Somewhere into my third year of raising sheep the ewes developed a minor epidemic evolving from my own carelessness. Many of our herd (which grew from 5 to 16 over the first three years) had a nail growth problem that was on the verge of turning into infection. This was my barn epidemic! I had let slide setting up the appointment for cutting back their hooves and when the first 2 of 16 began to limp I panicked. Bad enough were the little surprises that you learned about from hands-on training, but as this was my own error it was almost more than I could bear. I was surely always the student perfectionist, so what happened? Owning up to the fault here was not going to take care of the problem and taking care of the problem in an off season was not going to be a piece of cake.
Arranging for hoof trimming in January involved an endless stream of answering machine messages which yielded nothing positive over the next 24 hours. The snow storm did not help either. Of course, no hoof trimmer/sheep shearer was ever home during the day to take their messages off answering machines, and anyone would have to wait to hear back from them at least until they got home from their day job. That was enough to just about do me in. By 8 p.m. that night I found myself shaking. Boy oh boy, Look what I did! If I could not shear wool and cut hooves so be it, but I should have gotten the expert on time. Being a medical typist, I applied everything I knew about foot ailments to my barn ladies - sepsis, gangrene, amputation.
In desperation I bought out the feed store's supply of something called Copper Blue which would disinfect the sheep hooves and prevent infection. I did the proper dipping process on each of the 4 hooves for 16 sheep. Hey, that was okay! After all, I made this crisis myself, so whatever it took to correct it would be the lesson I had coming to me! My back hurt a little but no sheep in my barn was going to be infected by the end of the day today and that was all that counted. It would be a good thing in the words of Martha Stewart. After several more sessions of dipping into Copper Blue the day that followed just to be sure and all the ewes feet were now blue from the medicine, my last few phone messages were finally returned. It was time to come to grips with the fact that no one would come up my mountain by the private road full of ruts and ice to trim hooves for at least another month or two. This chore of trimming and shearing was to be performed in March, April and May or not at all. Crying ensued.
A friend of mine who raised horses nearby had a farrier who came to trim hooves. I asked her if she thought he could trim the hooves of ewes. She said she didn't see why not, and as he had an appointment for her horses that afternoon, she then brought him up to my farm. He agreed to try, (telling me he had not done this before on sheep … oh joy!) but as I prayed sincerely for help, I found that my friend's farrier must have been the genius of his class. I kept telling him this over and over, whether or not he appreciated hearing it, and he actually did extremely well. One by one I let each hoof-trimmed ewe out of the barn pen through the lower half of the dutch door, and scampering each one bounced into the pasture, happy as a lamb. I was grateful and the guilt was lifting .The job was a challenge because it was me who had to wrestle the sheep into place and then lift each hoof, but to be honest I was just so delighted at the outcome that I kept grabbing those hooves. I showed no physical evidence of how I was going to feel tonight in a very hot shower with Ben Gay as my friend to follow. Soon we would be done and the emergency would be over! It was all I cared about and all I wanted to know.
The problem came with the last ewe, lest the job be accomplished too smoothly to be believed. The feistiest ewe of all became my foe. I left her for last because she ran the fastest and I knew I would need extra time for her. Hey look - more lessons to learn straight ahead!
Round and round in a circle the last ewe trotted. Hard as I tried, I could not grab the wool on her back and stop her in her tracks like I had with the others. Each time I made my best grab, she would pull me with her for a few steps and then brake away. My attitude was "I'm going to get you. Why don't you just give up?" Her attitude was "Let him cut your hooves lady! You're not going to stop me, so you give it up!"
With the mind of a great engineer I devised what I thought was the winning stance that could not fail. I jumped in front of her path as she made her next orbit around the pen. With the grace of a baseball player, I positioned myself in her path, legs just a little apart and to hold my balance. I leaned forward to cut her thrust as she ran toward me. The ewe promptly put her head down, went through my legs, picked me up on her back, and in an instant I was riding her backward in her circle of choice around the periphery of the pen. It was just her and me and the big circle. Ride'em shepherdess!
My two partners in crime, the farrier and my friend, would have stopped the animal and taken me off if only they could have contained their laughter. Since laughter however was not going to be contained that day, we continued our orbit of the pen for 6 more laps.
My friend said "We're not really laughing at you!" followed by the farrier who added "Yes we are!" and no help came from either of them for yet another 2 laps after that. I finally made it off the ewe's back, I just don’t remember how. She was secured against a feeding stall and I don’t remember that either, but her hooves were cut and the job was finished. I know I was conscious, I just don’t remember much after my try out for the next production of Annie Oakley.
For those of you out there who raise sheep, remember how important it is to perform timely herd maintenance and to make your appointments early. If you are new to raising sheep, you might want to keep a stash of oatmeal raisin cookies in a tight lid tin box at the barn. If ever an unexpected crisis occurs in your barn similar to the one described above, the cookies will raise your blood sugar afterward. You could also share them with your friends who come to help you in emergencies or in a pinch the sheep can enjoy them with you too. Other alternatives to consider are having a ski lift installed or the purchase of a helicopter (not all that great in bad weather) if your hilltop farm, like ours, is located straight up the side of a mountain. Face it, your shearer should not have to travel a gravel road covered in ice to get to you in January. Pay attention to these details and remember, a little thought beforehand, well - it's just a good thing!
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Song of the Red Winged Black Bird
If I still remember the sites of Davenport,
The bouquets of wildflowers from the hills,
Or the smell of fresh cut hay and the song of the red winged black bird,
Will Davenport promise to remember me?
Will the fog in the valley remember when I gazed upon it lovingly from the hill,
Or the church where I worshiped still pray in my behalf,
Or the nearby creek whisper my name at night as it washes away another woman's tears?
If I reach back into my wandering heart for memories of those days,
Will the spirits of the saints who walked its fields and built its homes
Open their arms to me again to welcome my lingering soul
While I seek the stories of my past?
Will the fireflies flicker as bright for me by summer,
Or the moon rising behind the trees reflect upon the pond again for me,
Or the mountains to the south display their outlined peaks in my sight by winter?
If I remember the ease of laughter and the beauty of its children,
The rolling delicacy of its farms and the inspiration gained from its simplicity
Will it remember that I will always care, even after I have left?
Alice Elizabeth Cagle-Pisano, August 19, 2010
The bouquets of wildflowers from the hills,
Or the smell of fresh cut hay and the song of the red winged black bird,
Will Davenport promise to remember me?
Will the fog in the valley remember when I gazed upon it lovingly from the hill,
Or the church where I worshiped still pray in my behalf,
Or the nearby creek whisper my name at night as it washes away another woman's tears?
If I reach back into my wandering heart for memories of those days,
Will the spirits of the saints who walked its fields and built its homes
Open their arms to me again to welcome my lingering soul
While I seek the stories of my past?
Will the fireflies flicker as bright for me by summer,
Or the moon rising behind the trees reflect upon the pond again for me,
Or the mountains to the south display their outlined peaks in my sight by winter?
If I remember the ease of laughter and the beauty of its children,
The rolling delicacy of its farms and the inspiration gained from its simplicity
Will it remember that I will always care, even after I have left?
Alice Elizabeth Cagle-Pisano, August 19, 2010
No More Shall I Ask / Chasing Mayberry
My wish list starts with ………
1) A happy life in Labrador's Goose Bay.
2) Really good company for visits; people who like to write and can tell good stories.
3) Different commitments than the type people make before age 45. (Need to gracefully smile but simply run away from more marriages, more financial responsibilities and career pressures, (which would be the new for me.)
4) A used sturdy car - very gas efficient, with almost no mileage.
5) Relative calm for thinking and creating.
6) Northern Lights for 200+ nights a year. (Labrador tour book claims this to be true.)
7) One tummy tuck; one chin shaping.
8) Lots of writing equipment - new computer for home, laptop for the road, and a fine desk (maybe something French?) for new house in Goose Bay.
9) One really pretty pair of gold earrings, not necessarily new.
10) Good warm and dry winter boots for the first time in life.
11) Mittens of Lopi yarn from Iceland or angora fiber (the kind that is "too soft" when brushed against the cheek.)
12) Good French lessons by native born speaker (Labrador is English but it sits on top of Quebec Province where life is French.)
Years ago I realized the rhythm of the city had begun to oxidize me and I was turning green from pollution and noise. In an effort to experience the best of 2 worlds (a country-sort of city,) I moved from New York City to Larchmont and then White Plains but even the rhythm of small cities had become too much for my sensitivities. Walking past a bus stop was all I needed to be convinced, especially as the bus was pulling away. I do not need to be "setting and rocking" to be content, although I will admit I was chasing Mayberry when I first came to upstate NY and Davenport in search of peace. I wanted the memories of a simpler time, a more respectful time (something like Queens in the 1950s.) I know I will never need skyscrapers at dusk and highways going off into the horizon again. It was exciting to be part of it when I was 17 but that's really done. What I do want is the ability to hear myself think and do my own thing, and I know I cannot roll this along with mega-activity outside my front door.
