junden.com

Not long after my sister was born, when I was two, my parents heard that a mother fox had been killed nearby and there was a litter of fox kits. My mother bundled me up so Dad could take me to see them. Somehow, we came home with one of the kits. It’s easy to imagine a toddler me, babbling with delight over the baby foxes, and somehow also easy to imagine my father giving in to the impulse to bring it home with us. Kippy became a pet.

There was also a puppy, “my” dog, Puff. They tell me that I would shuffle around the house in my footed pajamas, Kippy hanging onto one ankle and Puff the other, growling and tugging furiously as I dragged them over the hardwood floor, laughing.

As Kippy got older, she was put away after each playtime, into a pen on the screened-in porch. One day as Mom was putting her back in the pen, Kippy bit my mom. After that, Kippy had to live in a pen in the garage, and our play times were over. When I was five, we moved to another house. Kippy did not come with us. (You kne w that wasn’t going to end well, didn’t you?)

I don’t have a really conscious memory, in the usual sense, of playing with Kippy. But I know that there are feelings I have when I remember that time. Feelings of warmth, of sunlight on wood floor, and a very strong sense of play. I have an unmistakable sense of hearing a sudden noise, and all three of us turning our heads towards it. It was right and good back then to be a sensitive creature. Fox is able to remain unseen in plain view, the protector of the family. As you might suspect, I have great affinity for the fox clan.

I can’t tell you why I need wild nature, quiet places, and connection with the furred and the feathered. I only know that I do, and I need to keep remembering and honoring that, and to reject the guilt I sometimes feel over needing that as the daughter of people who never got such choices in life. I need to remember to pull myself away from the computer, the chores, the endless parade of crap that I get entangled with, my futile worrying and planning and arranging to make everything come out my way, in constant search of instant gratification or ego strokes. To get outside…out out out.

There used to be a me who had no trouble living in the here and now, a me who played with a fox and a dog, a me who was perfectly content in a perfect world.

She’s still there sometimes; I find her maybe watching a family of White-tailed Kites in a tree, or listening to the delicate sound of pelican wings overhead. She is the best part of me.

It was eighth grade CCD class…those were the classes we went to at church on Wednesday nights. We never knew what CCD stood for, but it turns out it’s “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine”, something established in Rome in the sixteenth century. Basically, it’s religious ed for those of us who weren’t attending a Catholic school.

That year, they split us up into small groups and we met in the basement of the school. I was in a class of about six kids, all of them from another school. Our instructor was the owner of Fast Eddies, a drive-through carryout store, where you didn’t even have to get out of your car to buy your beer and wine.

There was a boy in that class who was acting out a bit; let’s call him Brad. He’d make outrageous comments during class, and would draw elaborate depictions of pills and syringes on his class handouts. The other kids in the class made fun of him and informed me that he liked me. I didn’t really like him, but the idea of any boy liking me was such a novel thing, I went along with it. I drew mustaches and devil horns on pictures of the pope on my own handouts to show solidarity.

They had a retreat for junior high school kids that year, on a day when our schools were all closed for a teacher in-service day. This was 1977, and the folks running the retreat were the same folks who made the hippy banners for the church and struggled to strum their way through guitar mass. 1977 might seem a little late for that, but this was small-town Ohio…we were always behind.

During a break at the retreat, I was swinging on the swings. Brad wandered over to talk to me. As he talked, I pumped my legs harder and harder, flying higher and higher on the swing, full of nervous energy. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember not wanting anyone to see us talking.

Later, during the retreat, they split the boys and girls up, took us to different rooms for a sex ed type of session. It was painful for me; they didn’t really teach us anything, just encouraged us to ask questions. I didn’t know enough to have any questions. I felt humiliated when we were asked who had gotten their periods already; I felt that the girls who raised their hands already knew how much wiser and more sophisticated they were than me. I can’t remember what was actually discussed, but I remember being shocked by some of the candor. I couldn’t imagine not being ashamed to talk about my body so frankly.

