There's the
Where on the top of Hog Mountain in Holly, Massachusetts, I was going to get the pharma
Cornish name, so I looked at the surroundings.
It could have been Clodgy, which is Stony and Muddy Row, but I thought Trigellus hidden
Homestead was more fitting.
Then it's always fun to see how it's pronounced and the fact that we get called Mr. or Mrs.
Trigellus.
Trigelli.
Or Trigellus.
Nobody says Trigellus.
When you go in and feed a bunch of animals, you know you've done good because they're
happy to see you.
They're glad, they're satisfied, you give them the hay, you clean the water, they yell
at you the moment you woke up and knew that you heard your footsteps.
The sound of chomping and ruminants, it's just wonderful.
It's nothing nicer than being in the barn and they're all lying down and chewing their
cud.
It's like listening to a heartbeat.
It really is a good feeling here.
It's on a lay line.
You can feel it.
You can feel the compassion actually in this place when you come here.
It's like listening to a heartbeat.
It's like listening to a heartbeat.
It's like listening to a heartbeat.
Okay, my name is Edward Coffey.
What do I do?
I don't know.
I'm a photographer.
I traveled to the Philippines.
My name is Jody.
I'm known as Jody.
I'm Jody Coffey.
I'm married to Ed.
I'm also known as, occasionally, as Pamela Stewart, which is my writing name, which is
poetry, not the person who writes the horror stories.
I grew up with dogs.
I had some cats when I moved to apartment life and I adored them.
But I had absolutely no, and I was horse crazy as a kid.
Absolutely nuts, you know, like the typical girl.
But I had no experience.
Ed was the person who had experience.
I grew up in Cornwall and my brother-in-law had a farm.
I had friends that had farms.
So I grew up milking cows.
I grew up with beef cattle.
I grew up with pigs.
And I just grew up being with animals.
This is an indoor rescue bird.
Eventually, if he gets very excited, he'll throw up on me.
We built it as something we were able to have an interest together and something to care
about, something together.
We created a history.
We created a history for the place as the farm grew and developed and slowed down and
did all the sort of normal things that a life does.
And we created a history for within our marriage that we went through a process and are still
going through it.
I came in from the boat.
I used to be a fisherman.
There's hotels in my hometown, it's an island in Cornwall.
I used to supply them with fish for the restaurant and I went in and one of my friends come over
and say, hey, I want you to meet my friend from America.
So I said, hello, and I said, what's your name?
She said, Jody.
And I said, what do you do?
She said, I'm a poet.
So I said, tell me a poem.
And she couldn't.
No, I couldn't.
Because I don't memorize my poetry and I should, it's probably a good idea.
But I went, I had a Guggenheim and I traveled to Cornwall to look up Arthurian sites, which
I actually didn't do.
I actually spent most of my time in pubs and wandering around and looking at things.
But I met him in this after hours of the bar in the hotel.
When I shook his hand, I felt this current of warmth go up my right arm.
And that was how it all started.
We met in, I don't know, we made 1982.
Then we married when I returned to England in 83 and we lived there for seven years.
We came to the States in 1990 and lived in Montague, an absolutely wonderful house.
And Ed did some landscape gardening.
And then he became sick with what was considered chronic fatigue or whatever catchall phrase
they had for a real couple of real years of a real problems.
And then one day he said, oh, I want animals.
Let's go have a farm.
I thought, please.
So we started looking at farms and we had at that time three dogs and a number of cats.
And so we wanted a place where dogs could run and we wanted privacy and we were shown
this place even though it was on the market.
And the people who owned this place at that time took to us and our sense of wanting to
have a farm.
And so it all milled it and worked out.
We will have such a big next meeting because I know it's very hard to get through here.
Clearly I have a camel, a couple of donkeys, a large number of sheep or at least about
40, I think.
Many dogs, nine dogs, two cats, four goats, one alpaca named Wallace Phillip and about
five llamas, I would say by now, don't you think?
Oh, let's see, about eight pigs, one peacock, one old turkey, ducks, geese and an emu.
Has that covered everything?
Yaks.
Yaks and a couple of cows and some yak cow cross.
You could sit and talk about all the good times and all the silly things that animals
do.
But one thing when you care for other lives is you learn an awful lot about death and
you learn, you know, you hear the old people in the tribes all over the world talking about
good deaths and bad deaths.
