Surrendering to 'What Is' is not the same as Giving Up.

This is my mantra when I haven’t written in days, when the house is loud with children, when the lambs are being born and I am in the barn elbow-deep in a sheep’s uterus. It is what I tell myself when the house is messy (disgusting is the actual word I use)— laundry piled up on the couch, the bathmat speckled with hay and pebbles, the rug littered with tiny pieces of paper my 4-year-old cut up to make “soup.”

I look around and sigh, pick up some kid undies I’m not sure are clean or dirty, pick up two pieces of trash as if I’m at a beach clean-up saving the environment, saving the world, as if these two pieces will make a difference shifting them from floor to bin.

The kids say I am The Cook as I serve them our hens’ eggs (scrambled with cheese and sea salt or a meltdown ensues) and homemade fucking bread spread thick with butter and jam. Minutes later I am squatting in front of an unscrubbed toilet in an uncleaned bathroom wiping poopy butts and wondering why I went to university.

For this.

For this?

And then my seven-year-old takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek, my forehead, and I think yes.

For this.

For this!

But the mornings are still hard when stories are calling me and I tell them to hush for now, hold on for now, I will return I swear I will, please just hold on. But am I meant to hold on? Or release and let the stories sing through my body and return to the stars, just like these precious lives of ours?

My daughter looks up into the sky, head cocked, and says, “I hear her. I hear Tunie in the eagle’s call!” Her face is alight with connection, recognition, her dear great aunt singing from the sky after leaving this world months ago. And this is what it is: connection. That is what I am craving, and my adult mind thinks that writing is the only way to be connected to story! But my daughter has it right—we are the stories, written or not, connected every day to spirit. I just need to tip my head to the sky and listen, let the knowing flood through, trust that I am in the right place, right timing for this all. I just need to hold my girls tight, feel their hearts beat against mine, be present to the love story we are. Connecting.

And though I hold these aspirations in my head, I know there will be days when mothering feels too hard, when I hear the eagle in the sky and think, Are you too asking something of me, something I am too tired to give? Or asking me to carry a story I do not have time to write? I will crawl into bed in my mind (as there is little room for such rest in real life) and huddle under thick blankets of sadness and regret, of wishing I was somewhere warm or somewhere alone or both and I will accept this melancholy for a while. Or accept not accepting. I will turn the pages of my life and mourn the adventurer I once was, anchored now, only writing about sea voyages and scaling the Himalayas instead of actually doing so. I will coo to myself that this is but another season in life, a different chapter from the ones before, maybe the lowest point or the highest point in the hero’s journey; it’s hard to know where to place oneself in one’s own story. But I will surrender to this too—the grief of time passing, of freedoms lost, of constant laundry. I surrender knowing that this too will change and someday my girls will travel with me and exclaim at the brilliance of the Caribbean Sea or the vibrancy of foreign syllables clanging together in a busy market.

Someday I will have all day to write—an even harder concept to imagine and one tinged with sadness.

Someday my girls will wave me a cheerful goodbye as I go off on my chosen journey and they go off on their own.

Someday they will even do their own laundry.

Until then, I will laugh and sob and scream and smile and do all the things in each little moment of each little day and listen as words whisper into my ears, stories and life entangled, as they are, as they always will be, while my girls swirl around my legs, (my heart, my mind,) full of stories and whispers of their own, our stories forever unfurling, forever interwoven.

Why we slaughter animals

The word has a brutal tone: slaughter. Is it the meaning that makes it brutal or the word itself? The slow slide of the slaugh to the harsh sibilance of the T, the er drawn out, a knife slicing through skin.

I don’t want to be glib about it. Slaughtering, (or butchering or harvesting) animals is not something I take lightly. It is true, it is hard, it is messy. Both physically and ethically. How can we take another creature’s life? How can we name creatures that we eat? Why do we do it when it is so messy?