A couple weeks later, there was a dance planned at my school. I usually went to the dances with my friends, holding out hope until the very end that a boy would ask me. I figured that this boy from CCD liked me, so I’d ask him to the dance, and somehow I managed to do that. Funny, I can’t remember how. Maybe a note? I was a coward, so probably it was a note. The year before, I’d given the boy of my obsession a note:

Do you like me? Check one and send this note back to me:

No

Yes, as a friend

Yes, as a girlfriend

The first time I put the note in his locker, he ignored it. The second time, he checked the dreaded box #2, and gave it to his friend to give back to me. I saw them talking, then the friend walked down the row in study hall and flipped the note onto my desk, saying something nasty and hateful to me.

I’m sure I was no less elegant with asking Brad to the dance.

I remembered when he did answer, it was after CCD class. He came up to me on the playground while we were going to our car in the dark October night, and I was with my brothers and sisters. I was in a panic that he would talk to me around them. They mustn’t know! I let out some horrible tirade about him being gross and of course I didn’t like him. It was if I couldn’t help myself, like I was watching myself do it from outside. I am still miserably ashamed of myself when I think about it now.

The next Wednesday, I talked to him again, and explained that I was around my family at the time and was sorry I’d said all that. He didn’t seem to mind…the poor guy was probably used to it, to be honest. But we arranged for him to go to the dance with me.

On the night of the dance, I waited in the lobby of school for him. Word got around and some of the other kids waited around also, to see who would possibly go to the dance with me. When he came in the door, of course, they all laughed. But we made a quick escape into the dark gym, and went to the top of the bleachers to sit.

He held my hand, and we talked. I felt frozen with fear and tension. There was no punch bowl at this dance to alleviate my edginess; those appeared later, in high school. My best friend and her new friend, Cindy, came to talk to us. Cindy never hid her loathing for me. They stood and talked to us for a while, then Cindy suddenly grabbed my hand and shoved it into Brad’s crotch. I was angry, but Brad didn’t seem to mind.

We slow danced during the slow songs and talked during the fast songs. He brought up the retreat and when they split up the boys and the girls and said that he thought it was wrong that they did that. He thought they should have kept us all together and that it would have been much better. I tried to change the subject.

The dance ground down to the bitter end of the evening. Brad tried to grind his erection into me while dancing, and I pretended not to notice and shifted away each time. Right here in the junior high school gym? Ew.

My dad came to pick us up at the end of the dance. We climbed into the back seat and sat next to each other, maybe holding hands. The radio in the car was broken, so we tried to make conversation all the way back to Ayersville. (My mom said later that Dad vowed to get the car radio fixed right away after that.) I can’t remember…when we dropped him off, did he give me a kiss on the cheek? I just remember being horrified by the whole experience, there with my dad. We drove away, and I climbed over the seat to sit in the front on the way home.

I didn’t really talk to Brad much during the rest of the year. Later, I noticed him in church because he became an altar boy and seemed to find religion and got more involved with the church. But we never really had conversations or were even friends after that. And for the rest of junior high and high school, I never did go to a dance with a boy. Eventually, I just didn’t go to them at all.

Despite the feelings of humiliation and shame that I still feel when I remember this story, I laugh at myself more. I’ve become an adult who’s still quite awkward in social situations. Most of all, I’m struck by the sense of isolation I felt and how I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone then about my real feelings. I’d like to time-travel back to the person I was, and to tell her, “Hang in there. You’re going to be fine. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get much, much better.”

I was happy to get a kayak back in the water on Monday, checking out Estero Americano for the first time, after over a year of no paddling at all. It took a silly amount of will for me to get over my fear and reluctance to make the effort, even knowing it would all be worth it. And it was.

I’m reading The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram. It’s been a long hard slog through this book, but I’m in a good section now, and am struck by this passage:

For the Navajo, then, the Air—particularly in its capacity to provide awareness, thought, and speech—has properties that European, alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an interior, individual human “mind” or “psyche.” Yet by attributing these powers to the Air, and by insisting that the “Winds within us” are thoroughly continuous with the Wind at large—with the invisible medium in which we are immersed—the Navajo elders suggest that that which we call the “mind” is not ours, is not a human possession. Rather, mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans—like all other beings—participate. One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through and around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligences is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.