Now, on the other hand, if there was a small inlet harbor I was watching from a little shore cottage, where fishing boats went out with today's dreams and came in with today's catch… well that would be just fine. There is nothing more I would like than gazing upon the choppy water and sable skies of some little fog covered hamlet anywhere along a Canadian waterway; gentle rolling tides and little "dinner napkins" that would float upon the surface of the currents, (sail boats of the tiniest variety like the Thistle.) This I could do; in fact I could build a life around such a picture. I could write like crazy to make sure I had covered every subject of global importance during this long anticipated retirement. I could knit and sew just to steal a few hours away from the writing, and I could wake and sleep to the rolling harbor activity and the sound of a ship clock clanging at quarter hour intervals. I might try my hand at drawing a scene of lobster cages flung onto the pier waiting to be stacked neatly for tomorrow's catch. I saw this in St. Catherine's, Nova Scotia. If that were my last vision in the life we all know, I would be proud that I had made it there in time.
The varying shades of purple, pink and yellow lupines in a nearby field surrounded by lots of green growth would be my next favorite site, all very wild, a tribute to life for the intricate blossoms alone, knowing that because it is wild the reblooming will continue year after year and generation after generation. To gaze without schedule at this quality of beauty is my idea of the most perfect rest for eyes, body and brain. The older I get the more disdain I exhibit for the tame, and the more I appreciate the wild. In fact, I find myself suspicious of the tame as if it was disguising a motive of its own like "Look at me! Look at me!" with just the right level of self-centeredness. Within the same organism, for tameness to be achieved, often the wild qualities are flushed out to extinction. When the wildness is taken away, so goes the truest survival qualities. This was the stuff that keet one running without losing your breath, or in plant terms, blooming in beautiful color and healthy every season without fail. What is left behind is an element no more supportive of life than the tenacity of shortbread or tissue paper, though pretty to look at temporarily.
To truly appreciate the wild you must be willing to come and go season after season, like wildness itself, and become stronger and more resolute as you do it; gratefully the stronger and more resolute would be the meaningful accomplishments whereas the coming and the going would be our elective choice. Wildness rests in the days of the winter snow and thrives through the summers of renewal. In the winter, the wildflower works on blending colors of purples and peacock never before seen within the seed, for the beauty it contributes in the season ahead. No one has tamed the color cycle in the wild and no one ever will. You can never, never expect the delicacy of the long stemmed hot house rose to appear in the forest with the wildflower. The glamour would not fit. Who would expect it to be there, and who would care if it was? In the wild you get to appreciate the overall aura of beauty in a field of lupines as they all contribute to your view of the world around you. A hot house rose you buy in the market for two bucks when you need a birthday gift.
When I get to Goose Bay, I will want to be on my own, not to hermit my way into the life that follows retirement day, but just in that I will not want the distractions of another to persist. I will need to savor the colors, flavors, scents, temperatures, textures without the common responsibilities one lavishes on a mate or extends to a companion. I find those relationships for me become totally absorbing, and rightfully so as they should be, but I will want to be available to things other than lavishness and extensions at that point, and I will not have that chance if another is by my side or someone is walking along a common path. I will want to know the Northern Lights on the nights they shine over Labrador, and feel the chill air that accompanies this. I will want the Northern Lights to feel my presence as I promise to be outside watching them every night that they appear, while I grip mugs of hot chocolate with two hands in mittens and wear boots that don’t let melted snow creep between the sole and lining.
I will want to meet the young children who still study at the dinner table in the evening before bed, old women who feel they must still tat doilies and darn socks, the old smiling vicar at the chapel who labors over Sunday sermons, grandfathers who make their way home after rounds through the village collecting the stories of local news, the dad who continues to work in the ball bearing factory without a fuss, for the future of his family and the education of his offspring, even though he has a degree in History. I hear these sacred patterns are still alive there and I want to watch and remember my own days in some of those roles. I need to believe these things have not disappeared from the earth, never again to be experienced or recognized. I pray it waits for me to catch up to it; I have so much philosophy to study, wilderness to witness, simplicity to appreciate, the smell of a little harbor and its tides, and the smell of homemade coffee cake with cinnamon, raisins and almonds. The 1950s has become the resolute wildflower with proven philosophies of grit strength that I can still recall and recite. The new century is perhaps the hot house rose. I need to record the things I long to see again, so the experience can be shared with those who come later. The honesty of the worthy shades of purples and gentle hues of peacock must not be forgotten, nor the time when people trusted each other, helped each other, but still basically depended upon themselves for the things they sought to achieve with the encouragement of their neighbors and friends. I think these lessons of lifestyle represented the only true path to accomplishment. They endured and were methods as sure footed as the blooming lupine. If people will read these recollections, (another dying skill,) I will be happy to tell them about what I can recall and what I see still works, (and I will do this often.)
There are, of course, the skills of tatting and darning that are waiting for me to learn from the ladies of the village, if they will have me as a student/neighbor, before the fishing boats get home. I might think of those French angoras rabbits again, and finally learn to card and spin sheep wool. My tangibles will balance out my intangibles one choice at a time. I might more seriously contemplate the purchase of a real loom, and a few silky mohair goats. I already know sheep, maybe just two Merino would not be too much work. This will be no tourist call, jumping through 6 provinces in 4 days with tent and canteen in tow. Every morning I will pray for snow but every afternoon I will pray for the lights in the sky that night. No more will I want when these things are in place, still chasing Mayberry and the wisdom of a simpler time.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle, August 10, 2010
1) A happy life in Labrador's Goose Bay.
2) Really good company for visits; people who like to write and can tell good stories.
3) Different commitments than the type people make before age 45. (Need to gracefully smile but simply run away from more marriages, more financial responsibilities and career pressures, (which would be the new for me.)
4) A used sturdy car - very gas efficient, with almost no mileage.
5) Relative calm for thinking and creating.
6) Northern Lights for 200+ nights a year. (Labrador tour book claims this to be true.)
7) One tummy tuck; one chin shaping.
8) Lots of writing equipment - new computer for home, laptop for the road, and a fine desk (maybe something French?) for new house in Goose Bay.
9) One really pretty pair of gold earrings, not necessarily new.
10) Good warm and dry winter boots for the first time in life.
11) Mittens of Lopi yarn from Iceland or angora fiber (the kind that is "too soft" when brushed against the cheek.)
12) Good French lessons by native born speaker (Labrador is English but it sits on top of Quebec Province where life is French.)
Years ago I realized the rhythm of the city had begun to oxidize me and I was turning green from pollution and noise. In an effort to experience the best of 2 worlds (a country-sort of city,) I moved from New York City to Larchmont and then White Plains but even the rhythm of small cities had become too much for my sensitivities. Walking past a bus stop was all I needed to be convinced, especially as the bus was pulling away. I do not need to be "setting and rocking" to be content, although I will admit I was chasing Mayberry when I first came to upstate NY and Davenport in search of peace. I wanted the memories of a simpler time, a more respectful time (something like Queens in the 1950s.) I know I will never need skyscrapers at dusk and highways going off into the horizon again. It was exciting to be part of it when I was 17 but that's really done. What I do want is the ability to hear myself think and do my own thing, and I know I cannot roll this along with mega-activity outside my front door.
Now, on the other hand, if there was a small inlet harbor I was watching from a little shore cottage, where fishing boats went out with today's dreams and came in with today's catch… well that would be just fine. There is nothing more I would like than gazing upon the choppy water and sable skies of some little fog covered hamlet anywhere along a Canadian waterway; gentle rolling tides and little "dinner napkins" that would float upon the surface of the currents, (sail boats of the tiniest variety like the Thistle.) This I could do; in fact I could build a life around such a picture. I could write like crazy to make sure I had covered every subject of global importance during this long anticipated retirement. I could knit and sew just to steal a few hours away from the writing, and I could wake and sleep to the rolling harbor activity and the sound of a ship clock clanging at quarter hour intervals. I might try my hand at drawing a scene of lobster cages flung onto the pier waiting to be stacked neatly for tomorrow's catch. I saw this in St. Catherine's, Nova Scotia. If that were my last vision in the life we all know, I would be proud that I had made it there in time.
The varying shades of purple, pink and yellow lupines in a nearby field surrounded by lots of green growth would be my next favorite site, all very wild, a tribute to life for the intricate blossoms alone, knowing that because it is wild the reblooming will continue year after year and generation after generation. To gaze without schedule at this quality of beauty is my idea of the most perfect rest for eyes, body and brain. The older I get the more disdain I exhibit for the tame, and the more I appreciate the wild. In fact, I find myself suspicious of the tame as if it was disguising a motive of its own like "Look at me! Look at me!" with just the right level of self-centeredness. Within the same organism, for tameness to be achieved, often the wild qualities are flushed out to extinction. When the wildness is taken away, so goes the truest survival qualities. This was the stuff that keet one running without losing your breath, or in plant terms, blooming in beautiful color and healthy every season without fail. What is left behind is an element no more supportive of life than the tenacity of shortbread or tissue paper, though pretty to look at temporarily.
