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The Diaries

One month, three weeks and one day out -- soft sounds of water falling

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(First, an important announcement. Tonight (Monday, July 2), we are lucky here in middle Tennessee to be visited by Brad Friedman, the founder of BradBlog.com, for an informal gathering to discuss the current state of affairs regarding the sanctity of our voting franchise. Brad was one of the more dynamic speakers at our 2005 National Election Reform Conference and he has devoted the past three years as an investigative journalist to uncovering the many threats to our voting process and promoting solutions to overcoming those serious threats. We will be hosting Brad at Deborah Narrigan's home this evening from 6:00-7:30 pm and we hope you can join us. Deborah's address is 4003 Auburn Lane and her phone number is 615/383-7141. If you were fortunate to hear Brad at our "Nash-ional" conference, you know what you have in store. If you know him only by reputation (or don't know him at all yet), join us tonight for a rare chance to meet a 21st century Minute man. Since this will be one of my first forays away from my farm since my release from the "house", I hope to see many of you there tonight.)
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Good morning everyone. It is a cool morning for early July here on the farm. The breeze from Wyoming helped bring some much needed rain yesterday, mixing the cool of the north with the moistness of the south for a nice afternoon of heavy downpours. A soothing time to sit on my front porch, watch the raindrops bounce off my shed and creek bridge, see the young crookneck squash, Silver Queen corn and Early Girl tomatoes swaying in the garden, soaking it all up.

Because it has been so dry (and because I planted about a month late), my garden has not done much so far this year. I have spent many early mornings watering what was planted but that only served to deeply wet down the dust immediately around the young plants, rather than soaking the ground where their young roots really wanted to be. So it has taken the rains of the past few days to awaken the plants, to have them really growing as they should. Now I must gently lift the sugar pumpkin vines out of the walkways when I visit the garden, I must reach to help the Kentucky Wonder pole bean vines bend over onto the tops of the trellis netting strung there to hold them, I must continue to weed between the new plantings of crowder peas, basil and zinnias to let the young, more desirous plants take their invited foothold into this 2007 garden space. There is always something to do in the garden, and – for the past one month, three weeks and one day – that has been my salvation.

It is amazing, and has been somewhat sad, to experience the gift of uncertainty every morning when I wake up in my own bed. Though I am so thankful to be free of the "house", my life is still not my own. For perhaps as long as the next 29 months, I will not be free to travel outside middle Tennessee without permission from my less-than-caring probation officer. That means that I cannot visit with any of my family unless they travel to my farm. That has meant that I have missed my niece's (and god-daughter's) beautiful wedding and family reunion in Mississippi, that I have been unable to visit when another favored niece gave birth five weeks early to her new son in my home town, that I was unable to cheer my brother on as he swam eight miles straight in Norris Lake to raise money for Big Brothers-Big Sisters in east Tennessee, that I could not take my invited place on the podium of a recent election reform panel at a national conference in Atlanta, that I could not stand and sway silently to the drums and the chants of the Northern Arapaho at their Sun Dance outside Ethete in north-central Wyoming.

I think it is maybe that lack of freedom to move – coupled with the natural shifting of anticipatory consciousness that comes with ending my time at the "house" – that has made the past almost two months much more surreal than I had anticipated. It has been a quiet and solitary time here on the farm, but if I really do believe in my Higher Power's best wishes for me, I must accept that I am just where I need to be – physically, emotionally, spiritually. Sometimes that is hard to accept, but the solution – to take the next deep breath and put one foot in front of the other (or to just keep sitting still) is allowing me to move through this time at the pace that She has prescribed for me.

Besides, there is much to celebrate. Every morning, I am awakened by the chirps of cardinals and the coos of morning doves. The dogs are there on the porch, awaiting our five waking-up minutes of petting and nuzzling. The garden sits quietly, giving me more to do, allowing me to start my mornings on my knees, the sounds of water falling over the small break in the bed-rock in the creek in front of my house. No other noises are there in the early morning – no traffic sounds, no loud-speaker, no banging of work-boots and metal lockers, no conversations wanted or unwanted from my "grown man's dorm"roomies. Just natural sounds buffered by cool quiet, just gentle breezes, just thoughts of what it was like, what happened and what it might be like next.

