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.

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.

Gratitude

Summer. I am watching sun filter through old planks of a barn, prayer flags faded and torn, old couches softly decaying in still light. My desk is an old board nailed to sawed off two by fours, light green paint chipping and floating to join the pine needles and crunchy leaves on the dusty floor. Mosquitoes fill the evening-lit air with motion; a thousand specks of life and movement, no reason, no destination.

I am full of gratitude for this past week (and for this year, this life, but I will be specific in an effort to name my joy). This is how:

I am grateful for home-made, home-picked blackberry pie bubbling over and through buttery crust pressed into a cast iron skillet and the smell that fills the house as it bakes.

For the voices of a dozen men and women gathering on the front porch last night to do nothing but sing melodies and harmonies, sing for singing’s sake, sing for the pleasure of listening.

For a discussion at a potluck on that same porch nights before that ended with a promise to think about shooting deer in her backyard to dress, store, and eat for the winter. And how many island gatherings have had conversations centering around self-sufficiency and efficiently and sustainably maintaining an omnivorous diet in non-conventional (but really traditional) ways.

For a swing in the trees that makes my stomach drop every time as my body flies out of the forest and over the road far below.

For telling fantastical stories after the candles are blown out, the darkness ringing with bright laughter. And singing softly to sleepy ears upon waking.

For a house full of lovely people who grow vegetables and make food and call for community in so many different ways.

For the opportunity to open myself ever more deeply to love and connection in all of its various forms.

For bone broth soup made with beef from cows raised less than a mile away and veggies from the garden I help to grow.

For dolphins (porpoises?) surfacing in the sound as my kayak paddles touch glassy cold water. 

For dancing and running and leaping on the beach reminding me that all we are meant to do in this life is have fun and that fun comes in many different forms as does love and pain and growth.

For a tree rotting from within shepherded reverently from sky to ground.

For sleeping outside underneath the stars, underneath a bright moon, circled by a quiet army of trees, circled by quiet arms.

For sipping dream tea in the evenings, laps covered in quilts, bullfrogs shouting stories across the pond, owls questioning everything.

A Walk through the Fall(ing) Woods

I should not have been in the forest. 

When I first stepped in I tilted my head skyward, eyes fixed on branches 200 feet above the mossy ground below my feet. I grew dizzy as the tips of hemlocks and cedars swayed and shuddered in the river of wind dampening all other sounds in the forest. Old limbs creaked and crumbled under my boots scattering compost into the soil. New limbs creaked and split above me showering lichen into my hair. 

I breathed in the movement, smiled at the dance of the forest, and kept walking. 

I walked and breathed and swayed with the trees. My deafening thoughts competed with the rumbling of twisted limbs through turbulent air. Then quieted as I climbed the hill and gasped at the beauty of a thousand tiny mushrooms, their bright orange caps like braille spelling out Mystery on a rotting log.

I heard it from the clearing. 

I had backtracked from the path to find this little shelter in the woods. “Frolicking meadow,” I think the sign proclaimed when I last visited. But the sign was gone and evergreen branches lay strewn across the grassy field. Yellow leaves littered the wooden platform where an Adirondack asked for my company. The planks soft with this week's rain, the seat squeaked a greeting and attempted to soak memories of once being a forest into my skin. 

Summer frolicking officially ended.

Crack shudder whoosh bassdrum. 

I assumed a truck from the distant road hit a pothole. Or backfired. Or dropped a huge trailer of something very, very, heavy.

The wind picked up again, the trees around the clearing danced frantically, a moss-covered branch landed near my foot. 

I knew it wasn’t a truck. 

I knew I should probably get out of the woods.

If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? 

Yes. I was that somebody there to hear it. 

I packed up my journal and took one last long look at the coniferously-tipped horizon, distinct grey clouds hurrying by on their way to the sea, perhaps late for a celestial Thanksgiving dinner. I was about to run a gauntlet and I wondered how long a tree takes to fall. How big of a branch it takes to kill a person. With how much of a concussion could I stumble out of the woods.

The tree trunk was broken in six places. Fresh jagged chunks confettied the surrounding ferns. The trail, the one I had backtracked from 20 minutes before, was now partially obstructed by this newly fallen tree. This newly fallen pretty damn big tree. Definitely out of “concussion” territory and in “full blown dead” realm if we’re talking diameter. Right on this path where I had stood. Not next to the path, or 50 feet from the path, but Right On The Path, following the trail with its broken body like a dis-jointed toy snake.

Now, I’m not usually one to hide at home in fear of being hit by a random bus or struck down by lightening. Hell, I go to sea for a living knowing that once you are Out There, there is very little  control (as in None) you have over nature. Anything can happen. But for some reason walking through the woods on a thoroughly windy day seemed like asking for a (large jagged) stick on (in?) the noggin.

I skirted the newly fallen pretty damn big tree and listened to the thousands of shaking leaves around me as I sidestepped blushing mushrooms and flooded dips in the path on my way home. I sang and skipped and smiled my way to the road where I live, the lingering anxiety dissolving as I stepped into a nearby clearing. I raised my hands to the branches and gave gratitude for the reminders about flexibility and impermanence and the unknown consequences of simply going for a walk. Simply being alive.

How quickly does a tree in the woods fall and if so, can you hear the sound if standing directly below that tree? Today I didn’t need to be the one to find out. 



(but if it had been my day to be smashed by a tree, I would've gone out with deep gratitude in my heart and an overjoyed sense of a life well lived.)

It is a Day of Deep Thanks:

I am grateful for being alive, not just Not Being Smashed by a Tree Alive, but Living a Very Amazing Life Alive.

I am grateful for the woods and wind and water that surround me.

I am grateful for my community of friends and family; those who I already know and those that I have yet to officially meet.

I am grateful for my strong, healthy body (especially when I need to get the hell out of the woods).

I am grateful for all the wild blessings in my life and for my gut leading me to more and more every day.

In Waves

It happens in waves.
The ocean is calm out there but the waves crushing pebbles on the shore don't know this. It foams and leaps and dissolves into the cracks between the grains, it drains into the depths and remembers itself among the fish and kelp. 

Old patterns twist and turn and snake through my head and sink through my shoulders into my lungs, absorbed into my heart. They slip through fluttering aortic valves and shimmy through capillary walls down into my gut where the truth lies. I digest or vomit them out, depending on the taste and time.

It happens in waves.
The fog rolls in skipping over ripples, over seagulls, over sunburnt children playing tag with the surf. The fog envelops us all and blankets us in quiet and hope and giddy melancholy.
I can't see all of you next to me. Could I see all of you before?
The fog makes us doubt who we are, who we were, but makes us want to run headlong into crashing froth of salt and water and life and be blanketed by water crystals above and below the surface.
You evaporate into the dimming mist and the who you were is unclear.


My heart jumps into my dirty-cuffed sleeve. I smile into the absence around me. The nothing filled with everything. I am reaching into my heart to pull out the sound of love, of peace, of gratitude. I know the hand I really need to hold is my own.

It happens in wind and sand and fog.
It happens above the surface and below in the depths.
It happens when I stop to scribble a note about a sunset and a stranger starts a conversation about words art connection faith karma.
It happens when I am quiet and break my heart open to listen to myself.
It happens in waves.