The Farm is Quiet

We didn’t always get along. He’d lash out at me and I’d lash back, words against spurs, pleading, screaming, questioning. I wanted him to understand me, wanted him to listen to reason. We didn’t speak the same language, hold the same context. We shared a home but had very different perspectives. I was annoyed by his actions and often cursed his life, a flood of angry shadow work bubbling up from my depths. But that didn’t mean that I wanted him dead.

The sun burrowed out of the clouds of this long winter and painted the hillside green grass green. Tall firs and hemlock punctuated the misty skyline. The old growth wood of the barn almost glowed in the golden light. Spring! I was so ready for a change.

I fed hay to the goats and grain to the pigs with their little dirt covered faces. I collected eggs from the nesting boxes in the darkening coop and laid out swaths of grain for the chickens which they instantly attacked. The yard was quiet in that roadside farm sort of way- birds chirping, goats bleating, pigs snuffling, hens clucking, trucks rumbling by.

Yet something was missing. That shrill call of a dominant male lording over his ladies, a familiar and constant refrain that echoed through our days. I thought perhaps he was up the hill under the scotch broom and fir boughs. Or across the street at the Foodbank jousting for scraps. But his ladies were all here…

I wandered over the land in the beauty of the evening and felt myself being drawn towards the pond. I wasn’t necessarily looking, but in the lower field I found piles of feathers. Soft, tufty gray ones and rigid jet black ones, a tangle of long curved feathers, black and white and iridescent green.

Rooster feathers.

No no no.

But yes, the land was quiet and rooster was not simply hiding in the plum trees ready to attack me for coming too close to his harem. He had been attacked, was gone. Coyote or eagle? Maybe a stray dog? More questions than answers in a pile of plucked and ripped feathers, no body near by.

A flash of green in my palm, I held his mangled feathers in my fist and wandered back into the house with a bucket of eggs in my other hand. His torn up beauty and potential offspring balancing on either side of my body. We will bury his weightless remains under our new lavender plants, fingers in the soil, burying roots that will slither down through iridescence. We will eat the (fertilized) eggs and digest the reality that there will not be brilliant black and green offspring this year. We will feed the hens in our quiet(er) yard. I’ll still be on guard for a while when I hear a flap of wings and rustle of feathers running towards me, but the memories will dissipate with the decomposition of feathers underground.

RIP Rooster Midnight

A Jar of Red and Heart of Gratitude

I hold the pot and wait to stir. 

My heart is stirring before the flow starts. She is laying on the dirt. We are holding her legs, holding her head. Feathery strokes of fingers on neck, she stops struggling. Nature whispers to her muscles to be still, to breathe deeply, to trust the end. Her eye is turned towards the tree, a rope newly hanging from a limb. Her eye is turned towards the weeping sky. Her 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.

The knife is sharp and quick against her throat. The skin is thin under coarse fur the color of desert earth. Her 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 her lifeforce is pumped into my pot. I catch the blood to be made into food. I admit it sounds grotesque but blood is edible and nutritious and now I see it as another way to honor the life of this goat that is presently somewhere between goat and food. GOAT/FOOD When is that line drawn? When she was born into the care of humans, as she lay dying at the hand of a kind man, as it is butchered into small pieces that will fit into a pan? 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 her 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.

(Do these words affect you? Is your stomach turning, your mouth watering, your mind squirming to picture something else than this image of a goat bleeding out into a pot, into the earth? This is where we are. This is why I’m here. This is uncomfortable. This is the reality of eating meat. This is what I believe in and I want you to believe in it, too. Its not that easy, I know. We do not want to know the details, do not want to think about 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 horror. I want to see/know/feel how easily life can cease. I want to appreciate who my food has been as a living breathing being to appreciate it even more on my fork.)

We continue, blood on our hands, warm body against ours as we lift her 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.