You really come to understand and you really come to understand compassion and I think
because I had so much compassion for my animals is what drew me to Buddhism.
They teach you a true life lesson and for me personally, I can look up into a field
and I can look at an animal and I can tell you if he's got a bruise on his big toe of
his right leg.
I do a lot of fair trade or I have done a lot of fair trade work all over the world
and I did a lot working with Tibetan people in Nepal and India.
Now I'm actually working with families in the Philippines and again, what is giving
me the strength to sit down with a family that has absolutely nothing.
A tin shack if they're very lucky and the mother is very, very ill or dying with tuberculosis.
You've got a premature baby there, you know is going to die.
You have dirty drinking water, no sanitary conditions, but the people are happy.
They don't know when their food is coming next.
They're so happy and I think I help them out as much as I can sometimes with money, a lot
of times with deeds, but I think learning from the animals, learning the compassion
from the animals is what's giving me the strength to actually work with people.
Send Britney Spears to a farm.
God willing after 13 months she'll have a different perspective on life because she'll
see what matters and she'll see what she can survive and she can see.
You can get your hands dirty, you can cherish life, you can help support it, you can feed.
Feeding animals is so much fun because they're always really pleased about it.
When you have somebody's life in your hands, it doesn't matter if it's a pig or a chicken,
you care for that animal and actually I talk to my animals all the time and they respond
and they understand.
It's been like constant graduate school that I have animals all the time.
How to give an injection, how to tube a baby, how to fail, how to live with death.
You just become more sensitive and thoughtful in different ways.
Now that I'm doing less farm work, I really, really miss that.
Probably 90, 96, 97.
That's when all the fiber business began to burgeon and began to learn to weave.
We moved to the farm in 94.
So we have been here 18 years from two days ago.
The natural dye studio had started to function and build up and the dyer was named Jody
McKenzie, who was quite a well-known fiber person.
Things developed to have more of an interest in the Tibetan culture and the Asian cultures
and the Buddhism and the stupa got built and things shifted away from the fiber into something
that involved a connection, a global connection with the rest of the world.
An arrow that we traveled, I think I could honestly say that we started off thinking
that we was going to make money and then we just fell in love with the animals.
And then it didn't care about the money.
It's a funny dimension to go back and think about what I do this again, sure.
And I can say, oh, I do this different, I do this different.
But every single experience for good or ill builds up everything that you are and the
world you live in.
I can't imagine leaving this place, but I also have no idea what I would do with it,
because it's quite a big thing.
But I couldn't go into a town and not have some of each animal.
I mean, I'd have to have an ark house.
I honestly don't see what's next at all.
Do you?
You have to go somewhere warm.
I have to go somewhere warm because of my health.
I have chosen the Philippines because, well, the one thing with my nerve problem is I cannot
be near a fan.
I cannot be near any sort of wind if it's a cold wind.
I discovered that the Philippines there, the wind is hot.
My pain goes away, and the problem with my pain is no doctor has ever been able to take
it away from me.
They've tried narcotics, everything it does not work.
The pain is unbearable.
I know I'm going to end up living there eventually.
I've just spent seven weeks there.
I just ripped a cartilage in my knee in a mango forest, a hundred-year-old mango forest,
taking pictures of a mangrove snake.
I will go there.
I have families that I've been helping for years.
I have old, old friends.
But the problem is my wife cannot go there because she cannot take the heat or the humidity.
I can't stay here.
We don't know what we're going to do.
We'll figure out something we figure.
We know we're going to leave, whether it be by death or whatever.
Someday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not going to be quarter past three on Saturday afternoon.
It's going to be some part of our life.
But I really hope that we've left a very good fingerprint on this land and on the animals
living and dead.
We have protected the land so nobody can build it on it, so our woods would stay woods forever.
Our fields would stay fields forever.
We just hope that when we do make the decision to move on, that we can find the right people
that will care as much as we care for it, because it's something very, very special
here.
There we go.
There she is.
She's fine.
She's fine.
Okay.
And then I'm going to put her down and they can run away, not be so scared.
That's a girl.
Yeah.
I don't know if you're going to understand how cruel it is to have a good mommy.
She's a great mommy.
She's a great mommy.
She's a great mommy.
She's a great mommy.
She's a great mommy.