Love. Just like death, love is messy in all the ways. We love our animals. We care for them, treat them when they’re sick (if we can) and are compassionate enough to cull them if they’re in too much pain. We feed them well, we scratch behind the pigs’ ears and cuddle the bottle baby sheep that run up to us. We do all the things we would do for a pet. But at the end of their time on earth— a time that we determine, not nature— we harvest them to nourish our family and community. We whisper gratitude as we stun, as we cut, as we witness the beat of life flow out of the animal. With the sheep and goats, the skin is removed, often saved to tan and make into rugs. The jeweled innards are saved for eating (liver, heart, kidneys) or compost (stomach, intestines—even though these could be eaten and are in many traditional cultures). We take the life of the animal and turn it into food. We cut it into cookable pieces, pack our freezer full of nourishment. We are connected to our food every step of the way.

Every meal we sing gratitude, we acknowledge who we are eating, who is helping our kids grow, who is keeping our bodies strong. When we don’t know the name, we say the animal, helping our kids connect what they’re eating to the animal it came from. This is not gruesome; it is knowledge that they need to be connected to the animals, to all the beings of this earth. Just like they know that the broccoli or beets are from our garden, I want them to know that this roast is from a pig, the steak is from a neighbor’s cow, these chops are from our sheep. Maybe Thomas or Pumpkin or Prince. Or just pig, cow, sheep. Either way, we honor the origin, the life that was taken, sunshine/grass/grain turned into meat.

Humans have had predator/prey relationships since humans were…well, human. Animal husbandry came later and in all sorts of forms. In the western US, indigenous folks control-burned land to attract animals for hunting. It wasn’t as ‘managed’ as keeping livestock within electric fences, but it was still a symbiotic and intentional relationship.

We contain the animals we eventually eat as a form of care. Not in crates or cages, but within barns or electrified fences in the field. We also hunt and fish and forage as long as there is balance in the ecosystems we exist within.

And we believe in the power of nutrient dense meat! Some bodies don’t need much, some bodies (like mine) need a lot to be strong and healthy. The bioavailability of nutrients in meat is undeniable. I don’t think there would be such a huge market for “meat substitutes” if our bodies didn’t inherently crave meat, know that that’s where the most nutrients are as well as the least anti-nutrients that are found in many plant foods. Again, it’s animals turning grass and grains into nutrients we can more readily absorb! It’s amazing and I’m so grateful.

This essay could ramble on, but in the end, it’s about the health of our bodies, the health of these animals, the health of this planet. It is all a circle, we are all connected, and there is always, always a sacrifice to sustain life, whether we consume plants or animals.

A Thanksgiving Book?

I did not set out to write a “Thanksgiving” book. I wanted to write about harvesting animals. Would it be sheep, goats, cows, chickens, rabbits, turkeys? The story that came to me was that of our annual turkey harvest…which happens to be for Thanksgiving. So voila! A Thanksgiving-associated book was born.

So why do I even bring it up? Well, I have complex feelings about the US holiday we call Thanksgiving. While my family celebrates the harvest of the season and being with family and friends during that time (not necessarily just on Thursday), I am aware of how many people, especially Indigenous families, feel grief about the complicated and often brutal history of settlers being in this country. Not necessarily something to celebrate!

The complexity deepens as I am of settler heritage in a direct way: my maternal ancestors “settled” in John Day, Oregon, home of the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute tribes. My paternal ancestors “settled” in North Dakota (I’m not sure exactly where) and in San Jacinto, California, home of the Luiseño and Cahuilla people. My ancestors most certainly displaced and/or did direct harm to the Indigenous people.

I know that I did not choose my ancestors, that I cannot change history. But I still feel grief around my family’s role in the destruction of many peoples’ lives. So, there’s that.

What do I do in this time and place, with this history, with my current wishes to steward this land that we live upon? And knowing that we make income directly from this holiday that celebrates the “settling” of the USA?

First, I acknowledge where I live, who have come before on this particular spot, and who still surround us. I acknowledge that our farm is located on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Coast Salish Peoples who have reserved treaty rights to this land— specifically the Lower Skagit, Swinomish, Suqamish, and Snohomish tribes. I thank these stewards who have lived, and continue to live, on this land since time immemorial. Our hope is that by continuing to steward the land in respectful ways and support Indigenous voices being heard, we can continue our quest to be in Right Relationship with all beings on and in this Earth. 

On Thanksgiving, we will donate to Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theatre and Sogoreate Land Trust. This will be an ongoing tradition of donating to Indigenous led non-profits or groups. No, it does not undo the damage or ameliorate the generational guilt, but it is something. We can all do something to honor all those who came before as well as work towards a more peaceful and just world. Lofty goals, I know, but ones I must believe in.