After the udder is cut away, 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 for the ride home where it will be made into sausage with apples and onions from the land. I thank the goat for all she has given, all I have learned, how she will nourish our community at the harvest celebration that weekend. I thank her for reminding me how fragile and dependent and connected we are as farmers and animals and humans and community. I thank her for the opportunity to be witness to all that sustains us as people, for the opportunity to take responsibility for how I nourish my body. 

Thank you for making me stir with discomfort and awe.

This is life and death, this is gratitude.

Flowing

Constellations in relief, black as night spinning and expanding in the void.
No clear edges on the individual, no clear boundaries on the bunch.
A universe creating itself beneath the sink.

I did not find the mold first. The water streaming down the kitchen floorboards was the countdown to exploring the space. I say ran down because the old house is slouching into the earth and in our lives carrots and cherry tomatoes and water runs east across the old growth grain. East towards the sloping garden, foraging turkeys, towards stretching trees and looming sunrise. The water seeped into the crack between the kitchen and porch taking an alternate route into the bowels of the house. This on a day when fall pranced into the room and shook its soaked body like a golden retriever returning from a glacial lake.

I am still in my pajamas as I tear the linoleum off the cupboard sole and twist open freeways of pipes warm and dripping. Bits of bloated food and indecipherable sludge coat the interior landscape. How much is hidden inside smooth white! How many indigestible, un-washable layers are represented here? I take each piece and soak it in vinegar (pipe pickles!) and scrub with an old toothbrush. I watch gunky enamel fall into the bowl.

I am disgusted and relieved. It feels good to clean this out.

Inside almost matches outside but the problem is not solved.

The water still tumbles over grain.

The problem is deeper. Underground.

I run a metal snake through the exposed arteries of the house and do not find a blockage. I find pig grease and human hair and an amalgamation of meals long forgotten but the snake’s mouth is hungry after a few grotesque pulls. A twist in a pipe, detritus accumulation, blockage I cannot reach.

I think about all that is flowing inside me. I think about the universe of love and dreams streaming through my life, mostly unobstructed. I think about the bends where half-digested ideas accumulate and block the passage out of all that is no longer needed. 

I am scrubbing, snaking, clearing. I am having trouble reaching the basement. This goes deep. 

How do I restore the flow without tearing the house down? 

Go outside.

My pajamas are soaked with grimy water. I go visit the turkeys in a dress over wet pants and wellies. I give the goats apples and collect eggs from the hens. I pluck cherry tomatoes from the matted green arms of the garden. Blackberries, plums, pears, apples fall onto the ground where I cannot catch my fill. Beets grow next to carrots and parsnips and turnips. Winter squash begs for space underneath popcorn eight feet to the sky. The flow of life and food is all around. Outside and in.

We will nurture the house back to life, heart in fiery coals, friends’ laughter beating strong, the stove's belly warm with plenty. The blockage is not permanent; it loosens with care and community

(and perhaps the healing of a plumber navigating the constellations and freeways and dark underground universe of the basement).

These pipes flow. The land absorbs. We all thrive.

Gratitude to the Chicken

Red warm against the back of my hand.

 The combed head in my palm, my fingers holding the little flap of skin between trachea and spine. Against the hills and valleys of columned bones is where the vessels lay. Now severed, now flooding the valleys with warmth, staining feathers with cells they’ve never noticed beneath the surface, dripping onto skin that is not of its own. The scaly legs kick into the air, the brilliantly colored wings flap, the hills of the neck twist and shiver. Freckles of blood cover my arms, are Pollock-ed against the back of the stainless steel sink. My gut is twisting in time with the spasms, my eyebrows knit in concern. Did I do it right? Is this fast enough? Can they feel the pinch and slice, knife through skin, forward cut one vessel, slide down and back the other? 

Two streams of blood, two eyes shutting, many cycles of breath and heartbeats emptying the body.

Stillness.

It is afternoon and I am outside in a field. 

