog bites. In the upper class sections of the city, that seems  rare.

Class and money seem to permeate every aspect of American life.

Dogs have been living with people for more than 14,000 years if you follow the cave drawings, they are the most adaptable of all animal species, they have figured out how to live with people, and they are smart enough to know what they need to do to survive in a world where many species are being wiped out or are dying from climate change.

Sandy gets to run with her pals once or twice every day, in all kinds of weather. I was happy to see how healthy and content and well trained the dogs in the park were on the two mornings I saw them.

Dogs are moving ever more steadily and deeply into American lives.

A friend of mine told me yesterday that he hoped to move to Florida next winter, he doesn’t like the cold weather here and he wants to take a walk every morning where it’s warm. He asked me if I ever thought of retiring, I said no, I’ve never been busier, happier, or more engaged with the world.

I wish him well. That’s not for me. I would wither and fade down there. (I wouldn’t mind a couple of weeks in February.)

Today, a step towards the next chapter here on the farm, a 10 a.m. meeting with a highly regarded podcast specialist named Michael Sheldon, we’re doing a video conference with me, Maria, Chris Archibee of Mannix Marketing and Sheldon.

We’re seeking information on what equipment we will need,  how much it will cost, what the best podcast platform is and whether we can set up the podcast to allow telephone calls.

My “Talking to Animals” broadcast, which I love, had awakened me to the possibilities of doing weekly podcast from Bedlam Farm with Maria. I see with modern technology broadcasts can emanate from anywhere and be heard everywhere.

The idea would be to discuss the week on the farm, the dogs and other animals, our ideas about creativity, Maria’s art and my writing and photography.

We also want to talk about our lives and our own relationship, and how we manage our lives together. I’m thinking the broadcast would be about 20 minutes long, we’d love to take a call or two and I would also talk about the dogs and our ideas about animals.

The podcast would work on a voluntary donation model, it would be free to anyone who wanted to listen, if they wished to make a donation or contribution, that would be fine. There will be some costs involved – hosting fees, some new equipment.

If this can be even a modest revenue stream, that’s another good reason to do it.

Mannix would help us install the podcast on our blogs, and also help maintain it.

Today we’ll gather the information we need, and decide if and when we want to do this. I’ve been plotting this for some time.

I am excited about doing this together, Maria’s appearances on the radio show have made it abundantly clear she has a gift for this, and we work very well together.

Yes, it’s snowing here. Bingo at the Mansion tonight.

(Maria sitting at the Vernal Equinox bonfire at the farm last night, celebrating the coming of Spring.)

It’s odd for me to be teaching a meditation class, I always sought teachers when it came to meditating, I have never thought of myself as one. Yet I’ve been meditating on and off for 20 years, and you don’t really need a permit or degree. I’ve learned a lot, I was just self-absorbed to see it.

I’m delighted to have a chance to pass along to the Mansion residents some of the things along that I have learned. Meditation has shaped and enriched my life and understanding of myself.

I teach things like how to breathe, and when to let go, and how not to judge myself, and how to come back to a peaceful place when my mind crosses the border and runs around like baby rabbit being chased by a cat.

Several of my meditation teachers have told me that we all have a peaceful place, and that the beauty of meditation is that we can find it if we look and listen. We don’t have to go anywhere.

I have found this to be true.

I told my first meditation students, Mansion residents much older than I am, that I know they need a peaceful place, their lives are full of challenge and discomfort and illness and fear.

We all have a safe and peaceful place inside of us, we really don’t have to search far and wide for it. I close my eyes, think of my breath. In my mind I am on elevator, going down and down.

I feel that every floor on the way down opens to a failure, a hurt, a fear, a mistake, a resentment in my life. No wonder it took so long. I didn’t want to stop at any of them.

The elevator takes a long time, I pass many different kinds of sounds and smells. My eyes are closed, I am listening.

After awhile, the doors open, and I open my eyes, and I am deep inside of myself, a quiet place full of echoes and sweet sounds – rustling leaves, gardens, running stream, wolves howling, I can even hear the flowers growing and unfurling.

In my peaceful place – I have to be alone – there is no anger, no fear, no past, no future – just now, just the moment, just the present. I float in this place, like a kid in a stream lying on his back. The kid is me.

The peaceful place is my secret, my respite, my sanctuary. It gives me strength and soothes me, and then when I am ready, I get back in the elevator and rise up and up and into the world.

And when I step out, I am calm, I am at peace.

That, I said to my students, was my meditation today. I found my peaceful place.  And then, I saw that their eyes were all closed and it was still.

Thank you for teaching us, said Sylvie. My heart swelled with pride.

I love my country, but I always have understood it to be arrogant and insular. Other countries can ban murderous military weapons in a couple of days if they think it will save some lives, we can’t even talk about it. Other countries understand our joint obligation to save the world, we blew off science once it seemed it would reduce corporate profits.

Whenever I go to visit Brooklyn, I am amazed at this old American story. Growth can never be controlled, only enabled. Profit and loss comes before any other value, God, the Earth, our common civic system. Socialism is an unspeakable evil even as we steadily tumble from our position as the best and most respected country on the top of the world.

If the economy is good, we are good. That is all that really matters, In Brooklyn, this brutal and almost frightening thing is happening, and there is very little fuss being made of it. The character and scope of the place is being overwhelmed by giant and condo and office towers, some more than 70 stories high.

Tens of thousands of people are being driven from their homes and apartments by rising rents and properties being knocked down for more condos. Visiting the city, walking around, I thought wow, good riddance to Amazon. Do we really need any more of this.

Everywhere I went and looked there were cranes, blocked off streets, massive traffic jams, monstrous crates rising to the sky, the deafening sound of tractors and jack hammers.

My heart sank, the ground shook, the sandwiches in the gleaming new deli cost $18, day care for two-year olds in the best schools cost nearly $40,000 a year. The schools get out at 3 p.m. After day care until 5 and 6, which is when most people there are still working, is extra.

Is there any such thing any longer as enough money? Does one family – the Waltons –  really need to own 40 per cent of the country’s wealth?  Can they even spend all that money, which would send every young student in the country to college for free.

How many skyscrapers are enough in a place that was once two or three stories high and full of people and shops, now full of condos and malls?

Karl Marx, someone I rarely have occasion to quote, wrote that the thing about capitalism is that the greedy people never fill their bellies, are never rich enough. And if they aren’t contained and knocked down once in a while, they will devour themselves and us.

I stood on a corner in Brooklyn as the sun rose over the mushrooming towers. Wow, I thought, this is a kind of brutality on a scale that is unimaginable to me.

And we hate socialism, it is a taboo and heresy because it can’t possibly work for people?

For me, it’s not about politics. They really are all the same. It’s about money, just like my first boss, Robert Ebener told me on my first day as a reporter: kid, he said, you’ll learn soon enough that there is really only one story in the world, and you will cover it again and again: the rich always screw the poor.

That’s what I see in Brooklyn. The greedy people just get greedier and hungrier, and as I walked the streets there, I thought, wow, they are devouring themselves, and us.

Robin, my granddaughter, is into fun. She has a sense of humor, and can laugh a bit at herself (not too much). She has the devil in her eyes sometimes, and is quick to laugh. She tends not to like being told what to do. She is always up for some trouble.