Follow this link to find additional Indigenous non-profits to support.

Respecting the Goat

 Author’s note: I wrote this several years ago but it feels very relevant now with the release of Thankful Harvest.

I hold the pot and wait to stir.

My heart is stirring before the flow starts. He is lying on the dirt. We are holding his legs, holding his head. Feathery strokes of fingers on neck, he has stopped struggling. Nature has whispered to his muscles to be still, to breathe deeply, to trust the end. His eye is turned towards the tree, a rope newly hanging from a limb. His eye is turned towards the weeping sky. His eye is still and softly yellow, the pupil a slit into another world, the future.

I wait to stir. I find myself whispering Thank you Thank you Thank you.

My partner’s knife is sharp and quick against his throat. The skin is thin under coarse fur the color of desert earth. His neck opens up crimson blood and white cartilage. I stir as the red collects in the pot I hold, shaking I stir, still mumbling thank you thank you thank you I stir as his lifeforce is pumped into my pot. I catch the blood to be made into food. We will usher it into casings and boil it until it is dark red almost black. We will crisp it in a cast iron pan with kale and garlic we grew in our garden, that we plucked out of the earth with these hands that now hold him down. We will (do) honor the life of this goat that is presently somewhere between goat and food: GOAT/FOOD

When is that line drawn? When he was born into the care of humans, as he lay dying at the hand of a kind man and his partner who whisper gratitude, as IT is butchered into small pieces that will fit into a Dutch oven? Maybe there is not a line, was never a line or an order: FOODGOAT

I stir. The blood separates and coagulates and I scoop out the solid bits as his muscles twitch their last. I set the deep red aside to help with the hauling of the body into the air, the skinning, the evisceration, the blessing of making this muscled gift an edible feast.

I am learning how to slaughter animals. It is a slow, delicate process for me. It is not pleasant pulling a knife against a living being’s throat and being with them as their heart beats them to death, as they take their last breath, as their legs stop kicking underneath our palms. I am choosing to feel the conflict between gratitude and sorrow. I want to see, know, feel how easily life can cease. I want to appreciate who my food has been as living breathing being to appreciate it even more on my fork. I have held the knife and taken the lives of chickens and turkeys. I am now apprenticing to the body of the goat.

Thank you, Prince.

We name our animals. We are not afraid to love what eventually we will eat. We rub goat bellies and laugh when the pigs nip at our muck boots. We snuggle our tiny bottle fed lambs in our laps and laugh wildly with gobbling turkeys. Why not love what is here in this moment, these creatures we nourish for months or years, these creatures who will nourish us during long winters and rainy springs? Raising these animals brings us joy and security. I savor the warmth of a freshly laid chicken egg in my palm on a cold winter morning and a pot of chicken soup on the stove. We slice bacon into the cast iron pan and thank Poppy for her corpulence. I feed little bits of lamb leg to our daughter and say “Thank you, Boots.” Our daughter witnesses our harvests and our gratitude. We know where our food comes from and what our food ate. This is important to us.

In high school I became a vegetarian. A guy handed me a pamphlet with blurry photos of pigs in tiny crates and chickens with feet meshed into wire cages. I was appalled. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and questioned taco stands about lard usage in their “vegetarian” burritos. I confounded my father by turning down perfectly barbecued steak and pan-fried salmon (“It’s fish, not meat,” he said). After college I argued with burger-eating friends about the fallacy of animal protein being essential and would wait until we were half way done with a meal before revealing the ground meat was texturized vegetable protein.

They stopped coming to dinner.

That didn’t stop me from feeling that eating the milky gray versions of beef from fast food joints or the pale proteins that came wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam from the grocery store was just not right. I just didn’t know what I could do about it other than avoid meat altogether.

Years later, after countless visits to homeopaths and nutritionists concerning my nagging fatigue, bloated gut, and chronic skin issues, I abandoned my diet of beans, rice, and wheat for meals that consisted primarily of organic vegetables and pasture-raised beef or free-range chicken. Eating that way helped my body heal. I read all I could about nutrition, cooking, and industrialized livestock production in this country. I hoped that what I was buying in the miniscule organic meat section of the store was actually free range, not just for what I saw as a more humane treatment of the animals, but for the added nutritional benefits of pastured meat. I talked with friends about my desire to learn how to raise and harvest animals myself (which was usually met with aghast faces at such a concept) but my opportunities were decidedly limited in the urban landscapes or on the boats where I lived for much of my twenties.