To truly appreciate the wild you must be willing to come and go season after season, like wildness itself, and become stronger and more resolute as you do it; gratefully the stronger and more resolute would be the meaningful accomplishments whereas the coming and the going would be our elective choice. Wildness rests in the days of the winter snow and thrives through the summers of renewal. In the winter, the wildflower works on blending colors of purples and peacock never before seen within the seed, for the beauty it contributes in the season ahead. No one has tamed the color cycle in the wild and no one ever will. You can never, never expect the delicacy of the long stemmed hot house rose to appear in the forest with the wildflower. The glamour would not fit. Who would expect it to be there, and who would care if it was? In the wild you get to appreciate the overall aura of beauty in a field of lupines as they all contribute to your view of the world around you. A hot house rose you buy in the market for two bucks when you need a birthday gift.
When I get to Goose Bay, I will want to be on my own, not to hermit my way into the life that follows retirement day, but just in that I will not want the distractions of another to persist. I will need to savor the colors, flavors, scents, temperatures, textures without the common responsibilities one lavishes on a mate or extends to a companion. I find those relationships for me become totally absorbing, and rightfully so as they should be, but I will want to be available to things other than lavishness and extensions at that point, and I will not have that chance if another is by my side or someone is walking along a common path. I will want to know the Northern Lights on the nights they shine over Labrador, and feel the chill air that accompanies this. I will want the Northern Lights to feel my presence as I promise to be outside watching them every night that they appear, while I grip mugs of hot chocolate with two hands in mittens and wear boots that don’t let melted snow creep between the sole and lining.
I will want to meet the young children who still study at the dinner table in the evening before bed, old women who feel they must still tat doilies and darn socks, the old smiling vicar at the chapel who labors over Sunday sermons, grandfathers who make their way home after rounds through the village collecting the stories of local news, the dad who continues to work in the ball bearing factory without a fuss, for the future of his family and the education of his offspring, even though he has a degree in History. I hear these sacred patterns are still alive there and I want to watch and remember my own days in some of those roles. I need to believe these things have not disappeared from the earth, never again to be experienced or recognized. I pray it waits for me to catch up to it; I have so much philosophy to study, wilderness to witness, simplicity to appreciate, the smell of a little harbor and its tides, and the smell of homemade coffee cake with cinnamon, raisins and almonds. The 1950s has become the resolute wildflower with proven philosophies of grit strength that I can still recall and recite. The new century is perhaps the hot house rose. I need to record the things I long to see again, so the experience can be shared with those who come later. The honesty of the worthy shades of purples and gentle hues of peacock must not be forgotten, nor the time when people trusted each other, helped each other, but still basically depended upon themselves for the things they sought to achieve with the encouragement of their neighbors and friends. I think these lessons of lifestyle represented the only true path to accomplishment. They endured and were methods as sure footed as the blooming lupine. If people will read these recollections, (another dying skill,) I will be happy to tell them about what I can recall and what I see still works, (and I will do this often.)
There are, of course, the skills of tatting and darning that are waiting for me to learn from the ladies of the village, if they will have me as a student/neighbor, before the fishing boats get home. I might think of those French angoras rabbits again, and finally learn to card and spin sheep wool. My tangibles will balance out my intangibles one choice at a time. I might more seriously contemplate the purchase of a real loom, and a few silky mohair goats. I already know sheep, maybe just two Merino would not be too much work. This will be no tourist call, jumping through 6 provinces in 4 days with tent and canteen in tow. Every morning I will pray for snow but every afternoon I will pray for the lights in the sky that night. No more will I want when these things are in place, still chasing Mayberry and the wisdom of a simpler time.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle, August 10, 2010
Where Did All the Enthusiasm Go?
I found several synonyms today in Webster's New World College Dictionary for the word enthusiasm - intense or eager interest; zeal or fervor. Of course, other words define enthusiasm too, words that might appear more clever or pertinent depending on which scenario they describe, but I found these little words most relative to my story and amusingly, I haven't seen or heard from 'intense or eager interest" in quite a while. I wonder if they have escaped from society and drifted out like dinosaurs into extinction; maybe its just feels that way in a recession/depression economy when it is hard to be enthusiastic about breathing, much less feel turned on to an involved project or homespun preoccupation just because it tickles your fancy to dream about it.
The last time I felt an "intense or eager interest" about a project was in 1997, at the end of the last recession when I, a city woman in a tech job, and my late husband, a retired guy from a local newspaper and former Wall Street junky, decided to start a sheep farm. Not long into the project, we realized that our appetite for information about barn life was insatiable. We read everything there was to read, and learned everything there was to know about ewes and rams over months of lunch breaks and long evenings after dinner. For the purpose of this essay I will call this a thrust of "compelling enthusiasm." Of course I could also add other relevant adjectives to the word, if only for the purpose of qualifying this definition specifically to our situation; overwhelming enthusiasm, totally absorbing enthusiasm, assertive and aggressive enthusiasm, powerful and enabling enthusiasm, disarming enthusiasm, totally annoying enthusiasm, breathless, smothering, exhausting enthusiasm (others available upon request … but you get my drift.) We were enthusiastic to the point of suffocation about working on the project of our first farm, and we exhibited the vigor of frantic North Pole elves at the end of November. To round out the top of our project, we bought farm ducks and some geese for the pond. It was a marvelous experience because we were learning a new and previously alien science, and it made its impact on everything else we did. By anyone's definition, the feelings that had manifested surely qualified as zeal and fervor, especially if it made everything else in life feel better - and it did indeed do that!
We danced in the streets (too old for rap and too young for waltz) as the paychecks went one by one into a savings account for the project of barn building. There was great celebration as we ate hot dogs instead of steaks at the dinner table, so that we could afford our first 5 sheep to fill the fine barn. The fact that it was a mutual project within a marriage actually made the marriage better; I can't recall a single argument in that time period and every chore that had to be done got out of the way faster because we wanted the time to work on our project. Now, that in itself is noteworthy! Instead of getting up each morning annoyed by the alarm clock, we got up with happy anticipation of the late day library visit ahead of us after work to pick up yet another book on the trials that agricultural families conquer on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
I found that most everyone around us did not understand the enthusiasm we displayed for this commitment, especially its intensity and total absorption of our free-time. I was then bold enough to ask some of them when they remembered last experiencing a great enthusiasm for anything important to them? The responses they gave me indicated what I felt was the direct effect of the anemic economy. Their answers included "preparing for the wedding," "getting ready for a baby" and "buying a house." Someone's child felt "buying a dog" was his best recollection. He also said he thought his mom's best enthusiasm was displayed on "grandma's babysitting nights." Almost no one stepped outside of what we used to think were the essentials of life (weddings, babies and houses,) and no one mentioned a special project to me other than these essentials. Since cars are achieved cheaply on lease these days I did not expect to hear the words "car" or "truck" and I didn’t. If I recall correctly, I asked about 15 people separately. It took me two days.
As the project of starting the farm began to unroll including the barn building, then the arrival of sheep, feeding ducks and geese, and the eventual birthing of lambs, we reveled and celebrated every minute. We were the proverbial children in the candy store picking and choosing just the right combination of details to finish the project properly and even my decorating skills came into play - little bells to hang on the wall of the barn, an Amish hex sign stapled to the Dutch door and of course endless fly strips to catch unwanted flying things. These were all positioned with precision and good taste. They were also color coordinated.
Various visitors came to us from near and far. Family descended on us from out of town one weekend after the next, so as not to be excluded from witnessing the fruits of our labor, or the wives in each branch of the family made them go. The elders in the group were kind but the younger adults were dismayed. Many expressed concerned that we would undertake this new lifestyle electively; others just shook their heads in disbelief, but in time almost all of them eventually got the message that our approach to the new place we would call home was wildly enthusiastic and their concern could not shoot that balloon down. We believed in the monster we had created; we thought we would be good at this new life and we gave it everything we had, and happily so. No one was deluded into thinking our project was chosen because it was fashionable in the neighborhood or made us fit in around our newly adopted environment. They all realized we did this project to ourselves and for ourselves, and also by ourselves. We also knew we were participating in what we thought was a dying lifestyle and were doing out part to renew or rebuild its worthiness as an American industry of the countryside; the building of the little family farm, but we were loving every minute of it and could not get enough. We called it "getting closer to the earth versus drying up in the city" and "saving the family farm in the US" even though some of our friends thought we were just oxygen depleted.
I think it is important to note that the great enthusiasm from an adventure like this manifests itself in the same way that a delightful drizzle topping of chocolate fudge smothers a plain dish of vanilla ice cream. If you are "bit by the bug" so to speak, you can't seem to do without it and then when you finally have it, it brightens everything in your life to a heightened degree. However, it is only mildly infectious to the bystander as he stands gapping at your eagerness. A portion of surrounding humanity will always shake their heads in an utter lack of appreciation for your choice of project. They will only perceive the potential exhaustion involved with your joyously adopted responsibility. Almost no one will see it as you do or through your eyes, no matter how long you make them suffer through your wide-eyed animations in explanation.
In today's world, there are some who have not seen what it is like for anyone to pass time in an aura of enthusiasm, especially one that would mimic wild zealousness. It is a state of being that should not be missed in that it is the simple beauty of people carrying out their own little project to the point of completion and management. The fact is that this is only a slightly realized experience for the common man in today's world. These same people might interpret what they are witnessing as if it were a disease process like a type of dementia, a psychic spell from a nearby jealous landowner, or something demonic from a platelet transfusion. Because they might never have seen it before, they really don't understand what they are looking at. Like everything else in life, "if you don't get it, you don't get it."