My arms are scrubbed free of blackened red flecks, a few feathers cling to my tangled hair, my mind still holds images of slowly hinging beaks ceasing mid-breath. I carry a basket in my hand and shoo chickens from my feet and laugh at the chaos. I open secret-looking doors and am consistently delighted by finding eggs in golden wood shavings, sometimes with hens defending little bundles of DNA.

Warm in my palm, the energy of potential life.

We gather the eggs and put them into a cool room next to where we slaughtered chickens that morning. We head out again. We started the day with feeding the chicks in the barn and we end doing the same. Little fluffy bodies in our care. Little fluffy bodies that have a fate already determined. Is that a bad thing? Even if they don’t know their fate? Or maybe they do? Do they communicate with one another, can they feel the knowing that at nine weeks of age they will be processed into the next version of themselves, consumed at dinner tables and ooohhhed at at fancy restaurants and boiled into broth that cures the common cold? Is there comfort in the knowing? Maybe even pride? 

Anthropomorphizing aside, maybe chickens feel it all. Maybe they feel more than we do, maybe their clucking language contains a more complex lexicon of emotion than we humans will ever begin to fathom. Perhaps, like so many other species of animal and vegetable, they are the ones in control and have lured us into breeding them, caring for them, eventually ending their lives in a fairly humane manner (at least on this farm) all so that they have some structure in their lives. A structure they (perhaps) crave. A structure that many humans (me) wished they had. Would it be comforting to know that at 50 years of age we would be stuffed into a metal cone face down and pinch slit slit Done? Would our lives feel less frantic if the end date was determined? Of course there is always the chance for an accident. The chicken with the wing ripped off by a raccoon or rat would tell you so. But what if we just knew?

It is still warm after the sun has set. We scream down the dark road on the back of a motorcycle, our bodies blurred to trees and grass and the cows invisible in the fields. All this motion, all this energy moving forward, fragile and full of potential, our death already waiting for us at the end of some road, known or not. And as we hit a bump on the asphalt I wonder if this is it, the end, the pinch and slit and I think of the chicken perhaps orchestrating this all, including my ride on the back of a bike and that my fate is already determined. So I lean into the warm body in front of me, full of love and life, and I smile at the structure of the universe as we move forward into the darkness.

Following the Lambs

I pull a thick blade of grass from the field and step over the mesh fence pulled taut along the top of the hill. Patches of stone are calloused white islands in the waves of sun-warmed pasture, outcroppings shorn of vibrant greenery over years of hooves and snow. Or perhaps the opposite? Maybe the sea of grass overtook the bare spots (not really bare but a jagged beauty all their own) and they are the hold-outs, the fighters, the free.

I feel the strength of millennia under my booted feet and turn west, towards the river, towards the next pasture, towards the horizon. The clouds look different here: they are distant and voluminous with pencil-etched grey hulls. All this water in different forms, even this grass in my fingers. The sliver of green fits between my thumbs, I raise my hands prayer-like to my lips and breathe deep beneath the empty spaces filled with blue sky. The chlorophyll-laced intermediary vibrates and screams a song of enclosure originating in my lungs.

A cloud-like body of fluffy white rubs up against my leg, one of his own legs bent and unused. An X on his back, bleating for milk, the lamb calls for nourishment that will soon disappear when the bag of formula is emptied, the last bottle of sugary powder measured and shaken and served. But I pretend that he wants something more, that he likes the actual me of me instead of my potential for surrogate mothering. He looks up and bleats again, my grass blade songs ignored. I drop to my knees, drop the grass to rub his soft wooly body. I learn quickly from him that I can give and receive affection even if it means something entirely different to each of us.

The shepherds move to the fence and the flock of sheep begins to crowd in, eying the lushness of the grass just behind the (usually electrified) mesh. The grass on this side has been chomped and chewed, a full day of jaw work and foamy cud-soaked lips. The flock could probably last another few days here, it seems to me (the uninitiated one), it is not devoid of all life yet. They could eat it down to the bare earth, the bugs, the stone.