In my thirties I became friends with city homesteaders who slaughtered ducks in their backyards and urban agricultural activists who lived as much off the grid as the gridded city would allow. I bought whole cows from a local farmer on the edge of the county and organized dispersing the steaks and roasts between a couple dozen friends. I became an urban farmer and worked at a community college garden, dirt on my hands and a smile on my freckled face as I nestled kale seedlings into earth surrounded by skyscrapers.

Eventually I found my way to a rural community on an island in Puget Sound. I fell in love with a man who was an aspiring livestock farmer obsessed with holistically balancing the needs of animals, humans, and soil. We bought a house with land, had a baby, got hitched. We now graze our six sandy acres rotationally with goats, sheep, chickens, and turkeys. We hope to add more ruminants as the quality of organic matter in the soil improves, which of course happens when we have animals adding manure to the fields. It’s all about balance. We hope to provide more of these animals (FOOD) to our community as rejection of the industrialized food system grows in intensity.

I never would have guessed when I became a vegetarian at 16 that I would have the very same objections and desires as my current livestock-centric 40 year-old self: to have less of an impact on the earth (or more optimistically have a positive impact), to respect the lives (and deaths) of animals, to be healthy and happy.

We continue, blood on our hands, warm body against ours as we lift him off the ground. The skin slides along the torso over a stratum of fat and fascia. It comes off surprisingly easily with knife against fur skin almost muscle and bone. Tug out and down, slide hands in and separate the layers. So many layers. We tug and cut and pull until the body is naked and cooling.

A slow slice down the middle from pelvis to sternum is all that is needed for the jewels of innards to fall into my hands. I hold the blue-tinged intestines and slatey gray stomach and purple green gallbladder. As the body is emptied out of stomach and spleen, heart and lung, kidney and liver the warmth and beauty astounds me. The architecture and soft simple curves of complex systems supporting life rests in my hands. We are all soft inside and I see the emptiness of the now carcass (GOAT/CARCASS/FOOD) and am struck with the sudden knowing that this is me upside down in a tree. My body is a sharp blade away from a shell of meat and bone and fat. Hollow and mysterious and always seconds from no longer existing in the way that I live/write/eat/slaughter/survive presently.

Blood and fat and fur on my hands, I pour the pot of bright red liquid into a jar to carry it to the kitchen where it will be made into sausage with apples and onions from the land. I thank our goat for all he has given, all I have learned, how he will nourish our baby, our family, our community. I thank him for reminding me how fragile and dependent and connected we are as farmers and animals, as delicate and resilient creatures of this earth. I thank Prince for the opportunity to be witness to all that sustains us, for the opportunity to take responsibility for how I nourish my body.

This is death.

This is the reality of my manifested life.

This is a harvest of gratitude.

Raising Animals is Hard

Raising animals is hard. Not all the time. Sometimes the days go by and everything is easy. Feed, water, clean the coop or barn or no need to clean at all because all the animals are outside in the field, browsing or rooting or pecking, definitely pooping, all that soil enriched by their presence. Easy.

The hard days can look so many ways. An infection in a goat’s knee from a brush with old barbed wire that was abandoned in our field decades ago. A first-time-mama ewe exhausted laboring with triplets, little hooves and nose sticking out but not progressing, two more in line behind the first but mama too tired to push anymore, the first lamb’s head just too big. A hen with a bound egg, abdomen dragging on the ground and looking very, very uncomfortable. An old rooster too old to deal with lice himself. A sick pig, lethargic and stumbling, sick from what? Sick from what?

