The Olive Farmer
About the life of Benjamin Shepherd
Benjamin Shepherd is a Stonemason, a Sculptor of Stone, and the Author of "The Book of Say" and "Before There Were Flowers." Born in the rural south of the United States, he achieved the equivalent of a fifth-grade education through homeschooling. Without formal education, Benjamin dedicated his career to researching the lives of political families and incorporating their stories into estate homes through art and sculpture across the United States, Caribbean, and Pacific Islands. In 2011, The News and Observer recognized him as one of the greatest living artists in North Carolina after he spent four years crafting one of the two Holy Relics of the Moravian Church, during which time he worked under the name of A. Tew.
Now residing in Ortigia, Italy, Benjamin manages his olive farm in the Italian village of Castiglione Di Sicilia on Mt. Etna, where he cultivates San Benedetto olives. An avid waterman, sailor, diver, and fisherman, he harvests sea salt and sea glass from the Ionian Sea.
Surviving repeated trauma, he has found the courage to reach out to others through the written word; he is a listener, a self-healer, and a mender of loose bricks and broken things. The man mixing mortar is a confidant and faithful friend to the mighty, the lowly, and all living things.
"The Book of Say"
"The Book of Say"
A Father’s rare blood disease cannot be healed by evangelical faith in the early 1980s. As he leaves for treatment on the AIDS wing of the National Institutes of Health, his young son, Finn, goes to live in the homes of strangers in the rural South, carrying his red fireman’s bag as a metaphor for his father’s disease.
Sent to live with an elderly couple in their rustic cabin on Panther Mountain, Finn is shown and taught the ways of the Native Cherokee that lived in the meadow. In the lantern glow of deep conversations, he learns that love is a fountain whose only business is to flow. He experiences the handwritten letters of Jon and Elizabeth, and their promises to be reincarnated as Doves.
Finn returns to the Wheat Hill House having realized that the universal language of every heart is truth, and that all who love are born of God. Eternal life is not merited but measured in how much love we leave behind. Though, at times, Evil does kill the Chiefs of Peace, time has never stopped seeing them being born.
"Before There Were Flowers"
Is it possible to live in a world without the other half for which you were created? Just as butterflies existed long before flowers,
What if all human beings had animal characteristics, Would we use them for good or evil?
Imagine if we were all born as slaves, and the cost of freedom merely lay in the ability to articulate it in our own words.
What if we could touch our loved ones just once, and thereafter communicate with them in a dream state?
This book is for the curious, the profound thinkers, and those yearning to write the Terms and Conditions of their own freedom.
Click on the image for a link to purchase.
Life in Sicily
Contact Me
Questions or Comments
For inquiries regarding my work , please use the form to contact me. I appreciate your interest.
Benjamin@bennytheolivefarmer.com