On the water, I try to feel that. Can I break through the wall of my own thoughts, into the air around me? I have had those feelings of oneness with nature; usually, animals are involved, perhaps with a hawk with a broken wing or with an elk who shakes his antlers at me. But the feeling is fleeting. I can’t summon it up at will.

I’ve been hearing people talk about how their god or their higher power loves them. And as I paddle along, I think about this. Do I feel loved by my higher power? I dig deep for the feeling, but I find that it’s not there for me, at least not now. I’m not terribly bothered by this, but I do wonder what they are experiencing. I have a kernel of worry that maybe it’s something I need to be able feel so I don’t keep trying to make gods out of men and then seek their love.

My father spends our conversation on father’s day bemoaning my lapsed Catholism; I finally reveal to him that it’s worse than he thought…that I’m not only a non-church goer, but I’m a Buddhist, too. I finally, finally understand that he will never accept who I am. But I am quicker to understand that it is easier for me to feel compassion for a mere mortal than it is for me to have compassion for a god. He asks me to say an “Our Father”, and I don’t have the heart to tell him how often I find myself holding hands in a circle saying that already…or how that “father” part of that grates on me when I do.

The wind picks up, pushes me and the ‘yak forward, and I remember the Navajo concept of a mind as wind. I imagine that I am in my place here on the estero, breathing in and breathing out, breath mingling with the breaths of the doe with two spotted fawns under the tree, or the cries of the raven chasing the eagle who rolls to threaten the raven with its feathered talons. The air envelops me as I move through it and it also moves through me as I breathe; it accepts me and I it. Is this being loved? More questions. Always with the questions.

I put the paddle down, drag my fingers in the water as it passes through the estero and out to the ocean. I breath in and out, and I dangle my fingers, and I really am connected, via air and water, to everything else breathing this air and touching this water. What would it feel like to be loved back by it all? What am I expecting? Is it already here?

My stubborn head always gets in the way. Cut it off and set it down beside me in the water; I should have brought a rope to tow it with, let the fish nibble at it along the way. And turn my mind over to the lovely wind.

My mornings are usually too hectic to write much anymore. For a while, I was trying to get up at 4am to have time to write; now I try for 4:30, and and then there’s the snooze alarm for a few times while I try in vain to remember dreams and contemplate how cold it it’s going to be to walk to the outhouse (even when it’s not cold at all). There’s time to sit zazen, do a few other things for spiritual practice…habits I’m trying, with some success, to start my day with. Then I make coffee, look at email (rarely answering any of it anymore…sorry), and another alarm goes off. That’s the 5:45am alarm that gives me 15 minutes to wake and feed Laika, throw on the Carhartt double-fronts and muck boots, pour coffee into the travel mug and get down to the barn and milk goats.

Really, it’s a pretty good morning.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cravings, and my constant need for more, more. There are times when I am crazy with craving and have no idea what the craving is for. When I do know what the craving is for, I know that the object of my craving won’t fill the void, and yet it’s always been so much easier to give in; to check out, to succumb to the numb, with food, with alcohol, with material possessions, with accomplishments, with love or anything that remotely approximates love.

Every practice that feels right to me…permaculture, zen, Jungian psychology…tells me that I am not separate or apart from anything. That we are all profoundly connected and that it’s those interconnections that are the important thing. And when I have moments of actually feeling that, instead of trying to intellectually conceptualize it, I certainly don’t feel cravings.

The cravings require a hole, and a hole requires a boundary, a demarcation in space of some sort. “Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.” It makes me wonder if my task is not so much to avoid the impulse to fill the emptiness, but rather to dissolve the sides of the hole. To ignore the red herring of the suffering known as craving, and to instead seek to experience the interconnection.

My understanding of these things is very naive. The other day, I woke up to the fact that I really am like a 14-or16-year old driving around this self-abused 46-year old body…that parts of me must have split off at some point and just quit maturing, and now my task is to grow them up. And really understanding this, I realize how much in danger I am of making stupid mistakes. I always want to think that the rules don’t apply to me. Will I ever learn to shut up and listen to the wisdom that’s right in front of me? I’m trying, but sometimes I think I’m just going to burst into flames. I become a wad of discontent.

One of the things I’ve wanted in my life is to live closer to nature, to really feel those interconnections. Slowly, my life is being steeped in this more and more. Most days, you could ask me what phase the moon is in, and I’ll know…not because I have an app for that, but because I’m outside a lot, and waking up to the sky, the wind, the birds, the earth. The other morning, I looked forward to scanning the sky as I walked to the bathroom…I knew it was the full moon. I could even see the glow from inside the dark yurt.

But when I walked outside and turned to look at my friend the moon, something was wrong. A big lopsided bite had been taken out of her. And I remembered hearing about an eclipse.

I sat zazen with the eclipse that morning, outside with the borage, nasturtiums, and numberless beautiful weeds. The moon drifted above the fog, until slowly it was dragged down into it, as if being eaten by a giant cosmic snake.

I almost didn’t get it. I almost forgot to be grateful, to wake up to this indescribable beauty, to how incredibly fortunate I am and how easy and luxurious my life really is. The life of waking up to nature was right here and now; everything I wanted was already mine. And I almost just ran past it in my life, almost just went ahead with the next obsessive thought about some idea of something new to need.

My newest zen hero: Ikkyu, originator of the concept of “the red thread of zen”. Philip Toshio Sudo described Ikkyu’s philosophy and influence like this:

To Ikkyu, cutting off relations between men and women so as to attain enlightenment made no sense. In his philosophy of “red thread zen,” sex deepened the experience of enlightenment. No one can enter this world without being born of both a man and woman, he said; we are connected to sex by the “red thread” of blood at birth. Back and back the red thread goes, long and unbroken, to the origin of all being. We’re of sex. That fact should be embraced, not avoided, Ikkyu said.

The poems are fantastic; I look forward to reading more of them. This one is from Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, a collection of translations by John Stevens:

The Dharma Master of Love

My life has been devoted to love play;
I’ve no regret about being tangled in red
thread from head to foot,
Nor am I ashamed to have spent my days as a
Crazy Cloud–
But I sure don’t like this long, long bitter
autumn of no good sex!

For ten straight years I reveled in pleasure
houses.
Now I’m all alone deep in the dark mountain
valley.
Thirty thousand cloud leagues live between
me and the places I love.
The only sound that reaches my ears is the
melancholy wind blowing in the pines.

My ranch job is to be the morning goat milker, so every morning at 6am, I head down to the barn and greet the ladies. If it’s been a rainy night, they’re usually hanging out in the barn.

Then I head into the middle room of the barn, where the milk is stored. My first task is to put a filter sleeve onto a holder; the milk gets passed through this filter before it goes into the storage tank.

Then that piece gets inserted into the big stainless steel cylinder, and attached via a big ring clamp. Getting this clamp on is the hardest part of the whole job, especially for someone with klutzy fingers. You have to hold the whole thing up against the tube while futzing the clamp into place. Fortunately, I’m getting pretty good at it!

When that’s done, I add more tubing with clamps to feed the milk into the storage tank.

Then I’m done in this room. Time to head into the milking part of the barn! First, I make sure everything is clamped and stoppered at the the receiving tank, which has been draining after the last cleaning. During milking, the milk goes here before it’s sent to the storage tank.

As you can see, so far it’s a lot of equipment manipulation and very little goat contact!

The next step is to disconnect the cleaning cups and close all the valves, getting the milking cups ready for the big event.

Finally, I make a trip out to the grain silo and get a couple buckets of rolled barley. This gets placed in the trough; the girls stick their heads through the stanchions for their morning treat.

Finally…time to get the goats! My favorite part of the morning is greeting my good buddy, Rozena Quail.

Rozena Quail is a big half-Nubian elder, often ill-tempered with other goats, and never seems to get enough to eat to satisfy her. She gave us the only set of triplets this year and gives bountiful milk. Despite the fact that I gave her triple the rations of any other goat in the pens, she was constantly hungry. But she seems to remember that I was good for an extra scoop of grain. Every morning, she comes right up to sniff me over thoroughly and get a hug. We are souls sisters for sure.

