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.

My Reality

 

A plume of salt and spent air and force crystallize the sky.

Inhalation. 

Focus on the curly edges of the kale leaves, I told myself (over and over) when she said, “You keep bringing emotion into this. Just stop. This is reality!” She listed off all the ways in which I was CLEARLY not within the realm of which she spoke. The leaves blurred into the wooded horizon as my anger and resentment welled up and overflowed in a tirade of words. 

 

This was not my intention.  

Teeth clenched, fins in motion.

I wanted to be calm, non-reactive, mature, but in the heat of the moment the thirteen-year-old in me leaped into (re-)action. The thirteen-year-old that was grounded for unfounded reasons and spent weeks writing dark poetry in her room. The girl that was told she was a spoiled brat for being independent and doing what she wanted. That was full of vitality and creativity and wide-scoped dreams and was (is) mocked for “being dramatic." 

Deep buried resentments spy-hopped at the surface. An ocean of relationship rippled and shook.

Instead of breathing into the pain, doing my shadow work and all that woo (goodness), I yelled back, teeth bared. I accused, I cried. I’m not proud of this, but it happened. My head spun with all that I wanted to say, how I wanted to be understood. But how can you be heard if the other doesn’t want to listen? How can I keep my heart open to others who have closed theirs so tightly, especially when my throat is tight and my hands are clenched and I'm yelling and I really really really don't want to be but I can't seem to help it? 

And what the fuck is reality? 

I am breathing, feeling, living every day and every day is real. My dreams, thoughts, and emotions are real. Even my fanciful imagination is real. So when I am told that I am not living in reality, I am confused. This confusion has been happening my whole life. From theater school to traveling around the world to living and working on boats to living on an island and growing my own food, I haven’t lived a particularly mainstream life, but this has no bearing on whether or not it is real. 

I am real therefore my life is real. Reality.

Flukes in the air, diving deep into the dark, thoughts swim and circle around reason. 

After the pain and sadness slowly receded alongside the anger (not disappeared, but ebbed enough to breathe), I have been able to see this flood of emotions as a call to contemplation: what do I believe about myself and my world? I know that what anyone else says or thinks about me is none of my business, that accusations strike a nerve in this way only when there is doubt within myself about my skills, intelligence, about how I live my life. 

What a gift to have this brought to light, I say through gritting teeth and tears.

So. What do I believe? What is real to me?

Here is the reality (in this moment) that I create:

People are good. I don’t want to believe that everyone is out there to fuck me over. If that what is supposed to make me a good business person, then I don’t want to participate in that kind of business. I’ve built my businesses on love, connection, and beauty. There is no need to be nasty, just honest. If we could all just be honest about what we need a lot of the nastiness would be avoided. This is what is real to me.

I live in a place where I can grow a lot of my own food and buy/trade for the rest from neighbors. This is not an idealistic or a hippie lifestyle. I’m not sure what being a hippie actually is. I do wear dresses in the garden and have potlucks and craft nights on occasion. Does that make me a hippie? If growing your own food is hippie, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is other than co-dependent capitalistic matrimony (in which I am woefully still engaged to a degree). Growing one’s own food and buying locally is much more practical and sustainable than relying on the industrial food system for far less nutritious food. It is also far more “traditional” than how the majority of Americans live presently shopping at Target and Costco and buying strawberries in January. Growing food is not a luxury. It takes hard work and planning and effort. The callouses on my hands are real. The kale and garlic on my dinner plate are deliciously real.

I enjoy my work. Whether it is sailing or cooking for other people, I like how I spend my waking hours. Not 100% of the time, but much more often than not. I have worked hard and created this way of life for myself instability (flexibility) and all. Sometimes it feels like I just fell into these passions. I believe that is what happens when you say Yes to what you love. And it is not that simple and easy and the bumps along the way are reminders of this, but those bumps are meant for refinement and growth. I want to spend my time doing something I feel strongly about in the way that positively affects the world. For me, cooking with food from my garden and from smaller farms in my area is revolutionary. I start and join in conversations about nutrition, local economies, self-sufficiency through my job. And I eat well, too.

