Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
Things have been close to perfect up here, the weather clear and calm, the tourists all gone back to wherever they came from and it has been quiet. There are moments when the Sun is just so, the light diffuse, long rows of clouds rolling across the sky right to left and the colors of the farm- the barn red, the scarlet of the maple leaves, the rust colored heifers standing in the last of the green grass, the blue smoke of apple wood drifting up through the trees around the smokehouse- appear to have some message in them.
Our oldest cow is on her way out, ditto the old boar and it is the first time since we’ve lived here that mortality has become something present and real. Slaughter has never struck me as death, but as a harvest whereas losing a beloved breeding animal to age has something of a familiarity to it.
What do we ever know? The things we experience filtered through our own personal lens, the visual, the visceral and the spiritual aspects all tied up into a single moment of presence, of witness. And so we either learn from these moments, look for the connections and the patterns that make them part of the greater fabric of life, or we choose not to.
Knowing is for each of us to decide for ourselves, I suppose. I try not to repeat mistakes, not to be careless or to do harm either through ignorance or inaction, but also to lend my hands to the bigger process that works ceaselessly around us whether we see it or not, whether it benefits us in the short term or someone else who we will never know a hundred years from now because that is all we can do.
I wonder if you see how well connected this post is to all the other pieces that went before it this week- the number 23, Muck’s friend dying, FM’s hunt with his son, the nurse and the cop- what do all these things have in common? Where does it all go and where did it all come from?