But how is that healthy for anything? There are pastures yet untrod and unfertilized. It is work to get them there, to set up boundaries and take them down and set up more, to consider the future of movement, to balance the exchange of nutrients instead of utilizing a system anchored in a depletion of resources and excess of waste. It is work to keep these relationships healthy. It is work that is worth every thought and motion.

Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence? It certainly is longer, lusher, more tender than the clumps in this field. How are the sheep attracted? By sight, by smell, by knowing from where nourishment comes next? Or is it just because it is there? Would they conserve if they knew this was their home for weeks or would they eat just as much and expect something more? Are they content in the movement or is it a constant flow of anxiety?

The sheep are restless, the momentum of unfurling green strands of life pulling them forward. The shepherds unearth poles, gather mesh and metal to reveal an opening. A mass of bleats and strong legs rush in a white stream between the men, a delta of moving bodies fanning out on a half acre of new growth. Heads down, bodies finding their way, the sheep eat. They don’t see another open pasture before them, the one adjacent that they will soon devour, but they don’t need to. 

In this moment, they are content.

I wonder if I will ever be content. I wonder if I will ever be able to focus on the blade of grass in front of me instead of gazing through a cross-hatched mesh of restrictive energy, hungering for what I can’t have, what I think must be better, what I reason will fill my belly in a different way. This kind of life that has kept me running from one pasture to the next, nibbling for a moment but never truly satiated; not due to lack of resources but inability to put my head down and nourish myself with what is offered. Or sometimes lingering too long in a field well past its capacity to feed, a field in need of fallow time to recover, absorb, regrow.

Out of balance.

The limpy lamb stays by my side for a moment and I wonder if he will hold out, wait for a bottle that is not coming instead of taking advantage of the open field in front of him. But he bleats one last time and scampers off with surprising agility after the rest of the flock. Why linger in an old field when a new one is offered? He doesn’t look back.

I walk towards the uneven line in the grass where the fence once bisected the hill. I turn and look to the bare stone island surrounded by nibbled grass where I had stood. And I turn back around. The sheep don’t think to stay where there has been lushness in the past because it seems the safer, more logical option. They don’t stand, wait, long for what they don’t have out of fear. 

They move as they listen to their gut.

A body is close to mine. Not a white fluffy one but a furry faced one just the same. I smile up at the shepherd who takes my hand and walks with me into the next pasture, the greener one, where there is growth and movement and life. And suddenly I realize that like the sheep (and the shepherds) all I need to do is manage the boundaries, listen to my gut to know when it is time to move forward, and let myself cross into that nourishing wilderness when the opportunity arises.

(And, maybe most importantly, that I don’t always have to cross those boundaries alone)

Eat the Truth

It makes me anxious. Terrified really. I don’t want this to happen. I want to shield them from this reality. I want to pluck out the evidence at its source. They may be the last to know even when WE ALL KNOW. We are OK with it. Sort of. We just skirt around the issue as we chew and smile.

But They may not be OK with it. They may not want to skirt anything of the sort.

They will be excited for the day the box arrives. They will come to town with high expectations, a rumbling belly, a head full of dreams of creation and nourishment.

Fwap. Fwap. Plastic arms open into theirs. They gently expose the contents of the mysterious black box they've been waiting for all week. They pull at curly leafed lettuce and poke at the smoothly wrapped gift of cabbage. They lift up the kale to find adorable peppers and a rainbow of chard. They pop a leaf of basil into their mouth unable to resist the memories of warm summer pesto evenings. They pick out their striped tomatoes and peach-colored watermelons. They pile everything into a bag or box and say hello to all of us harvesters sitting at a table eating lunch as they make their way back to their car.

My anxiety grows. I want to warn them. But I also know that this is an important life lesson. That they need to know the facts and I can’t be the one to halt that process. I can’t be the one to pretend like it didn’t happen.

