Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

When I first saw the promos for the new Captain Marvel movie, I was confused. I’ve read Captain Marvel and seen Captain Marvel in movies, and until very recently, I never imagined Captain Marvel as a women (Brie Lawson.)

Nor could I have imagined a woman – Anne Boden –  directing this most macho and ingrained of super heroes.

Disney, of all places, is showing that even evil corporations can sometimes do good, they are radically altering the way we see women in our culture. Women no longer exist in film primarily to be bedded and rescued.

Maria, not a great fan of superhero movies, wants to come and see this movie, she also sniffs a kind of history being made.

I don’t have any illusions that this is going to be a great film, it doesn’t sound like it. But it might be an important film, and it might also be fun, and if so, I want to write about it. This is my history too.

I’ll check in later.

I see that I am changing again, in recent days I have learned a great deal in my meditation about my mind, and how it works for me and against me. Mostly, I have come to see the origins of the fear and anxiety that plague me and so many people.

I am onto something, seeing something more clearly than I have seen it before. I feel sometimes like the Engine that could, I just keep chugging along, I won’t quit.

I see most clearly in meditation lately the way my mind flees the now and turns to the past for regret and shame, and the future for fear and danger. It is only in the present that I find true peace, because it is only in the present that true peace really exists. As the heavy thinkers suggest, the now is eternal, time is a fantasy.

My meditation teacher has counseled me when my mind takes off in distraction, as it so frequently does, to pay attention to my breathing and return to the present. This may seem like a simple idea to many people, but it is a profound idea to me. It is working. I couldn’t have done it even a few years ago, but persistence does pay.

People often think that meditation itself is a cure-all, and it is a safe place instantly, but it also takes work and commitment, and that is the difficult part for some people. Nothing worth doing is easy, other than walking in the woods or rubbing a donkey’s ear.

Weekends offer the greatest opportunity for me to see this revelation and understand it. Distraction and fear are cousins, because no one worried about me, I worried about everyone, including me. Distraction has always haunted my search for peace and grounding.

As we go through the week, we accumulate so much in terms of experience, stress and obligation. As we move through the weekend, we begin to look ahead to the week – appointments, work, repairs and maintenance, issues with friends. Sunday for me is the perfect day to stop and bring myself into the now, the most peaceful place there is for people like me.

All that matters is today. My love, my time with Maria, my pictures, my blog, my dogs, my farm, my books. This afternoon, we are going to see  Captain Marvel and I want to play close attention to the  difference between a female superhero and the kind I always saw as a kid, and until lately, an adult. History in the making, Maria wants to come.

That’s all I need to think about today.

I see now that I can soften and organize this ruckus in my head, I’ve been doing it for years. But I am sure many of you know that is work, and when you do it, the reward can be great.

Weekends are the perfect time for me to focus on the present, as I have done with fear itself, and gain some measure of control over my mind, and thus some measure of control over my fear, anger and resentment.

I know  this can work, I know many people who have succeeded. I understand most people quit, it is not for everybody.

When my mind moves away from me, I am learning focus on my breath or my body. I bring myself back, over and over a gain.

Even in these past few days I’ve seen a change. To some extent, I can train my mind to do this, because I am my mind, and my mind is me. I just have to make sure we each know one another.

The idea of the Eternal Now is central to me and this work. We are thus free to live in the present.

This is a spiritual idea, it suggest that time is an illusion a man-created tool for measuring change in life and work and farming. The question about time is whether change comes from outside or inside of us. A challenging idea to get my head around.

Paul Tillich, the great philosopher and contemplative,  wrote that the Eternal Now beings by understanding that everything in our world must come to an end. We shall all come to and end.

There is, he says, no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. I In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it.

“If we were totally within time,” wrote Tillich in his famous essay, Eternal Now, “we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. But as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time.”

This our idea of time is an illusion. The world beyond us doesn’t change. We do, constantly, and from within. If I were not changing, I wouldn’t be writing this.

This work on weekends is important, because I will see Sunday differently. I already do.

It’s not about fretting over my dental work tomorrow morning,  keeping up with messages, planning for my radio show, or my laser eye surgery in the coming week, it is about today, writing, reading, going to see a movie with Maria, perhaps writing about it tonight.

I feel nothing but love and peace for today, my dogs on this windy, stormy day, have joined with me in the Eternal Now, they are sprawled in a circle around me, a chorus of snoring and wheezing and sighing.

My mind has opened up to meditation. I am ready. I’ve done it for a long time, but I am just beginning to see things that I could not see before. And, as always, I will be happy to share.

Red Running, In The Spring, 2017, Bedlam Farm

Some years ago, the corporate vampires and slugs who took over commercial and cable broadcasting discovered that fear and hatred and anger are much more profitable thank compassion and truth and honesty.

The political consultants figured out the same thing – exploiting fear and promoting age is a powerful political tool, and works more often than not. The mix of hatred-spouting cultures, screens and politics, has turned out to be toxic beyond anyone’s imagination.