We live in times where money has been "strange" for about 30 years on and off, up and down, in and out. The intensity of one's preoccupation of choice tends not to be so emotionally embracing under a near-depression economy. As you can recall there was a surefooted interdependence between big projects from the past with the availability of cash, and as there is less cash available these days, you can see that there is less excitement. Not many know how to "do it" without "having it." Where did the days go when if you wanted to do a project badly enough, you simply resolved that it would be done no matter what type economy prevailed or how long it took you to achieve the end result, and you were willing to do it anyway you could - short of sticking up a gas station.
This trend of rationalizing your desires and moving ahead with your dreams seems to be almost dead in America; however, I remember hearing about it prevailing in the Great Depression after the initial shock of poverty turned into normalcy for the living and breathing left behind. I feel that our series of economic recessions have come and gone one right after the other, always with the promise of returning to prosperity in between. We never really made it up for air after one recession before we were thrown down again into the next recession. We are left, therefore, hard pressed to expect any sonic rainbows to appear in our imagination just because we think we would like to do something. No one seems to have reinvented the art of investing all your spirit and cleverness to achieve your fervent dream when we are busy bobbing up and down between this promise and that promise from the government, CNN and the banking industry. As fate has decided to hand us 30 years of economic see-saws, it has not given us the chance to teach ourselves that we must use one method (prosperity with plenty of cash,) or the other method (in poverty using our own wits because that's all there is to work with) for achieving a goal. Alas, most of us have given up manifesting passion for inventing a dream altogether.
We either need longer periods of truly reliable prosperity in this country or longer periods of recession and depression to return to the days of wild adult-quality enthusiasm and ingenuity. Either option will work, as each will foster its own kind of zealousness - one lifestyle will cause us to plan cheaply and the other will bring it about more expensively, but from a standpoint of just reinventing "the phenomenon of great individual planning - equals the enthusiasm that accompanies the goal - equals the achievement of said goal," either option (extreme hunger or extreme lavishness) will return us to the days of "intense and eager interest" as one's brain has the time to adjust to having money or not having money and how to survive in each case. If we could only know for longer than 4 years at a time if we are really meant to live rich or really meant to live poor, we might actually get a handle on how to do what with an idea (if we can remember how ideas are formulated when we get there.) If I remember correctly, I first heard the term "couch potato" in 1992. Man without method is equal to doldrums; the best definition of a couch potato I can give you is someone drowning by inability and incapability and this is what our economy has done to the last two generations. We live on sitcoms and reality TV because we can't even generate dreams. What's the point; we don't know how to carry out what we think about anyway, so why think?
Remember that 25 years is still considered an entire generation worth of time. In other words, Mom and Dad's latest saturation issue may not be exciting to their grown children, not because the kids think their parents are "square," but because the children grew up in times that were so financially challenged that those same children may have never seen saturation before - a mode of excitement defeated from its inception by the ongoing expense of raising a family in times that you cannot depend on. I'm hoping that you conclude almost any project within reason can be pulled off if you can determine how much money is needed to complete it, how much money is coming into your house, how much money really needs to go out in maintenance (food, utilities, rent, mortgage,) and how much more money you can make for your new goal if you need a second job to do it. It also helps to know where to buy what you need cheaply for the new set-up if you are in a down time financially. If times unexpectedly get better, you will always know how to hire someone to have in shipped in instead of picking it up yourself.
Even employing the principal behind, "no pain, no gain," the truth is that it is still the hardest thing in the world to give everything, but usually the only way to get everything. Take heart however, because ingenuity is still willing to be your friend! Our way of giving up everything was to slim expenses down to one telephone, eating hot dogs and homemade cheeseburgers instead of steak and salmon, and then living with only one car. I'm sure that there are many more sympathetic or supportive clichés orbiting around than "no pain, no gain" from the time when money was more readily available in pockets, frequently found in banks that would lend, and cash taken from Aunt Suzie's inheritance now ready to squander. For instance, one could reflect on, "If you want it done right, call a professional!" from days that were easier to roll with. Even so, close your eyes for a moment and I will offer for your consideration (if you can read with your eyes closed) the beauty of investing your own planning, time spent learning how to do it right, and hard earned money to pull off your desires. That used to be the American way, remember? The benefits of this method should be obvious even to the idiot. These days I find it less than obvious even to the celebrated genius. How to finance a project has become a lost art, so people go without their projects financed and without their dreams fulfilled, and at last become dull altogether. "The banks aren't lending!" Their philosophy is when the banks don’t lend, projects don’t get done. They will always be ready to criticize others who find a way to do it in spite of not borrowing money , but will never be ready to promote their own dream even after you have proven that you were able to finance your project a different way. Most of all, people disdain from sharing their inspired dreams with friends these days lest they be labeled as idiots themselves. "Yeah, how is he going to finance that!" is the expected response to the dreamer. The average Joe does not want to think about giving everything to get everything; he wants to talk about when prosperity is next expected to return and describe how big and easily completed the project will be when there is more venture capital available to borrow.
There is still time to transplant the formula for this lack of awareness into the souls of the project-planning ignorant, and in a way that 20+ and 30+ year old adults can clearly appreciate. To make it fun, try telling them to buy generic cream cheese instead of named brands on a weekly basis, and tell them it will save them $250 a year. From that alteration alone they could finance their next wild and crazy project but it would have to cost about $250. If they don't have "surround sound" yet in every bathroom of their house or apartment, this might be an attractive challenge. If they eat bagels for breakfast they will recognize the logic in using cream cheese as an instrument by which to save money; after all, a bagel breakfast is a meal where the cream cheese really flows. If they keep their trial goal small as you suggest, it will take exactly one year to learn how something can still come from nothing - or at least be less painful than they anticipated! If brand name cream cheese is too close a challenge to their taste sensitivities, tell them to try the experiment with margarine or cooking spray. They must perform this for one year or they will never yield the learning experience they will need in the future, and will not be able to multiply or divide what they got from the learning experience for larger projects down the road.
Even though bagels and cream cheese were not known as the breakfast of choice in 1794 when our infant country was depleted of funds following the Revolutionary War, the Cotton Gin was still invented as the brainchild of Eli Whitney, who was experiencing belt tightening just like the rest of post-war America. Furthermore, who had funds after the economic drainage of the Civil War for dynamite and typewriters to arrive on the scene? Certainly not the inventors. Founding fathers and others thereafter operating in low capital-flow environments like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison both died in circumstances that were considered relative poverty, but they created and created and created while they were alive. The former was a US president who lost a phenomenal library collection he had socked away all his life to settle his expenses before he died (which became the inspiration and initial ingredients for the Library of Congress.) That loss, in fact, turned into something good for the nation, but it was not good for him and gave him chest pain. The latter, who almost had none of his inventions credited to him because he was too involved with his inventing to know about the phrase "patent pending," spent everything he could raise to invent electric lights. Anyway, as you can see great things still occurred in times of rough economies fostered by people who could really think a project through, made a living at it, but were not altogether as solid planners as the times required. What I am trying to stress here is that you don't have to be poor after you achieve your goal. Here in lies the formula for success: Know who you are, where you are, where you want to go, what you will need to get there, and then don't forget to figure out how to survive when the initial plan turns to ongoing management or when your project is not as productive as you had hoped for, taking a few more years to get off the ground. My mother used to say, if you want to buy a house for $1,000,000, try to secure $2,000,000 before you sign on the dotted line. This might be what Jefferson and Edison forgot to do. For those of us who do not speak about money in digits that resemble telephone numbers, I will add to be careful not to wipe yourself out.
Continue to renew your planning as you go along; things that change without you realizing it can throw you and your project into the garbage heap if you are not careful. This is the last component to people's fear about planning to secure their dreams. So, do something about it! When you hit a snag, don't just throw your arm's up in disgust. After all, generic cream cheese helped you out once and it may help you out again, or you could just put a little more away for a "rainy day" in case you need it.
On a lighter note, the smallest children who came to visit from the time we were finally open for business, found the little sheep farm great entertainment and a swell place to run and jump. They loved the baby lambs, but they also loved the gait that swung open and closed on the pasture, they loved climbing up and picking wild raspberries on the little backhoe hills that were never hoed back, and they loved sliding down the railing on the deck banister while it was new enough not to give splinters through blue jeans. In other words, the project was enthusiastically accepted by small children because it was either totally different from what they knew or totally different from what they expected. Let's not forget that all methods of living life for the small child (including tending a sheep farm in your side yard) are new anyway to varying degrees. It either makes them cry from fear or laugh from entertainment, so laughter and wonder in the minds of the littlest amongst us might be deceiving and does not necessarily indicate approval, but more like discovery.
There was a significant membership to the mumbling observer's gallery who could not tolerate any of this experience. They looked at their visit as a duty. They wanted only to get out of their air conditioned cars, get into our air conditioned house through the attached garage, heat up a microwave dinner, watch a movie, complain of high-elevation headaches at only 1850 feet, and finally fall asleep on the living room couches, much to the delight of the rest of us. We, now confined to the downstairs family room, were willing to eat a homemade pizza at 1/3 of the pizzeria price, sit up all night reliving our achievements with any mentation-capable house guest, followed by early church service the next morning and praising God for his many blessings to us.