Sometimes you just don’t know. Like with the baby turkeys. Poults, they’re called. Babies nonetheless, all fluffy feathered and curious. They come to us in the mail. Someday we’d love to raise our own, have an incubator full of turkey eggs, a proud mama strutting in the field, a proud papa fanning his feathers when the eggs hatch and the poults emerge. But for now, without the year-round infrastructure to do so, we order them from a hatchery many states away and wait for the 5 a.m. phone call from our local post office. We cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Because sometimes we open the sturdy box with ventilation holes and not all the turkeys have arrived alive. We compost their small bodies with reverence, sadness, then go on and take care of the living. We dip their beaks in water to help them drink, we spread pulverized grain on feed bags spread on the brooder coop floor, we plug in their heat lamps to keep them warm. And we watch. We listen to them cheep cheep cheep. Sometimes we notice one that’s eyes are half closed or wings are drooping. Or they’ve flipped on their backs, unable to turn over (a condition called Poult Flip-Over Syndrome. Yes, that’s the real name). Or we come to check on the little flock and one is not getting up or one is very obviously dead. This year we lost nine out of fifty two upon arrival and in the first few hours and days. Not the usual loss, probably not our fault, but sad nonetheless.

It's hard. Farming is hard. Death is hard and not just because it affects us financially, even though that is also a factor. Each $7 poult becomes a $100-plus turkey to nourish our community. We don’t make much to begin with as we use organic feed—something we don’t compromise on—and it’s expensive. Losing young ones is less financially painful than losing older, well-fed birds, but it’s still sad, a life gone. Were they in pain? Did it go quickly? What could we have done to help them, if anything?

Even if we did everything “right,” especially when we did everything “right,” there is always that little voice doubting our abilities. Could we have done something different, better? Are we cut out to be livestock farmers caring for hundreds of animals a year?

Like the first year we raised turkeys and gave them unlimited access to grain (instead of feeding them twice a day as well as moving them twice a day to give them plenty of forage area). They got huge, like 48 pounds huge, and some got sick. That was our fault. We learned a lot that year and continue to learn so much from our animals, in sickness and in health. It’s hard to remember we’re learning too when animals are doing well, thriving, but we are—the lessons are just gentler and mundane (in the best possible way).

Sometimes predators take what they can and though we do everything we can to stop them, sometimes we can’t. Eagles, owls, raccoons, coyotes—they’re hungry too. And very resourceful. So we fortify our chicken and turkey tractors with extra wire and tarps, put up electric fencing, keep the small animals under cover so eagles can’t swoop and strike. We cringe in our beds when we hear the coyotes howling in the field at night, run out to check with a flashlight, hope we aren’t too late. We raise our faces to the evergreens on the periphery of our farm when we hear the eagles chirping, hoping their bellies are full of salmon, no need for poultry. We check for scratches or damaged limbs from a determined owl or raccoon reaching through the chicken-wired shelters after dusk.

We will watch and wait and listen, do chores, give gratitude for these beings—all these beings—in our ecosystem.

We will watch and care for this batch of cute little fuzzy poults that will turn into awkward teenager turkeys, then the strutting, curious, amusing turkeys we think of when we think Turkey. A fan of feathers, strange bits of skin hanging off their face (the snood), the gobbles that always make me smile whenever a plane flies overhead and the turkeys think it’s an eagle. We will care for the turkeys (and chickens, sheep, pigs, and goats) until we harvest them. Another hard day, the harvesting one, but one full of gratitude for the nourishment they provide our community and our family.  

Raising animals is hard. And we thrive on doing hard things for the sake of our kids, our land, our community, and our world.

Apprentice to the Riverbed

For most of my life I’ve been a river.

Rushing through valleys, grinding down mountains along my shore, tumbling over boulders, the rapids rough spray in the air, drowning some with my turbulence. Constantly pushing past, never lingering for more than a moment in a beautiful eddy, swirling, singing through the pebbles, circling back into the intense flow down down down emptying into the ocean.

Then- so many options! Where to flow? Separated by currents pulling me here or there. Evaporated into the clouds, thunderheads gathering us up, spitting us out. Cleaved apart by possibility. Whole only as a raindrop searching for another river to rush down.

Now, I want to apprentice to the riverbed.

Soft tumbled rocks and sand, water flowing over us, changing my shape slowly with gentle movements, adjustments, rubbing against other rocks snuggled into the riverbed. No need to move in more than micro-trembles when the world (water minerals ash leaves life) rush past. I want to observe the massive flow streaming past, bubbling around me, swishing by in the form of fish and human, idea and dream. But I will have no hands to grasp. I will let it go. I will not fear the forgetting. These elements in me have deep memory, deep connection, and what needs to be remembered will be.