I am not in the camp that JOB must equal SUFFERING. This is my reality.

I love what and whom I love. I might not get society’s approval but I cannot follow what this society implies I should love. Or whom. Age, gender, profession, appearance…my heart chooses and I am learning to follow, to let the judgments fall away and keep my heart open to the infinite possibilities of love. Why impose restrictions when the world is infinitely generous? This is realistic.

My reality is based on love and emotion. This is what makes us real, just like we learned in the Velveteen Rabbit. This is what children inherently know. I don’t want to shut my heart off in order to be “successful” because in my eyes that is a very empty success. And unnecessary. I wouldn’t be able to write or connect with people or cook beautiful food without this love, without this openness for emotions. This is my reality.

I’m sailing to Alaska in a month and, I admit it, am scared about dying. About my life changing. Of leaving a comfortable farmhouse for rough seas- what's the point? This is what is bringing me alive in this moment. I am immersed deeply in the contemplation of my life, realizing what is most important to me, accepting who brings me alive and who drains my vitality and how I can release the latter. I could die, this is the reality, but this is also the reality every single (safer?) day of my life. Or your life. My question is: can I die with an open heart, whenever and wherever that may be? Death is real.

I surface again, nicked fins, broken teeth, full belly flopping into oncoming waves. 

I am in love with my magical, fantastical life. It hurts sometimes, too. But I choose to believe in the full range of feelings and possibilities, that we are here to create and love and play and swim through it all. This is my reality. 

What’s yours?

On Fear

I have been reading about fear. I have been absorbing the notion that what we fear most is not necessarily the harm that could befall us, but more so the bodily reaction to fear, that anxiety and sense of losing of control. I have read that we need to accept the actual feeling of fear because the circumstance doesn’t really matter much. You cannot stop potentially painful things from happening (car crashes, violence, falling off a cliff) just because of your fear of those things happening.  I mean, sure, you can lock yourself up at home, but what if there is an earthquake that takes down the house or a brown recluse hiding under your pillow? You are still full of fear, even hiding under the covers. 

We are a fragile fabric of skin held up by breakable bones and powered by a mechanical system programmed to eventually fail. So why did this finite system program fear into the mix? For our safety? Or so that we can learn how we move through the world?

And in this book I am reading it also says that we have basically the same physical symptoms with fear and falling in love. Fluttering heart, lack of breath, time stops. They are the same. It is simply the perception that differs.

I think of sailing. How I push myself every time I step onto a boat. How the loss of absolute control has become a standard in my life. Perhaps I compensate in other areas on land for this lack of control when I am at sea. The ridiculous thing is that I am no more in control on land but it is not so immediately obvious among the houses and cars and perfectly ordered cans of beans on grocery store shelves. The straight lines and speed limits lead me to believe there is order, that we have covered Nature over with smooth dominance and therefore we can function in predictable ways. 

There are no straight lines at sea. The horizon is curved, flying fish arc above and below the surface, even becalmed water holds circular movement. Fear is transformed into alertness as every moment changes the course. Out there it is visible. Out there, I have been scared, for sure, but the ocean doesn’t allow for the what-ifs to accumulate for very long. The blank canvas of the sea makes anything possible and so those what-ifs spill over and color the sunsets with their oranges and reds. In a place that may seem more dangerous, fear is replaced with a horizon-less love.

Then I think of living on land and all the complications that arrive with this choice. Taking care of a house and animals. Having a job to pay for such things. Making time to do the things I love (like writing and cooking and sailing). And the fear creeps in. How can I be more scared of this ‘stable’ life than a squall at sea? Is this why I need my dose of sailing, to remind me of that fearlessness? Is this why I am so adamant about sailing to Alaska, something that truly scares the shit out of me? Or will this simply be another adventure in a long line of adventures, a way for me to feel alive, special, but no more the wiser or stable? I sit and stare and worry, brain spinning, hands still.

So I go into my kitchen and cook. I go to my laptop and write. I go work on the boat or go for a swim. Instead of standing on the cliff and fearing the fall, sometimes I actually jump. Not all the time, but I am learning to jump, fall, release and let the love rush in.

