Life and Death

It's been a while since I've written, so I thought I'd make up for it with some really intense subject matter--Life and Death.  I used to have the impression that farmers were people who made life happen--farmers help plants and animals to grow and thrive, so that the people who eat them can grow and thrive.  And this is true.  I understand myself as a food midwife, ushering zucchini and eggs and cheese and jam into the world.  But farming is undeniably also about death.  There's a lot of casual death around here.  Out in the garden, where we are helping the tomatoes and carrots and beans to grow, we pull out any plant that we don't want there, starve it of water and nutrients, and throw it on the compost heap to rot.  The beautiful red beetles that were munching on the potatoes last week were smashed under my boot by the handful.  Of course, too, we know that the turkeys that I've fallen so in love with will be dinner come November, and that we are raising two beautiful calves that will likely be dinner too, and that soon we have to slaughter a couple of roosters because we have too many of them.  I know that life and death is everywhere in the world, but the interplay between them is so close to the surface here on the farm.  Yesterday it bubbled up right in my hands.  We had a little chick, two or three weeks old, who couldn't walk.  Something had gone wrong with his or her legs, and the poor little thing would flop over every time it tried to stand.  We tried nursing it, separating it from the others and giving it its own food and water, making little splints out of pipecleaners... but none of it worked.  The Chick sat in one place for a day and a half, unable to hobble even to the dish of food we'd put out for it.  And so we had to kill it.  I know that I kill mosquitos all the time, and weeds, and that I've eaten meat for most of my life and so am implicit in the killing of animals, but this was the first creature that I've had to take in my hands with the implicit purpose of ending its little life.  I could feel it breathing, and hear it chirping, and he relaxed in my hands when I turned him on his back and through my tears I had to twist its neck.  I don't think I was decisive enough--it kept breathing, chirping, flopping.  Brendan gave it a few more twists and we left it on the compost pile and went to eat breakfast.  And our lives go on.  One becomes very aware, on a farm, how much our living is tied up in dying--not just our own eventual deaths, which color everything, but the little lives extinguished for our survival--or even just our comfort--every day.  It's enough to make one stop and think, isn't it? 

The World is Round

When I place my hands
on the ground, side-by-side
(here, like so)
and if I sit very quietly
and hush all the music in
my head I begin to feel
the earth in its bulk.
Below this grass is soil.
below that rock, and water,
and magma, tectonic plates,
a giant, shifting world moving
in its own idea of forever.
And below that is china,
or India where there are people
walking and loving and touching
the ground with two hands,
like-so.
And all of us--the
spider crawling on my leg,
the jack pine and its shy seeds,
the Chinese lovers and me
are turning constantly
away from the light and then
towards it, like a dance.
like so.

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I'm leaving for India on Saturday. Wow.

Open Eyes

Something I want to have is open eyes-- to see the world really, and not to let it pass over my head. John Cowan, whose book "Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians" I've been reading, talks about delusions-- the ideas we have about things that, in our minds, replace the things themselves.

Tonight as I was walking to a meeting it was snowing lightly. I saw it, said to myself "wow, that's beautiful", and then kept right on walking-- head down against the cold, trying not to slip on the ice, not wanting to be late. I wish that I would have stopped and SEEN the snow for what it was, without automatically categorizing and dismissing it. I think winter is a good time to practice living with open eyes-- stopping, looking, seeing doesn't come as automatically now. It's so much easier to walk with our heads down-- to avoid seeing, and thus to avoid pain, to avoid beauty, to avoid what might, ultimately, be real.