I have stayed busy working to return the farm to its former look and feel, cutting the overgrown pastures (all 70 acres of them), watching the young rabbits and older deer scamper into the woods, viewing the ground nests of turkeys with their remnants of egg-shell left after this year's addition to my growing flocks that hatched out before I returned home, seeing a solitary coyote moving slowly to the shade of the woods beyond my loud tractor and its trail of Zen-like circles in the recaptured pastures. Though the late spring freeze eliminated this year's blueberry crop, it did not keep my tame black raspberries and my wild blackberries from fruiting. So some mornings (and more afternoons), my meals have been picked fresh and consumed standing on the edges of my fields and pathways, viewing the trails of the deer through the same berry patches, knowing that they have left some sweetness for me as I have for them. I have discovered large patches of peppermint growing wild now along my creek-bed, planted decades ago when this farm was a (hopelessly naive) collective endeavor, pleased to see that those long-ago labors' loves have not been lost. I have supplemented the volunteer patches of peppermint with new plantings of lemon balm and spearmint so that, some day soon, my evenings will be sweetened by the fragrant teas brewed from the tasty tips of my creek-side's minty bounty.

As I have settled into this, my once again quiet life, I have not socialized very much with you and others. Though I really enjoyed seeing many of you at the coming home party held within a week of my release, I now realize that perhaps I should have given myself some settling-in time before opening the farm to all of you so quickly. But since then, I have shared quiet morning coffee with my community's elders at the Santa Fe Diner, proud to see that my community café's owner has framed the Nashville Scene cover (with yours truly – the marijuana martyr -- on it) for her southern wall, intermingled with pictures of our local high school basketball teams, costume parties and the other evidence of accepted (and supported) life in our shared country home. I have made many more 12-STEP meetings than I could risk back when I was in the "house" and have been very thankful for that. I have weeded and planted the flower-beds in my town square (less bermuda grass and more zinnias in those beds for the first time since I was locked up) and stopped my planting chores there to visit for a long time with my county sheriff on the town square, him welcoming me back home and me thanking him for keeping our home safe from the bad guys (inside and outside our county courthouse). I have had snippets of conversations with old friends and family, and the beginnings of fresh understandings with new neighbors who have arrived during my absence. (One of them, a recently retired Metro teacher who bought 10 acres touching my western border, discovered me by Googling "Old Natchez Trace Road" and finding the saveberniesfarm.com web-site. We have shared a Low Country boiled supper from her South Carolina past and wild blackberry short-cake formed and filled to the brim from my fields. A good beginning ....)

I am slowly coming back ‘round to the sights and the sound of my life as I am privileged to live it. During this settling-in time, I have appreciated hearing from some of you, to have you checking in with me and checking with each other for news of your favorite felon. I am reawakening, but the sleep of the past eighteen months has still not completely left the corners of my eyes. There are the outlines of several interesting trails laid out in front of me, though I am not striking out just yet to follow any of them. I am resting, I am working quietly in the garden, I am petting and nuzzling my dogs, I am reaching out tentatively to some of you and accepting -- in turn -- your tendered and tender mercies, I am wrapped in the sounds of water falling. I am (mostly) free and buoyed by Mother Nature and her children (all of you and my hoofed, clawed and winged neighbors). Like me, the garden has taken its time to get moving but now it is ready to go, to grow again. As am I. Time to get on with getting on. There are lots of "next right things" ahead to occupy my time and space, my heart and place, my memories and my quiet moments. It is all good. But it is time to get going, and so I will.

I would love to hear from you, to know how your time is being spent in this dry summer of 2007. I hope to see some of you at Deborah's house tonight, to enjoy your company and that of one of our nation's fast friends, Brad Friedman.

And if not tonight, then somewhere else, some other space, some other time, filled with quiet grace, real soon.

Take care.

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