I do not have to be wild and rough, exciting and picturesque like the river, (but I can be at times, dislodging myself before settling again).

As the riverbed, I can be the grounding, calm, connecting force that holds so much.

And holds onto nothing.

Lambing Season

Her womb was warm and slippery against my searching hand. The lamb’s head was lolling in the outside world, eyes closed, little tongue out. One little hoof out. That was the problem. When sheep give birth you see the little nose and two little hooves bunched together coming out of the vagina, like a tiny diver readying themselves for the high board into the pool of life. Yes, that is dramatic because yes, birth is dramatic and magical and harrowing.

At least this one was. The first ewe of the season to give birth and she was obviously having problems getting the little one out. We’d been watching her for hours after the bag of water that emerged first lay on the barn floor. We watched her lay down and rise, contractions pushing through her for hours, a lamb nose finally emerging then receding. The tides of birthing exhausting her. We gave her space, peered at her vagina through binoculars, saw only that one little hoof pressed under the nose and knew we had to help.

That is how I found myself gooped up with antiseptic lubricant, elbow deep in ewe’s vagina. It’s awfully roomy in there, actually. I couldn’t help thinking of my own birthing stories, 68 hours and 20ish hours for my two girls, the pain and exhaustion, looking up at my midwife as I panted and howled on the rug in my living room and begged, Please help me!

I slipped my way down the stuck lamb’s body, found the other leg bent backwards, not the way it should be at all. I thought of my girls again, both born with arms above the heads, in my case not ideal, in my case not like diving out of the vagina but like pushing against the walls, refusing to leave. I get it- it’s a tough world. But my girls eventually made their ways out and I was going to do my best to save this little stuck lamb. After a failed first attempt with the mama lying down, a couple of friends helped hold her up while I pulled at the little leg, afraid of breaking something inside, mama or baby, but knowing that one or both or all (two more babes inside after the stuck one) could die if we didn’t get them out. So, I laced my finger into the crook of his leg and pulled, both hands now helping the body, the mama lowing and panting.

Come on mama, I chanted as the nose, eyes, ears emerged, as the legs and body and tail emerged. A puddle of lamb on the floor, blood and mucous and membranes, the mother slowly turning to see what the hell just happened. I don’t remember if she tended to him right away, this lamb that was in fact alive and breathing, all I remember is my friend saying, we need to get the other one out because this mama is too tired to push.

So we pulled.

Two more slimy little lambs that the mama licked clean, nudged their little bodies up to standing, little mouths instinctually finding the engorged udders.

Days later we ended up bottle feeding that first little lamb. Triplets are often hard to care for by a single ewe and that one was not getting enough, almost died from lack of nourishment and attention. We intubated him, gave him antibiotics, nursed him back to health as he lay swaddled on our kitchen floor. The girls gave him stuffed animals and made a card for comfort. Much to our surprise, he made it through, but we needed to keep him from his mother so that he didn’t mistake her for one who would care for him as he starved.

 I attempt not to compare myself to sheep- to the mothers that cannot handle more than one lamb, to the mothers we’ve had to cull that had birthing problems and no maternal instinct, leaving their lamb’s wet, shivering bodies lying in the hay.

Mothering is hard. Birthing, for me, was hard, even for the second one (which everyone said would be a breeze). All that talk about letting your instinctual animal body take over, that this is what female bodies are meant for and can naturally do, well, sometimes shit goes sideways- with humans and animals.

For weeks during lambing season I found myself staring at ewe vulvas trying to answer my kids’ questions as best I could. My five-year-old wanted to know more about the mechanics: What does the placenta do and what is the watery bag? Why does the mama not take care of a lamb? Why is one sick? Why does one die?

At night my two-year-old wanted stories about bloody sheep vaginas, placentas on the barn floor, and blood-covered babies.

And I am grateful for the questions and my challenge to answer.

I am grateful for the connection to life and death, the processes, the cycles.

I am grateful that our bottle baby Milky let me help him out into the this big, tough, beautiful world.

I am grateful to be a mama even though some days I want to push my way back in to a warm and quiet watery womb, be held, in the dark.