...when my brother was applying to med. school, I went over his application essay...including a sentence that began growing up on a farm,...I commented in the margin are you sure you grew up on a farm and not two and a half acres in the outer suburbs with a father who raised some goats and chickens as a hobby?...he changed it to small farm......in college years was what you might call an eco-hippie...raised money for Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network...recycled before everybody started doing it...spent an awful lot of time getting high in the woods...
Yes it’s good, livin’ on a farm, oh so good, livin’ on a farm...
Jefferson Airplane
...one dream shared by just about every eco hippie is of one day having a farm...living and working directly with the earth...in tune with the natural order...flowing with the eternal cycles of life and death...just like agrarian people have for thousands of years...
...as it turned out, I was the one exception to that...in my crowd, at least...then, I was also the only one who’d ever had to shovel shit out of a barn...
...as it turned out, I was the one exception to that...in my crowd, at least...then, I was also the only one who’d ever had to shovel shit out of a barn...
...mom was never really into the farm thing, either...nowadays, the pasture gets mowed once or twice a year, and my brother keeps up the garden, but the animals are gone...though not without a bit of trouble...out of twelve chickens, it turned out there were only four hens...and finding homes for eight roosters ain’t, as it turns out, easy...after ads offering them for free at local feed stores went unanswered, I suggested leaving the henhouse door open at night...letting nature take its course...mom didn’t like that idea at all.......outsider art is cool...generally created by people with little education or training in art...like Henry Darger, whose work would have been a lot less interesting if he’d ever read Freud or Jung....alas, it’s kinda difficult to be an outsider artist with a PhD...nonetheless, despite a fancy digital camera and familiarity with the celebrated work of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Annie Leibowitz, Edward Curtis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Earth to Holly, I’m trying to be as outside as possible with this photography thing...and an almost complete lack of technical knowledge helps...like, so far, I’ve figured out that light is everything...but haven't the foggiest idea what to do with that knowledge...
...walking around the old homestead a weekend ago, looking at old things breaking down...memories and all those memories carry with them crumbling to earth...tend to find it depressing...so, started taking pictures...trying to maybe save something...but not happy about how most of them came out...mostly because the light wasn’t right...ending up thinking the ones that came out best were the ones that came out worst...so, messed ‘em up even worse and put ‘em here...I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats
