Nov 26
Fat white flakes falling this morning, sky grey as smoke, and the snow lying thick on the yard, going crick underfoot with that satisfying crunch that tells you that it would pack into a perfect snowball…A white goose beat his wings in the white snow, suddenly, like a very small archangel…
The barn is warm this morning, filled with hay and the breath of animals, all bleating and mooing and wanting their breakfast. We’ve heard from the National Trust Farm in Cambridge, and they’re going to sell us their Anglo Nubian billy, hooray! Rich will set out on the day-long drive to pick it up on Monday, (weather permitting!) while I stay home and wrangle children, animals and farm chores. I wish I could go with him to pick it up, but someone needs to stay behind and feed all the waiting mouths…
Rich has been eyeing up new meat mincers on the Internet. The new one that we bought last year to make sausages out of the pigs got stripped entirely of its shiny protective coating when we put it in the dishwasher, leaving it ashen grey and coming off in dark prints on our hands – not reassuringly food grade! So we need a new mincer…before we can slaughter the pigs…before we can repair the pig shed roof…before we can convert the pig shed into a billy goat boudoir.
I’ve apologized to Joli for not being able to raise her in a more wholesome environment, but there it is. We’re going to sell goaty sexual favors for money. We plan to become the red light district of the goat community. I have images of the billy goats wearing flower leis and gold chains, hanging out in a Jacuzzi, welcoming in the visiting nannies…and I fancy myself in a bustle, like an old fashioned madam….
I’ve just read something so lovely that I want to write it down whole, so that I can try and understand it. It was written by Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, a Dominican nun who lives on a place called Genesis Farm, where they practice something called “sacred agriculture.”
Sister MacGillis starts with this quote, from Vincent McNabb, O.P.: “If there is one truth more than any other, which life and thought have made us admit, against our prejudices, and even against our will, it is that there is little hope of saving civilization or religion except by the return of contemplatives to the land.”
And then she says this: “If we understood the earth as a living being whose activities are to nourish, govern, learn, heal, regenerate and transform itself, then the mystery at the heart of human existence would open us and draw us into the sacramental aspect of our lives through the most ordinary and familiar ways…If we were to accept the Earth on the terms and under the exquisite conditions in which it continues to evolve, the role of the farmer would be raised to the most honorable and sacred human profession… farmers might understand themselves as acting in something akin to a prophetic and priestly role. We need to see farmers as entering the sanctuary of the soil and engaging the mysterious forces of creation in order to bless and nourish the inner and outer life of the community they serves. Villages, towns and cities surrounded by farms practicing sacred agriculture would begin to regain the elemental prosperity of pure air, water and diversity, and the possibility for health and vitality. The attention farmers would pay to the rhythms of the celestial world could re-inspire the artists and poets. The music and texture of “place” would be grounded in the great seasonal cycles by which the human has been fashioned in our longing for communion with the mystery at the heart of the world…There is nothing that does not participate in this deep sacramental presence. The soils, the microbes, the animals are all holy, are all revelatory. Understanding the Universe in this way has the capacity to transforms our obsession with control and power. Let the contemplatives return to the land.”