We performed a study on the visitor groups above, and our results were as follows:
1) Of the very involved and originally responsible project-inventing subdivision from the adult group (two people) we found ourselves to be 100% total absorbed with overwhelming enthusiasm and joy in our activities. We felt this was demonstrated by the fact that the harder parts of the project were inhaled at a much quicker rate than the easier parts. This is always a tip off! When the harder parts of a project are more comfortably performed at a faster rate than the easier tasks which have now become almost boring in a completely new lifestyle, it is secondary to "euphoria" which sets one notch higher than enthusiasm and is sometimes labeled as a type of madness. In fact, we felt better about ourselves and things we had to deal with in life because this exercise brought about a significant boost in self-esteem and it made life flow as beautifully as the project was flowing. All of these described components offered tangible documentation of 100% saturating involvement on the part of the inventing committee.
A lesser point of concern but still a fact of interest and worthy of mention here is that city people by nature are intrigued and sometimes saddened by "extinction" perceived and/or advertised. Historically, they will donate whatever they can manage to endorse a mission for bringing `relief to a project that fosters awareness and the eventual reversal of a attern of disappearance: "Save the whales," "save the polar bear," "save the family size sheep farm," etc. This incentive often tricks people into becoming overly-enthusiastic about ideas and projects that are not possible to achieve, but by about half way through your study on how to achieve your goal, you should be able to delineate whether the project is truly achievable at all. Of course we could have simply campaigned to save whales and donated our saved earnings and efforts for marches down Park Avenue South and attended charity dinners, or struggled to do our part for marine biologists by sending money over the internet, but we chose to raise sheep instead. This might be a simplistic example but it surely makes the point for the first time personal project enthusiast.
2) Of the group that had nothing to do with creating or carrying out the project, but came to observe it when it was completed and could actually follow what all the hoopla was about from having survived a few projects of their own, we found 28% to be smiling, hand-clapping and genuinely enthusiastic-for-us adults. They visibly enjoyed seeing people able to accomplish this quality lifestyle alteration and the achievement of a private goal. This group was generally 80 and older. The other 72% of the adults were not enthusiastic about the project but were a slightly more positive than being totally bored. At the very least, they listened to our endless explanation of how we pulled it off and they did not fall asleep in the process. Within that group there was a small percentage who we felt were just being polite, or smiling perhaps was just infectious that day. These candidates included several clergy ladies, whose common charge from their profession was to support any idea from the congregation that did not break the Ten Commandments or promote un-Christian living. As we made our phone calls to "Rent-A-Ram" for the next birthing several months after the pastoral visits, these ladies were not imposed upon to witness any displays of life in the barn that they might find objectionable from their perspective.
3) Of the small children's group, we found 100% genuinely involved with looking at the barn, the lambs, the mother ewes feeding the lambs, and precariously swinging on the pasture gate in unison, not necessarily in that order (depending on the size of the group on any given day.) Some were colicky or, as yet, not socially adjusted so they cried in fear to touch a lamb, which would have been their norm anyway, and no head counts were collected from this group for the purpose of our study, even though it was tempting because most of them were smiling. We felt including them in a data collection would better support the goal of a day care center than our project, so we left them out.
4) Back again to the adult group, there was another subdivision that was totally burned out almost immediately by the project, which we will call the "microwave dinner subdivision" from the above narrative. These people included adult children of the project inventors, their spouses, their bridesmaids, their wedding ushers and other friends. We found that only 7% even knew we had a barn or sheep before they arrived, in spite of the fact that they were thoroughly briefed, frequently updated and were sent proud evidence in the form of pictures, hand written notes of explanation and carefully photocopied articles from trade pamphlets. In other words, they did not know why they were coming to visit us to begin with, and brought their own video movies because we had a big screen. One member of this subdivided group claimed that after looking at the farm, she found the whole experience horrible because in order for sheep to eat they had to put their mouths on the ground and into stalls of hay and grain. The impact of this proclamation on the project creators was similar to banging a dirty sponge on a clean window, but we survived that assessment from whence it came.
In closing, fervor and zeal survived the visits and even continued in the project-inventing group of two people, as we ran through snow covered meadows to get the sheep fed and other barn duties done. The snow was four feet for weeks at a time but true "intense and eager interest" persisted for a period of five years. Barn cleaning was done a little less zealously and was, at first, performed by sympathetic neighbor farmers who felt we were inept, and that we required hands-on demonstrations to learn how this was done properly. Following these demonstrations, the actual barn cleaning was performed by hired teenagers who never felt they were paid enough. Notwithstanding our great enthusiasm for barn cleaning, our backs did not hold out as we shoveled sawdust and animal droppings which turned out to be heavier than we anticipated especially when wet, which was always, so we paid to have it done. Sadly after 5 years, newly developed allergies put the kibosh on the whole project and the sheep were shipped out, although the barn remains standing and strong to this day 16 years later.
What insight is yielded here as we summarize?
1. When you are truly invested in a project, (heart, mind and pocketbook,) do not expect more than 16% of the on-looking population to acknowledge your enthusiasm as they simply cannot identify with your fervor. The current economic trends do not allow for previous experiences in their lives to compare to your experience and what it took to pull it off. Since they have no personal recollections to superimpose your glee upon for comparison, you can expect vague smiles, empty stares and that they will inevitably drink more of your wine and beer to beat the boredom.
2. True project enthusiasm must not be allowed to be challenged by the reactions of those around you. If their reactions get too much for you to bear then get rid of these people who would descend upon you with sour faces. Just don't invite them or pretend you are going out to a sheep conference today (or whatever applies to your preoccupation.) Give up looking for acceptance. What counts is that you are happy. Why should you need confirmation from others? You could however try something unique to produce a type of souvenir of on-lookers visit to you if you have a few bucks left at the end of your initial investment, for example, T-shirts that say, "Save the family sheep farm!" This might induce some affiliated interest as the wet mops of the world contemplate how the shirt would blend into their wardrobe, and even in tight economic times, people are still trying to make outfits with their clothes. Should you choose this option, please select a currently popular color for the shirt, like perhaps purple. They can then feel invested in the project while they parade around their home communities displaying "a true cause" upon their chests or backs, and wearing the color of royalty.
3. Remember "it is harder to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven," (ref. Mark 10:25.) So you can spend every dime you have on doing this, eating hot dogs until you are blue, but when you die it does not mean you will naturally ascend upward unless perhaps you ate the "Hebrew National" brand of dog to save money. This may in turn buy you some points on the Day of Judgment, as their manufacturer has advertised that he "answers to a higher power" for at least two decades that I can remember. In the interim between life and judgment, try to keep the barn clean any way you can for points in having provided for the innocent lambs.
4. Choose projects that will give you and your partner a good time and a good feeling; those that speak to your inner child are the best because you might wind up doing it and enjoying it completely by yourselves and only in each other's company. This is one of those rare conditions under which you can shut out the world and have fun. Savor the experience and keep the enthusiasm alive.
5. Celebrate life to your heart's content within the rules of good living. We only pass through this place once they say - eliminate from your life all sadness and frustration that other people would impose. Make your projects come alive, and may you realize the achievement of all your ambitions.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle, August 17, 2010
The last time I felt an "intense or eager interest" about a project was in 1997, at the end of the last recession when I, a city woman in a tech job, and my late husband, a retired guy from a local newspaper and former Wall Street junky, decided to start a sheep farm. Not long into the project, we realized that our appetite for information about barn life was insatiable. We read everything there was to read, and learned everything there was to know about ewes and rams over months of lunch breaks and long evenings after dinner. For the purpose of this essay I will call this a thrust of "compelling enthusiasm." Of course I could also add other relevant adjectives to the word, if only for the purpose of qualifying this definition specifically to our situation; overwhelming enthusiasm, totally absorbing enthusiasm, assertive and aggressive enthusiasm, powerful and enabling enthusiasm, disarming enthusiasm, totally annoying enthusiasm, breathless, smothering, exhausting enthusiasm (others available upon request … but you get my drift.) We were enthusiastic to the point of suffocation about working on the project of our first farm, and we exhibited the vigor of frantic North Pole elves at the end of November. To round out the top of our project, we bought farm ducks and some geese for the pond. It was a marvelous experience because we were learning a new and previously alien science, and it made its impact on everything else we did. By anyone's definition, the feelings that had manifested surely qualified as zeal and fervor, especially if it made everything else in life feel better - and it did indeed do that!
We danced in the streets (too old for rap and too young for waltz) as the paychecks went one by one into a savings account for the project of barn building. There was great celebration as we ate hot dogs instead of steaks at the dinner table, so that we could afford our first 5 sheep to fill the fine barn. The fact that it was a mutual project within a marriage actually made the marriage better; I can't recall a single argument in that time period and every chore that had to be done got out of the way faster because we wanted the time to work on our project. Now, that in itself is noteworthy! Instead of getting up each morning annoyed by the alarm clock, we got up with happy anticipation of the late day library visit ahead of us after work to pick up yet another book on the trials that agricultural families conquer on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
I found that most everyone around us did not understand the enthusiasm we displayed for this commitment, especially its intensity and total absorption of our free-time. I was then bold enough to ask some of them when they remembered last experiencing a great enthusiasm for anything important to them? The responses they gave me indicated what I felt was the direct effect of the anemic economy. Their answers included "preparing for the wedding," "getting ready for a baby" and "buying a house." Someone's child felt "buying a dog" was his best recollection. He also said he thought his mom's best enthusiasm was displayed on "grandma's babysitting nights." Almost no one stepped outside of what we used to think were the essentials of life (weddings, babies and houses,) and no one mentioned a special project to me other than these essentials. Since cars are achieved cheaply on lease these days I did not expect to hear the words "car" or "truck" and I didn’t. If I recall correctly, I asked about 15 people separately. It took me two days.