The goats go into a holding pen. Those that aren’t on the first string wait here until their turn. We can milk up to eleven goats in a string; there are two strings on our milk line at the moment (21 milking goats).

If the girls are feeling cooperative, they run into the barn and stick their head into the stanchions and begin eating, and we lock the stanchions closed so they are held in place during breakfast.

But there are a couple more steps before the actual milking begins. Here’s the tools we use during the milking procedures:

Before we start milking, we have to strip, dip, and wipe. After the milking machine gets most of the milk, we finish each goat by hand…this helps prevent stress on the teats which can lead to mastitis.

The blue container with the brown strainer is used to "strip"…we get a squirt from each teat by hand and inspect it to make sure everything looks right. Then we use the blue cup to "dip" each teat in an iodine solution. Then we wipe off the excess iodine from each teat.

The orange bucket is used to milk out each goat by hand at the end. We dump the milk into the metal strainer, which has a paper filter to remove any dirt or hair. Then we do a final dip using the green cup, with another iodine solution.

Here’s a photo during the first dip, after the strip and before the wipe:

Finally, we’re ready to milk! There are five stations, so we milk in pairs, attaching the machine to one goat, and then moving it over to the other goat when she’s finished. (At between the last two stations, we have an extra goat, so we use whichever one is available first for her. Don’t ask me why there are eleven stanchions and five stations.)

The milking machine is quite loud! Here’s a little video of it.

During and after the machine milking, we might do herd care like hoof trimming or applying salve to chapped udders. We also finish milking each goat by hand; milking them to the very end can put extra strain on the teats and contribute to mastitis. So you have to keep a close eye on the tubes and udders during milking, to watch for when the milk flow begins to slow down, and move the cups from one goat to another until they are all milked.

After finishing by hand, the teats get one more dip in a sanitzing solution. Then the ladies are released to go back outside. Rozena, of course, sometimes wanders around the barn looking for more to eat until I lead her out. She even seems to have a knack for releasing herself out of the stanchion when she is done. I haven’t figured out how she does it, and she’s done it from mulitple stanchions. Smart goat.

I put more grain down for the second string, and the whole process is repeated until they, too, are sent out and down the ramp, back to the pasture.

I always gassho to the goats after the final string exits, grateful for their gift of milk and and the opportunity to work with them.

Then it’s time for cleaning. The big paper filters sleeve is removed and the tubing setup is reconfigured to direct the flow to and from the sink, instead of from the goat udders to the storage tank.

We put a powdered cleaner into the sink and fill it with hot water. This gets run through the entire system for five minutes.

Then it’s all drained out, and a second rinse cycle is done with “Acid Du”, an acid and deposits remover to keep the lines absolutely clean. Then everything is disassembled and left in the sink, ready for the evening milker.

The whole process, with two strings, takes about two hours.

You can also view this as a Flickr photo set. There’s a few more photos there.

I’ve been collecting materials for a memorial of sorts, and realized that today might be a good day to put it together.

Moving into a yurt did nothing to dispel my interest in traditional Mongolian culture, which started when I first heard of the Mongolian eagle hunters. One of the things that fascinates me the most about the Mongolian nomads is the place that animals have in their lives. Certainly they use animals for food, clothing, and other goods, but animals seem to be very important in the spiritual realm as well.

I found some photos of Mongolian monuments to horses….there’s one here (scroll down), and a great one here.

My version is a bit more stylized. You might notice that there isn’t a goat skull here…I have a nice one that I’ll be adding above the sheep ram head. J brought me a nasty gooey goat head about a month ago, and with a few more weeks in the compost pile and it should be ready to hang. (J shakes his head and laughs about making my wish come true with such a loathsome object…J is a good guy. He also gave me the sheep skull.) The bottom skull is of a cow, and I’ve had it for years.

It’s memorial to the animals of the ranch, past and present; a way to remember the ones that we’ve eaten or buried, and to the wind that enlivens us with their spirit.

