Benjamin Shepherd / Author and Olive Farmer in Sicily

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. Having no formal education, Benjamin spent his career researching the lives of Political families and incorporating their stories into their Estate homes via art and sculpture in the United States, Caribbean, and Pacific Islands. The News and Observer recognized him as one of the greatest living artists in North Carolina in 2011 after he spent four years creating one of the two Holy Relics of the Moravian Church. He worked this part of his artistic career under the name of A. Tew. He was never formally trained but self-taught.

Benjamin communicates in English, Spanish, French, and Italian. He lives in Ortigia, Italy, and works on his Olive Grove in Castiglione Di Sicilia on Mt. Etna. Benjamin is an avid waterman, sailor, diver, and fisherman. He harvests Sea Salt and Sea Glass from the Ionian Sea.

A survivor of repeat trauma he has found the courage to reach out to others through the written word: a listener, a self-healer, and a mender of loose bricks and broken things. The man mixing mortar or harvesting salt 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 1980’s. 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. Finn witnessed the handwritten letters of Jon and Elizabeth and their promise to each other 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.

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"Before There Were Flowers"

Is it possible to live in the World without the other half you were created for? Butterflies existed long before there were ever flowers. How did they survive?

What if all human beings had animal characteristics? Would we use them for good or evil?

What if we were all born slaves and the cost of freedom was simply knowing how to describe it in your own words?

What if we could touch our loved ones, just once, and then from then on be able to communicate with them in a dream state?

This book is for the curious, the profound, and those who want to write the Terms and Conditions of their own freedom.

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