As the project of starting the farm began to unroll including the barn building, then the arrival of sheep, feeding ducks and geese, and the eventual birthing of lambs, we reveled and celebrated every minute. We were the proverbial children in the candy store picking and choosing just the right combination of details to finish the project properly and even my decorating skills came into play - little bells to hang on the wall of the barn, an Amish hex sign stapled to the Dutch door and of course endless fly strips to catch unwanted flying things. These were all positioned with precision and good taste. They were also color coordinated.
Various visitors came to us from near and far. Family descended on us from out of town one weekend after the next, so as not to be excluded from witnessing the fruits of our labor, or the wives in each branch of the family made them go. The elders in the group were kind but the younger adults were dismayed. Many expressed concerned that we would undertake this new lifestyle electively; others just shook their heads in disbelief, but in time almost all of them eventually got the message that our approach to the new place we would call home was wildly enthusiastic and their concern could not shoot that balloon down. We believed in the monster we had created; we thought we would be good at this new life and we gave it everything we had, and happily so. No one was deluded into thinking our project was chosen because it was fashionable in the neighborhood or made us fit in around our newly adopted environment. They all realized we did this project to ourselves and for ourselves, and also by ourselves. We also knew we were participating in what we thought was a dying lifestyle and were doing out part to renew or rebuild its worthiness as an American industry of the countryside; the building of the little family farm, but we were loving every minute of it and could not get enough. We called it "getting closer to the earth versus drying up in the city" and "saving the family farm in the US" even though some of our friends thought we were just oxygen depleted.
I think it is important to note that the great enthusiasm from an adventure like this manifests itself in the same way that a delightful drizzle topping of chocolate fudge smothers a plain dish of vanilla ice cream. If you are "bit by the bug" so to speak, you can't seem to do without it and then when you finally have it, it brightens everything in your life to a heightened degree. However, it is only mildly infectious to the bystander as he stands gapping at your eagerness. A portion of surrounding humanity will always shake their heads in an utter lack of appreciation for your choice of project. They will only perceive the potential exhaustion involved with your joyously adopted responsibility. Almost no one will see it as you do or through your eyes, no matter how long you make them suffer through your wide-eyed animations in explanation.
In today's world, there are some who have not seen what it is like for anyone to pass time in an aura of enthusiasm, especially one that would mimic wild zealousness. It is a state of being that should not be missed in that it is the simple beauty of people carrying out their own little project to the point of completion and management. The fact is that this is only a slightly realized experience for the common man in today's world. These same people might interpret what they are witnessing as if it were a disease process like a type of dementia, a psychic spell from a nearby jealous landowner, or something demonic from a platelet transfusion. Because they might never have seen it before, they really don't understand what they are looking at. Like everything else in life, "if you don't get it, you don't get it."
We live in times where money has been "strange" for about 30 years on and off, up and down, in and out. The intensity of one's preoccupation of choice tends not to be so emotionally embracing under a near-depression economy. As you can recall there was a surefooted interdependence between big projects from the past with the availability of cash, and as there is less cash available these days, you can see that there is less excitement. Not many know how to "do it" without "having it." Where did the days go when if you wanted to do a project badly enough, you simply resolved that it would be done no matter what type economy prevailed or how long it took you to achieve the end result, and you were willing to do it anyway you could - short of sticking up a gas station.
This trend of rationalizing your desires and moving ahead with your dreams seems to be almost dead in America; however, I remember hearing about it prevailing in the Great Depression after the initial shock of poverty turned into normalcy for the living and breathing left behind. I feel that our series of economic recessions have come and gone one right after the other, always with the promise of returning to prosperity in between. We never really made it up for air after one recession before we were thrown down again into the next recession. We are left, therefore, hard pressed to expect any sonic rainbows to appear in our imagination just because we think we would like to do something. No one seems to have reinvented the art of investing all your spirit and cleverness to achieve your fervent dream when we are busy bobbing up and down between this promise and that promise from the government, CNN and the banking industry. As fate has decided to hand us 30 years of economic see-saws, it has not given us the chance to teach ourselves that we must use one method (prosperity with plenty of cash,) or the other method (in poverty using our own wits because that's all there is to work with) for achieving a goal. Alas, most of us have given up manifesting passion for inventing a dream altogether.
We either need longer periods of truly reliable prosperity in this country or longer periods of recession and depression to return to the days of wild adult-quality enthusiasm and ingenuity. Either option will work, as each will foster its own kind of zealousness - one lifestyle will cause us to plan cheaply and the other will bring it about more expensively, but from a standpoint of just reinventing "the phenomenon of great individual planning - equals the enthusiasm that accompanies the goal - equals the achievement of said goal," either option (extreme hunger or extreme lavishness) will return us to the days of "intense and eager interest" as one's brain has the time to adjust to having money or not having money and how to survive in each case. If we could only know for longer than 4 years at a time if we are really meant to live rich or really meant to live poor, we might actually get a handle on how to do what with an idea (if we can remember how ideas are formulated when we get there.) If I remember correctly, I first heard the term "couch potato" in 1992. Man without method is equal to doldrums; the best definition of a couch potato I can give you is someone drowning by inability and incapability and this is what our economy has done to the last two generations. We live on sitcoms and reality TV because we can't even generate dreams. What's the point; we don't know how to carry out what we think about anyway, so why think?
Remember that 25 years is still considered an entire generation worth of time. In other words, Mom and Dad's latest saturation issue may not be exciting to their grown children, not because the kids think their parents are "square," but because the children grew up in times that were so financially challenged that those same children may have never seen saturation before - a mode of excitement defeated from its inception by the ongoing expense of raising a family in times that you cannot depend on. I'm hoping that you conclude almost any project within reason can be pulled off if you can determine how much money is needed to complete it, how much money is coming into your house, how much money really needs to go out in maintenance (food, utilities, rent, mortgage,) and how much more money you can make for your new goal if you need a second job to do it. It also helps to know where to buy what you need cheaply for the new set-up if you are in a down time financially. If times unexpectedly get better, you will always know how to hire someone to have in shipped in instead of picking it up yourself.
Even employing the principal behind, "no pain, no gain," the truth is that it is still the hardest thing in the world to give everything, but usually the only way to get everything. Take heart however, because ingenuity is still willing to be your friend! Our way of giving up everything was to slim expenses down to one telephone, eating hot dogs and homemade cheeseburgers instead of steak and salmon, and then living with only one car. I'm sure that there are many more sympathetic or supportive clichés orbiting around than "no pain, no gain" from the time when money was more readily available in pockets, frequently found in banks that would lend, and cash taken from Aunt Suzie's inheritance now ready to squander. For instance, one could reflect on, "If you want it done right, call a professional!" from days that were easier to roll with. Even so, close your eyes for a moment and I will offer for your consideration (if you can read with your eyes closed) the beauty of investing your own planning, time spent learning how to do it right, and hard earned money to pull off your desires. That used to be the American way, remember? The benefits of this method should be obvious even to the idiot. These days I find it less than obvious even to the celebrated genius. How to finance a project has become a lost art, so people go without their projects financed and without their dreams fulfilled, and at last become dull altogether. "The banks aren't lending!" Their philosophy is when the banks don’t lend, projects don’t get done. They will always be ready to criticize others who find a way to do it in spite of not borrowing money , but will never be ready to promote their own dream even after you have proven that you were able to finance your project a different way. Most of all, people disdain from sharing their inspired dreams with friends these days lest they be labeled as idiots themselves. "Yeah, how is he going to finance that!" is the expected response to the dreamer. The average Joe does not want to think about giving everything to get everything; he wants to talk about when prosperity is next expected to return and describe how big and easily completed the project will be when there is more venture capital available to borrow.
There is still time to transplant the formula for this lack of awareness into the souls of the project-planning ignorant, and in a way that 20+ and 30+ year old adults can clearly appreciate. To make it fun, try telling them to buy generic cream cheese instead of named brands on a weekly basis, and tell them it will save them $250 a year. From that alteration alone they could finance their next wild and crazy project but it would have to cost about $250. If they don't have "surround sound" yet in every bathroom of their house or apartment, this might be an attractive challenge. If they eat bagels for breakfast they will recognize the logic in using cream cheese as an instrument by which to save money; after all, a bagel breakfast is a meal where the cream cheese really flows. If they keep their trial goal small as you suggest, it will take exactly one year to learn how something can still come from nothing - or at least be less painful than they anticipated! If brand name cream cheese is too close a challenge to their taste sensitivities, tell them to try the experiment with margarine or cooking spray. They must perform this for one year or they will never yield the learning experience they will need in the future, and will not be able to multiply or divide what they got from the learning experience for larger projects down the road.