Love and empathy just don’t draw people in the same way, perhaps because they are not about fear and perceived danger. The love and compassion peddlers don’t get rich, they are pushed to the margins of society, they don’t get to sit on those TV panels.

This ethos has infected our legislative and political system, the Internet, and the culture of social media,  even personal relationships and friendships. Digital communications are so often a corrosive hatefest.  The idea of hating the other is now a mainstream idea.

On this blog early on, I swore to a willingness to disagree with and listen to people whose opinions differ from my own. I disagree with people all the time, and quite openly, and many people hate me for me.

But I do not ever hate people for seeing the world differently than I do, I learn much from them. We all believe we are speaking from a place of righteousness, we are all doing the best we can.

To me, the very of refusing to read the thoughts of somebody because they disagree is a betrayal of the very idea of democracy, which is still, for me, the best form of government that I know of. I am seeing that many people disagree even with that.

When the 2016 election was over, there were about a dozen quite open supporters of President Trump in the creative group I ran and posting on my blog.

I am very proud of the fact that 10 of those people are still on the group, still posting, still reading my blog.  I sometimes make them uneasy, but I have never insulted them or driven them away.

They know, of course, where my political instincts tend to drift, but I also know that the new politics has put a light on many people left behind and abandoned by our political system for decades – they live all around me – and our world is not as black and white as the news would have it.

The problem I have is not with people who disagree with me, but rather people who can’t accept  who I am, or how I write, or my willingness to challenge people who violate my boundaries, erode my dignity or undermine my search for identity.

I stand with New York Times Columnist David Brooks, who wrote recently that what we need is not to disagree less but to disagree better.

“And that starts when you turn away the rhetorical dope peddlers – the powerful people on your own side,” he wrote, “who are profiting from the culture of contempt. Remember, when you find yourself hating something, someone is making money or winning elections or getting more famous and powerful…you are being used.” Fox News And MSNBC will earn billions of dollars this year, mostly by spreading fear and contempt.

There are plenty of suckers in the world.

This work to reject intolerance continues with the idea that you don’t run from people you disagree with, or who disagree with you. Those are the ones you need to talk to.

A week ago I wrote about my confusion about being a grandfather and my reluctance to step into the role seeing my granddaughter as a transformation of my life.  I like my life. It’s a complicated issue for me.

For others, it is very simple.

A woman was quick to scold me online for being ungrateful and whining. Her family (and grandchild) suffered from awful health problems, which she detailed, and she said I should be grateful for what I had. Her tone was contemptuous, I’m sure she has known real pain and suffering.

I wrote back that this was inappropriate and disturbing to me, I was sorry for her troubles, but they would not and should not shape my own relationship with my daughter or grandchild.

It was not appropriate, I said, for her to inject her grandchild’s troubles into my life, they had no bearing on my granddaughter. She was passing her pain onto me, and I was declining to accept it. That is what a boundary is.

When she left, I lost the chance to hear from a loving grandmother struggling to cope with so much pain and trouble, and she lost a chance to learn how take those problems where they belonged, which was not in a Facebook post to a stranger.

There is nothing to be  gained by hating each other.

But she was offended, and stormed off in a huff, as often happens with people who are used to giving opinions freely, but are not able to bear them. Quite often, I am accused of being a digital bully, of being cruel and ferocious, a “thug” as one person suggested, to people who are just trying to help me.

I hope these people never meet a real bully or a thug.

She was not interested I what I had to say. I never told this woman to go away or tried to drive her off of my blog.  She was quite welcome to stay, even though she didn’t like what I said, and I didn’t like what she said

But because I dared to disagree with her and challenge her,  she was outraged and had to run away, or storm away. She could not possibly stay and read my writing any longer.

There it is, really.

I disagree with people all the time, and they disagree with me all the time, every day, in many different forms, in paper and online, on Facebook and Twitter texts. Disagreement is healthy, it is democratic, it is human. I can’t imagine reading anyone’s blog every day if I never disagreed with it. What’s the point of that? I can enable myself.

I see many writers, especially online, who live only for the sappy and dependable feedback of social media. Praise is cheaply offered and easily gained. Dialogue is something else.

Hatred for the other is a sickness now, it has spread virally all over the country, it starts in one place and then moves on to other places.  There is no better and quicker vehicle for spreading hatred than TV screens and the Internet.

If you hate and fear a refugee, you will soon enough figure out how to hate  a Jew, or an African-American, or a Mexican. People have always needed people to hate, it makes their small lives bigger, and our world smaller.

I celebrate a world with disagreement. I just want to make sure I disagree better.

It isn’t often that I see Fate resting for too long, and since she is not allowed on the furniture, I rarely see her resting on my favorite living room chair, the one I meditate on.

So I was curious to see her so comfortably at rest, even leaning against the pillow, her long and lanky legs stretched out before her. Fate sleeps downstairs at night, not with us as Red and Bud do.

Like my border collie Rose, she likes to be near the door in case there is any sudden work to do out in the pasture. This portrait of her was special, Fate has the explosive energy of her breed, and it takes a long hard day to get her to take it easy.