They will get home and plan out dinner. Corn will be on the menu. They will wash the lettuce for salad, chop up the eggplant to fry in olive oil, slice the tomatoes for garnish. Then comes the moment when they peel back the husks and silk and find it gorging on their dinner. Their dinner! Excrement and sloppy chewing filling the space around emptied kernels with a wriggling monstrous worm sloshing away in his own doings.

They will drop the corn and scream. They will throw the corn out the window straight into the compost pile. They will root through the rest of their box looking for wrigglers. They will never buy organic corn (or anything else from the ground) again. EVER. The farm will go out of business.

Pause. Rewind.

These are sensible, CSA, farm loving folks. They know that worms are a sign that the corn is not sprayed with pesticides, not GMO, not dripping with toxins. They know that sharing with the bugs happens, that this sweet corn is delicious to a variety of creatures.

And perhaps they want to know the truth:

Corn comes from outside!

Corn grows up from the dirt!

Corn and all the other organic vegetables inevitably have creatures crawling on them at one point or another whether you see them or not. And sometimes that one point is when they go into the boxes and go home with you.

So why the anxiety? Because I have seen those who won’t touch dirty tomatoes and shrink away from twisted carrots. I have washed my fair share of produce going into CSA boxes to ease folks into the ‘veggies come from dirt’ discovery. But I know the time is now for the link to be solidified between soil and nourishment, that there are so many who are ready for the mental hurdle that bugs on food can present. And we are helping them on that journey.

I start to have faith that these folks will still eat that corn. That they will embrace the worm (or feed him to the chickens) and devour the sweet juicy niblets. That they will appreciate the reminder that all life needs nourishment and who (or what) can resist fresh September corn on the cob? 

I look down onto my plate full of salad from the farm. 

There is a tiny green worm inching towards the edge. 

I smile and let him crawl, the worry dripping away like butter off a cob. I am no longer anxious about the effect the worm in the corn will have. I realize I am actually part of the effect, a source of positive change in this society, thanks to this farmer’s honesty. 

I welcome another creature to our table and keep on eating.

Back on the farm

Dirty fingernails, open heart.

I milked a goat for the first time today. Or I think it was the first time. She munched on molasses covered oats as I took a hand to her udder. Pinch. Rhythmic squeeze. The sound of milk hitting the inside of the metal pail. I was slightly disgusted at first. I mean, what else comes out of a body? Pee, shit, semen, snot, tears, saliva, sometimes blood. None of those are edible (those of you snickering- you know what I mean). So to see something come out of a warm body with the intention to put it in my chicory latte later was slightly disturbing.

And that is why I am here on a farm- to encounter those realities that we have pushed aside for convenience, blissful in our unknowing. We ignore the fact that steak comes from an eviscerated cow or those mushrooms were grown on manure or that the kale leaf has holes because bugs were munching away on the organic goodness. Some of us have a higher tolerance than others. But finding out where and how your food is grown, milked, processed is important. The disconnect does not serve you, the farmer, the earth.

After coming to terms with the reality of milk (and slurping down the rest of my latte- yes, the farm has a quirky tiki-like coffee bar), I harvested broccoli florets and leaves for the weekly CSA. The tiny green buds were sweet and crunchy when I popped a stem into my mouth. I could be happy all day grazing through the fields, a leaf of arugula here, a bitter dose of dandelion there. I brush the occasional bug away (I have a higher tolerance on that front) and chew the sunshine with giddiness.

I dug up baby Mizuna in a hoophouse to give the other adolescent greens some room to stretch towards the spiders in the cloth above, nestle roots unencumbered into the loose soil below. I carried trays of the travelers and transplanted the spindly spiky shoots into an open field. Dig a hole, sprinkle with fish meal and beet pulp, worm castings and ground shells. Carefully break apart seedlings and place them in smaller clumps into their new homes. Tuck soil around them, douse them with a welcomed bath of water. Wish them luck through the cold nights filled with rabbits and gophers. Repeat.

My fingernails are dirty, my belly full of milk and cheese and greens, my nose is pink with sun.  

My eyes are bright with the nourishment of the earth and community.