Even though bagels and cream cheese were not known as the breakfast of choice in 1794 when our infant country was depleted of funds following the Revolutionary War, the Cotton Gin was still invented as the brainchild of Eli Whitney, who was experiencing belt tightening just like the rest of post-war America. Furthermore, who had funds after the economic drainage of the Civil War for dynamite and typewriters to arrive on the scene? Certainly not the inventors. Founding fathers and others thereafter operating in low capital-flow environments like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison both died in circumstances that were considered relative poverty, but they created and created and created while they were alive. The former was a US president who lost a phenomenal library collection he had socked away all his life to settle his expenses before he died (which became the inspiration and initial ingredients for the Library of Congress.) That loss, in fact, turned into something good for the nation, but it was not good for him and gave him chest pain. The latter, who almost had none of his inventions credited to him because he was too involved with his inventing to know about the phrase "patent pending," spent everything he could raise to invent electric lights. Anyway, as you can see great things still occurred in times of rough economies fostered by people who could really think a project through, made a living at it, but were not altogether as solid planners as the times required. What I am trying to stress here is that you don't have to be poor after you achieve your goal. Here in lies the formula for success: Know who you are, where you are, where you want to go, what you will need to get there, and then don't forget to figure out how to survive when the initial plan turns to ongoing management or when your project is not as productive as you had hoped for, taking a few more years to get off the ground. My mother used to say, if you want to buy a house for $1,000,000, try to secure $2,000,000 before you sign on the dotted line. This might be what Jefferson and Edison forgot to do. For those of us who do not speak about money in digits that resemble telephone numbers, I will add to be careful not to wipe yourself out.
Continue to renew your planning as you go along; things that change without you realizing it can throw you and your project into the garbage heap if you are not careful. This is the last component to people's fear about planning to secure their dreams. So, do something about it! When you hit a snag, don't just throw your arm's up in disgust. After all, generic cream cheese helped you out once and it may help you out again, or you could just put a little more away for a "rainy day" in case you need it.
On a lighter note, the smallest children who came to visit from the time we were finally open for business, found the little sheep farm great entertainment and a swell place to run and jump. They loved the baby lambs, but they also loved the gait that swung open and closed on the pasture, they loved climbing up and picking wild raspberries on the little backhoe hills that were never hoed back, and they loved sliding down the railing on the deck banister while it was new enough not to give splinters through blue jeans. In other words, the project was enthusiastically accepted by small children because it was either totally different from what they knew or totally different from what they expected. Let's not forget that all methods of living life for the small child (including tending a sheep farm in your side yard) are new anyway to varying degrees. It either makes them cry from fear or laugh from entertainment, so laughter and wonder in the minds of the littlest amongst us might be deceiving and does not necessarily indicate approval, but more like discovery.
There was a significant membership to the mumbling observer's gallery who could not tolerate any of this experience. They looked at their visit as a duty. They wanted only to get out of their air conditioned cars, get into our air conditioned house through the attached garage, heat up a microwave dinner, watch a movie, complain of high-elevation headaches at only 1850 feet, and finally fall asleep on the living room couches, much to the delight of the rest of us. We, now confined to the downstairs family room, were willing to eat a homemade pizza at 1/3 of the pizzeria price, sit up all night reliving our achievements with any mentation-capable house guest, followed by early church service the next morning and praising God for his many blessings to us.
We performed a study on the visitor groups above, and our results were as follows:
1) Of the very involved and originally responsible project-inventing subdivision from the adult group (two people) we found ourselves to be 100% total absorbed with overwhelming enthusiasm and joy in our activities. We felt this was demonstrated by the fact that the harder parts of the project were inhaled at a much quicker rate than the easier parts. This is always a tip off! When the harder parts of a project are more comfortably performed at a faster rate than the easier tasks which have now become almost boring in a completely new lifestyle, it is secondary to "euphoria" which sets one notch higher than enthusiasm and is sometimes labeled as a type of madness. In fact, we felt better about ourselves and things we had to deal with in life because this exercise brought about a significant boost in self-esteem and it made life flow as beautifully as the project was flowing. All of these described components offered tangible documentation of 100% saturating involvement on the part of the inventing committee.
A lesser point of concern but still a fact of interest and worthy of mention here is that city people by nature are intrigued and sometimes saddened by "extinction" perceived and/or advertised. Historically, they will donate whatever they can manage to endorse a mission for bringing `relief to a project that fosters awareness and the eventual reversal of a attern of disappearance: "Save the whales," "save the polar bear," "save the family size sheep farm," etc. This incentive often tricks people into becoming overly-enthusiastic about ideas and projects that are not possible to achieve, but by about half way through your study on how to achieve your goal, you should be able to delineate whether the project is truly achievable at all. Of course we could have simply campaigned to save whales and donated our saved earnings and efforts for marches down Park Avenue South and attended charity dinners, or struggled to do our part for marine biologists by sending money over the internet, but we chose to raise sheep instead. This might be a simplistic example but it surely makes the point for the first time personal project enthusiast.
2) Of the group that had nothing to do with creating or carrying out the project, but came to observe it when it was completed and could actually follow what all the hoopla was about from having survived a few projects of their own, we found 28% to be smiling, hand-clapping and genuinely enthusiastic-for-us adults. They visibly enjoyed seeing people able to accomplish this quality lifestyle alteration and the achievement of a private goal. This group was generally 80 and older. The other 72% of the adults were not enthusiastic about the project but were a slightly more positive than being totally bored. At the very least, they listened to our endless explanation of how we pulled it off and they did not fall asleep in the process. Within that group there was a small percentage who we felt were just being polite, or smiling perhaps was just infectious that day. These candidates included several clergy ladies, whose common charge from their profession was to support any idea from the congregation that did not break the Ten Commandments or promote un-Christian living. As we made our phone calls to "Rent-A-Ram" for the next birthing several months after the pastoral visits, these ladies were not imposed upon to witness any displays of life in the barn that they might find objectionable from their perspective.
3) Of the small children's group, we found 100% genuinely involved with looking at the barn, the lambs, the mother ewes feeding the lambs, and precariously swinging on the pasture gate in unison, not necessarily in that order (depending on the size of the group on any given day.) Some were colicky or, as yet, not socially adjusted so they cried in fear to touch a lamb, which would have been their norm anyway, and no head counts were collected from this group for the purpose of our study, even though it was tempting because most of them were smiling. We felt including them in a data collection would better support the goal of a day care center than our project, so we left them out.
4) Back again to the adult group, there was another subdivision that was totally burned out almost immediately by the project, which we will call the "microwave dinner subdivision" from the above narrative. These people included adult children of the project inventors, their spouses, their bridesmaids, their wedding ushers and other friends. We found that only 7% even knew we had a barn or sheep before they arrived, in spite of the fact that they were thoroughly briefed, frequently updated and were sent proud evidence in the form of pictures, hand written notes of explanation and carefully photocopied articles from trade pamphlets. In other words, they did not know why they were coming to visit us to begin with, and brought their own video movies because we had a big screen. One member of this subdivided group claimed that after looking at the farm, she found the whole experience horrible because in order for sheep to eat they had to put their mouths on the ground and into stalls of hay and grain. The impact of this proclamation on the project creators was similar to banging a dirty sponge on a clean window, but we survived that assessment from whence it came.
In closing, fervor and zeal survived the visits and even continued in the project-inventing group of two people, as we ran through snow covered meadows to get the sheep fed and other barn duties done. The snow was four feet for weeks at a time but true "intense and eager interest" persisted for a period of five years. Barn cleaning was done a little less zealously and was, at first, performed by sympathetic neighbor farmers who felt we were inept, and that we required hands-on demonstrations to learn how this was done properly. Following these demonstrations, the actual barn cleaning was performed by hired teenagers who never felt they were paid enough. Notwithstanding our great enthusiasm for barn cleaning, our backs did not hold out as we shoveled sawdust and animal droppings which turned out to be heavier than we anticipated especially when wet, which was always, so we paid to have it done. Sadly after 5 years, newly developed allergies put the kibosh on the whole project and the sheep were shipped out, although the barn remains standing and strong to this day 16 years later.
What insight is yielded here as we summarize?
1. When you are truly invested in a project, (heart, mind and pocketbook,) do not expect more than 16% of the on-looking population to acknowledge your enthusiasm as they simply cannot identify with your fervor. The current economic trends do not allow for previous experiences in their lives to compare to your experience and what it took to pull it off. Since they have no personal recollections to superimpose your glee upon for comparison, you can expect vague smiles, empty stares and that they will inevitably drink more of your wine and beer to beat the boredom.
2. True project enthusiasm must not be allowed to be challenged by the reactions of those around you. If their reactions get too much for you to bear then get rid of these people who would descend upon you with sour faces. Just don't invite them or pretend you are going out to a sheep conference today (or whatever applies to your preoccupation.) Give up looking for acceptance. What counts is that you are happy. Why should you need confirmation from others? You could however try something unique to produce a type of souvenir of on-lookers visit to you if you have a few bucks left at the end of your initial investment, for example, T-shirts that say, "Save the family sheep farm!" This might induce some affiliated interest as the wet mops of the world contemplate how the shirt would blend into their wardrobe, and even in tight economic times, people are still trying to make outfits with their clothes. Should you choose this option, please select a currently popular color for the shirt, like perhaps purple. They can then feel invested in the project while they parade around their home communities displaying "a true cause" upon their chests or backs, and wearing the color of royalty.