Last week, we got the milk line rolling, finally. It’s been interesting to see how this milking process works.

First we cleared the pasture of non-pregnant goats. Then we picked the ten goats who kidded first, plus Dahlia, and moved them to the main pasture without their kids. (Dahlia had a stillborn kid, so we’ve been hand-milking her to keep her milk in so she can be on the line.) Boy babies were sent to one pasture, and girl babies were put into pens in pairs. The girls are bottle-fed, not because they still need milk, but because we want to imprint them and get them as tame as possible. They’ll be on the milk line themselves in two years. I’m told that many goat dairies separate kids from their moms just a couple days after they’re born. These get the “luxury” of being with mom for a few weeks.

The milking barn is full of dairy equipment to automate the process of milking, and I dreaded the first day. Since they didn’t milk last year, the equipment has been unused for almost two years. We cleaned it up, but I had little faith that it would work. I did not feel better when it turned out that we were missing parts and could not use the machinery. Our first day of milking, Sunday morning, was all done by hand. Already dealing with carpal tunnel issues, I was nearly in tears when we finished. It wasn’t even so much the strain, but knowing that we’d have to repeat the process Sunday night and then Monday morning before the dairy machinery guys could make it out to our site.

The whole process had also been a group project, with four or five of us trying to piece together machinery and figure out (or remember) how it all works. It was really painful for me. I get grumpy and irritated, fast, especially when I’m tired and haven’t had the chance to take care of myself. I was (and still am) in dire need of some quiet nature time, some time to take care of my introvert. Being aware of it helps.

Somehow, parts were found on Sunday afternoon, and we miraculously finagled the equipment to work and were able to milk by machine on Sunday evening.

P. tells stories about days past, when all milking was done by hand. How they’d almost drowse, face against in the warm side of a goat, listening to classical music. She suggested that maybe we could get a radio. I’ve had fantasies of having the quiet barn to myself and the goats in the mornings, listening to the birds outside. I’d already decided to leave the radio off. It will be so peaceful…

It turns out that milking equipment is REALLY LOUD. It’s all air compressor and engine and pumps…well, I really don’t know what all it’s made of, but there is a fierce din. I can’t imagine trying to play a radio over it! However, I can certainly sing my lungs out to the goats if I want, because no one will be able to hear me.

The week wore on; more hours, both in the morning and evening, and more equipment failures add up to a general feeling of exhaustion, but thankfully I’m in a pretty good place with that. I take naps when I can. My days now start with the alarm going off at 4am…if I want to keep some of my morning time for myself (and I do…it’s my most creative time by far), I have to get up early enough to be at the barn and ready to milk at 6am.

One equipment failure was caused by a goat who became tangled in the hoses and tore off part of the air compression system, which meant another round of hand-milking. So often I am reminded of Temple Grandin’s book, Animals in Translation. We’ve changed procedures, and let the goats out of their stanchions one-by-one now, guiding them gently around the hoses. I really enjoy working with the goats in this way and tending to their care while we’re milking them. I picked more calendula this weekend to make more salve for their udders, and it’s very satisfying how we’ve been able to heal the ones who showed irritation from their babies nursing them mercilessly. I think the machine may actually be more gentle…those babies can bite hard!

Last night, we separated another set of babies and mamas, and will be adding a second string of goats to the line this morning. The second string includes some of the two-year olds…these are goats who have never been on the milk line, and some (Madrone, in particular) are quite wild. I’m pretty apprehensive, but am sure I will enjoy the challenge. Later in the week, we’ll add another group, and then hopefully we’ll be able to ease into a regular schedule where I”ll have evenings off.

Life is hectic, busy, and tiring. But I’m reminded regularly of so many things I am grateful for, not the least of which is for this very experience of being so busy. There are not many places for a woman in her 40’s to get such a hands-on education in work like this, and I am grateful every day that P. took a chance on me.

April 8: I’m in bed, hearing coyotes (perhaps I really was; they’ve been singing a lot). Laika is in bed already, down at the foot of the bed. I pull back the covers to let in my wolf, a tall rangy light-colored (not quite white). He curls up in bed with me.