When we face our fears, be it a rogue wave or a husband waving me home, we face death and we face life. We are always alive…until we aren’t. And no amount of fear will ever change that reality. So jump. Live.

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)

Down the Shadowy Hatch

“Adjustable wrench. And ¾ socket. Fuck those guys.”

I hand Captain L. the tools and nod in agreement. “Those guys” from the boatyard are now 700 miles south of our stern and are the reason we are tossing about the ocean without the ability to steer. They repaired the rudder this winter but weren’t necessarily the most fastidious of workers. Fuck em. But cursing them doesn’t help our situation now. So L. is crammed in the stern compartment of the boat where the rudder post and steering cables do their magic. Or in this instant, don’t, because something slipped out of place and now has to be jacked up and tightened. But even with loosening and tightening, hammering and shivving, something’s still wrong and the steering quadrant is hitting a bolt and preventing the rudder from going to port so here we are doing circles to starboard 100 miles off the coast of Jersey. 

Our autopilot quit working on the second stormy night and the navigation instruments keep shutting off at crucial moments. Half of the navigation lights shorted out. We lost the dinghy that was being towed behind. I lost my favorite hat overboard. L. continually tells stories about the last delivery where the engine crapped out. What else can go wrong? He wonders if the rudder has slipped down (if it slips all the way down and out of the boat it means we start sinking) but quickly abandons that thought at closer inspection. 

My first thought is: I am so glad this didn’t happen last night when the wind was blowing 35 knots and the seas were choppy 10 footers and the squalls dumped rain on us for hours straight and if we had been spun around in circles it would have been a Very Bad Scene. 

My second thought is: SeaTow! If we can’t get this fixed then we can get towed into port. I’m pretty sure they come out this far.

“Crow bar. Hammer. This better fucking work.”

I am looking down into the compartment full of sturdy metal plates and tubes and cables. The aluminum hull of the boat curves to meet the deck where I sit, a pile of tools next to me glinting in the sun. The breeze is light rendering our sails useless, the swells are gentle but still cause the boat to sway with every glassy crest, the smell of the briny water of the North Atlantic teases us about how close to port we have come. We are just below the shipping channels of New York Harbor and the chatter of cargo ships and fishing boats dominates the radio. 

And here we float. 

I want to help somehow so I hand down tools and give words of encouragement. I don’t talk of sinking or SeaTow. I ask questions about the mechanisms in the shadows and try to absorb as much as I can about fixing quadrants. I want this to be fixed quickly but I know that these things take time. The old “hit it with a hammer” or “just caulk it” or “just wait and see if it fixes itself” solutions aren’t usually actual solutions. They are ways to put off the inevitable repair or replacement or abandonment of something that isn’t working. 

In my own personal life I often avoid the real work of sitting down with the parts and pieces, taking the time to tune into the true damage at hand. Like my experience with a broken transmission whose insides were decimated by vibration: it wasn’t because of a faulty transmission but due to the engine mounts not being secured properly to the boat. It was a foundational problem, not a defect in mechanics. No matter how many times the transmission is replaced, if you don’t get to the core problem, the health of the whole system is compromised. 

“It’s not perfect, but hopefully it will get us in.” 

L. climbs out through the hatch and wipes sweat from his sunburned forehead. He’s grumbling but I can tell he’s proud of his repair. I carry the tools over the deck and down below to the canvas bag where they will wait patiently for another breakdown. This being a boat, that won’t be long. 

I step out on deck, look out to the blue sky empty horizon, and decide that I don’t want to jury rig my life anymore. I don’t want to immediately call for someone to come and save me when there is really no danger, no need to be saved. I am ready to break out the tool box and sit with the problem until I can truly see what is broken. I am ready to tinker and try different angles, different tools and call in the experts for help if need be. Storming away from my problems hasn’t worked so far, so I’m ready to turn around, lower myself into that shadowy hatch, and get to work. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and get greasy in this life.

I take the helm and steer us north. Back towards land, back towards “real life” where I will get a chance to pull out my tools one by one and tinker and try.  

And steer this life of mine. I cannot rely on Autopilot anymore.