I'm a seeker. I've the blessing of receiving a Godshot many years ago that pulled back a veil between waking reality and wakeful reality: I believe that we're here to learn and to experience. To what end I don't know, and maybe part of it is being comfortable with the not-knowing. But I digress.
I last shared my myriad emotions and thought trails around the notion of dominion, co-existence and consumption of sentient beings, and wondered how I had stumbled and lost my place in The Circle. One of the people I'm closest to reminded me earnestly, "If those chickens were ten feet tall, do you think they would hesitate to eat you?" And that touched on something. And so I thought on that as I began this most recent job.
I thought, too, about the proximity of a mountain lion sighting just a mile and a bit from where we were to begin this job, about how I'd heard of but not seen the elusive creatures here. I thought that, actually, I'm fairly grateful for the fact.
I was contracted to build a small feature wall, some forty feet long, just a couple feet tall. The client asked that we harvest stone from the woods at the far north end of the property; the land is replete with old stone-stack walls and gullies and creeks filled with tumbled moraine. What a gift, to spend time in a distant patch of unfamiliar forest, gathering these ancient stones. Before we headed back through the fields, the client flippantly recalled that recently they were awakened by the horses at some pre-dawn hour, only to come out to see a mountain lion snooping around one of the sheds just before it ran for the darkness of the north forest. In the morning they had made plaster casts of the impressive paw prints left in the soft soil near the shed. I didn't feel the impulse to ask to see them, but loaded my truck with my partner and we headed out.
........
There's something to be said for the forest, perhaps more to be said for some that feel more remote. There's the almost silence (there's almost always something somewhere scurrying or dropping from trees), and there's the stoicism of the flora, grandeur of the trees and stones. But the space is different. The forest is not uninviting, but it's no condo either. It opens, it undulates, it turns. As we spoke to each other as we started gleaning and drifted apart, it became apparent that beyond some hundred yards it becomes shouting, nothing to contain, retain, or reverberate our words.
And just like that I was alone. Victor had headed east, I had moved down a hill to the northwest. I enjoy those moments. It's always humbling, and the return is to have returned victorious, in some small way, in some primal sense. And so I turned over stones, looking for interesting characteristics, smooth faces, flat backs, strands of quartz blazing through granite. But I kept thinking about that cat.
Moving the sheep on the ridge I have steeled myself for a bear encounter. How they behave, how to respond, hoping for the best. But a mountain lion? The thought had me a bit off balance. I understand they're not just enormous (certainly relative to a bobcat or lynx, which I have seen) but silent, something of a terrestrial shark. There is nothing I can do in this moment, I thought, that would serve me in an encounter. Just like that, I thought, it could happen. Just like that. Sparing the more grisly details of the "it", I pondered the significance of the "it". "Just like that," again...."it could happen."
The "it", I realized, is that I would be serving an unforeseen part of The Circle that I had been sleeping through. And unlike the compassionate husbandry aspects, it would likely not be fast nor without pain. I am, and we are, a part of The Circle whether we are aware of it or not, whether we choose to be or not, whether we like it or not. We can build our structures, literal or figurative, to any dimension we choose in order to keep the wolves out (or, in this case, the mountain lion), but there's no true escape from what is simply, in the end, what is. To that end, we become the soil that feeds the worm. The worm that feeds the chicken. The chicken that perhaps is incubated in a home and raised with loving hands, fed well and cared for, and eventually is killed and processed and consumed. I described the rooster fighting that has begun in the chicken yard and it's affect on the flock, and a friend said shortly and assuredly, "Ah. It's time for them to serve their purpose then."
I love my chickens, and take measures to assure that they're cared for as well as I can provide every day. We have eight warring roos currently. Three will be processed on Monday. I'm simply not looking forward to it, and I think more and more that it's okay that I never will. We are a family of eight, few of whom have any desire to omit animal from the diet. I lift stones all day: my forays into vegetarianism and veganism were short-lived and revealing. We will eat animals, and to defer the process elsewhere, for me, is farther from my God than I want to be.
I don't have to like it.
But I guarantee I'll be profoundly grateful.
beautiful words. and a wee bit scary.
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