3. Remember "it is harder to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven," (ref. Mark 10:25.) So you can spend every dime you have on doing this, eating hot dogs until you are blue, but when you die it does not mean you will naturally ascend upward unless perhaps you ate the "Hebrew National" brand of dog to save money. This may in turn buy you some points on the Day of Judgment, as their manufacturer has advertised that he "answers to a higher power" for at least two decades that I can remember. In the interim between life and judgment, try to keep the barn clean any way you can for points in having provided for the innocent lambs.
4. Choose projects that will give you and your partner a good time and a good feeling; those that speak to your inner child are the best because you might wind up doing it and enjoying it completely by yourselves and only in each other's company. This is one of those rare conditions under which you can shut out the world and have fun. Savor the experience and keep the enthusiasm alive.
5. Celebrate life to your heart's content within the rules of good living. We only pass through this place once they say - eliminate from your life all sadness and frustration that other people would impose. Make your projects come alive, and may you realize the achievement of all your ambitions.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle, August 17, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Questions of Balance and the Destruction of Trust
You may have to watch out for mankind when you break a promise. When you give the ultimate promise to someone and then take it back, cancel the promise out and release him, what happens to his heart in the process? Granted, he will pick up the broken pieces of his own heart after you are gone, but will there be a price that even others pay for the lack of trust that evolved from your stunning wisdom?
If you were not the trustworthy sort to begin with, the results of these events might be in your favor. You may have made a promise to one you loved that was not believable because you were untrustworthy back then. With luck on your side, the one you loved will remember how untrustworthy you were to begin with. He may reflect upon his pain later and rationalize that his love for you evolved from his own poor judgment. You may then be 'off the hook'. "She was not the trustworthy kind to begin with. Why should I have believed in her promise at all? I'll find someone else worthy of trusting and things will be better." Keep in mind that this will be if you are lucky.
But if you were perceived as the trustworthy type back then by your lover, making the promise about hereafter and ever more and then changing your mind for any reason short of your own demise, well… it may result in his lack of ability to trust again. You may promote or create the heartbreak of the century, funny as that sounds, not just for your lover, but for all others he then touches and all whom he makes promises to, as he takes the experience you provided and rationalizes that even trustworthy people in life break promises. This, with all the other broken promises made in the world by the trustworthy and the untrustworthy alike, then begins to resemble a pandemic virus spreading through the learning population of mankind like an unending hurricane.
Children may go without a parent, wives will be brokenhearted, even though your recipient lover was well-intentioned in his own promise-making back to you in those days, now concluding that "sometimes even trustworthy people have to break promises!" Show me a child who understands that statement. But even so, the example is set and the result in the life of that child, when it is time to take his turn with the adult baseball bat at the home plate of life, is almost guaranteed to be similar. Many of the promises made will be loosely devised thereafter because you taught, quite resolutely by intention or example, to a child you did not know, that promises no matter how well intentioned not only can, but will be made and will be broken.
It takes more than just desire to make a promise, it also takes the insight of the prophets, which would induce consideration of the fact that perhaps you were not at fault to begin with. Making promises about life requires more than passion. As unromantic as this may seem, it takes hard and cold inspection to examine the balance between one's own capabilities and a lover's capabilities in producing the promises of forever and hereafter. Who makes promises with hard and cold inspection anyway? - certainly not the young, or to better qualified that statement, not youth who basically live by the hormone burst. However, don't start celebrating because you are not entirely free of fault in this dilemma. It was you who made the promise that was better left unmade and there is a chance that someone, or many, are paying for it now. If the promise were not made to begin with then it would not have needed to be broken.
Filling this scenario out a little further, what would you do if you passed by the one you loved so many decades ago, and he made the same offer to you today? "I missed you since the day you left. I'm asking you again to be mine as I did before." Would you believe your former love is trustworthy enough to make this promise to you, as it was you who generated the destruction of his trust so long ago? Will you expect to find this person as pure as when you broke his heart? Will you wonder now that you have witnessed both sides of a reasonable promise, if he can even make one? Will you let others convince you that you just have cold feet as you ponder this question, or even believe inside yourself that this is fate's way of balancing your past of immature commitments with today, now that you are wiser? Do you have the courage to break his heart again and deny him twice? Will granting his request this time be truly better than denying him again for his own sake?
These are your choices. You could choose to be strong and resign yourself to be available to the beauty of his love and whatever comes with it - late but not too late. You could also avoid "the promise" again, and make allowances for oceans of time and human events; simply listen and not speak, as it should have been in the beginning when you were too young to know how promises were made. Whichever path you choose, try not to make a mistake this time as well. There might be sweet wisdom available to you in the sound of his aged brandy voice and inspection of his undying amorous beliefs. A third option is to run and, engulfed by your fear and suspicions, abandon this proclaimed love that lasted the test of time, and one which you basically want to believe in.
Which course will you choose to balance the destruction of trust? As question marks prevail throughout your pondering, the answer might be found in both that which you need and that which you think you know, allowing for the knowing to be modified by the listening. If his needing and your knowing should lead to the same place perhaps you are now wise enough to neutralize that which you innocently created, this time starting within your own soul.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle July 21, 2010
If you were not the trustworthy sort to begin with, the results of these events might be in your favor. You may have made a promise to one you loved that was not believable because you were untrustworthy back then. With luck on your side, the one you loved will remember how untrustworthy you were to begin with. He may reflect upon his pain later and rationalize that his love for you evolved from his own poor judgment. You may then be 'off the hook'. "She was not the trustworthy kind to begin with. Why should I have believed in her promise at all? I'll find someone else worthy of trusting and things will be better." Keep in mind that this will be if you are lucky.
But if you were perceived as the trustworthy type back then by your lover, making the promise about hereafter and ever more and then changing your mind for any reason short of your own demise, well… it may result in his lack of ability to trust again. You may promote or create the heartbreak of the century, funny as that sounds, not just for your lover, but for all others he then touches and all whom he makes promises to, as he takes the experience you provided and rationalizes that even trustworthy people in life break promises. This, with all the other broken promises made in the world by the trustworthy and the untrustworthy alike, then begins to resemble a pandemic virus spreading through the learning population of mankind like an unending hurricane.
Children may go without a parent, wives will be brokenhearted, even though your recipient lover was well-intentioned in his own promise-making back to you in those days, now concluding that "sometimes even trustworthy people have to break promises!" Show me a child who understands that statement. But even so, the example is set and the result in the life of that child, when it is time to take his turn with the adult baseball bat at the home plate of life, is almost guaranteed to be similar. Many of the promises made will be loosely devised thereafter because you taught, quite resolutely by intention or example, to a child you did not know, that promises no matter how well intentioned not only can, but will be made and will be broken.
It takes more than just desire to make a promise, it also takes the insight of the prophets, which would induce consideration of the fact that perhaps you were not at fault to begin with. Making promises about life requires more than passion. As unromantic as this may seem, it takes hard and cold inspection to examine the balance between one's own capabilities and a lover's capabilities in producing the promises of forever and hereafter. Who makes promises with hard and cold inspection anyway? - certainly not the young, or to better qualified that statement, not youth who basically live by the hormone burst. However, don't start celebrating because you are not entirely free of fault in this dilemma. It was you who made the promise that was better left unmade and there is a chance that someone, or many, are paying for it now. If the promise were not made to begin with then it would not have needed to be broken.
Filling this scenario out a little further, what would you do if you passed by the one you loved so many decades ago, and he made the same offer to you today? "I missed you since the day you left. I'm asking you again to be mine as I did before." Would you believe your former love is trustworthy enough to make this promise to you, as it was you who generated the destruction of his trust so long ago? Will you expect to find this person as pure as when you broke his heart? Will you wonder now that you have witnessed both sides of a reasonable promise, if he can even make one? Will you let others convince you that you just have cold feet as you ponder this question, or even believe inside yourself that this is fate's way of balancing your past of immature commitments with today, now that you are wiser? Do you have the courage to break his heart again and deny him twice? Will granting his request this time be truly better than denying him again for his own sake?
These are your choices. You could choose to be strong and resign yourself to be available to the beauty of his love and whatever comes with it - late but not too late. You could also avoid "the promise" again, and make allowances for oceans of time and human events; simply listen and not speak, as it should have been in the beginning when you were too young to know how promises were made. Whichever path you choose, try not to make a mistake this time as well. There might be sweet wisdom available to you in the sound of his aged brandy voice and inspection of his undying amorous beliefs. A third option is to run and, engulfed by your fear and suspicions, abandon this proclaimed love that lasted the test of time, and one which you basically want to believe in.
Which course will you choose to balance the destruction of trust? As question marks prevail throughout your pondering, the answer might be found in both that which you need and that which you think you know, allowing for the knowing to be modified by the listening. If his needing and your knowing should lead to the same place perhaps you are now wise enough to neutralize that which you innocently created, this time starting within your own soul.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle July 21, 2010
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