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.

Update: the goat skull has been added — click here for an updated photo.

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.

“Tangible paradise depends on beginner’s mind, on a broken heart, and on the living earth on which we stand.”

– Wendy Johnson, in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World

It was a clear November day on Hawk Hill…just enough wind to keep the hawks moving through as we identified and counted them. We were being treated to gorgeous views of lots of adult Red-tailed Hawks in beautiful light. I was standing on the north platform, the best vantage for catching the birds as they materialized in front of us, circling and gaining height on the thermals before heading south over the Golden Gate. It was a good day; not many visitors to the hill, so it was quiet, and I could listen in on the conversation between the guru hawk watchers who practically live on the north platform during the fall migration season.

We’d spotted a set of three hawks riding the thermals and getting closer; two red-taileds and something strange (which always gets hearts racing on hawk hill). The strange shape turned out to be another Red-tailed Hawk after all, but it had a broken wing. I don’t know how it could still fly, but it did, flapping more frequently than the other hawks to keep itself aloft and on track.

All three birds approached, close in to the hill. My memory is of watching the hawk with the broken wing for a long time in my binoculars, and that the usual expert chatter on the north platform died away. I remember feeling very reverent about something very big that felt very tangible. All over the planet, numberless animals were moving south on the great energy of migration. And this hawk with a broken wing moved with it, too; it was perfectly at place in the world. Its struggle did not seem like a struggle at all; it was life.

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Wendy Johnson spoke at Stone Creek a few weeks ago; I brought her book to have her sign, and I thought about what I might ask her if I had the chance. In a section of the book called “Beauty Counts”, she lovingly relates a story of a woman consumed by grief, and that quote about “tangible paradise” appears at the end of that story. I didn’t know what my question was, but I wanted to ask something about that quote. I think I wanted to resist…”But WHY? Why does tangible paradise have to require a broken heart?” Because I don’t want to have a broken heart any more. I’m tired of feeling broken altogether. I’m tired of feeling like mush inside, mush surrounding a giant gaping hole of pain and want. I’m weary of every good mood being followed by a broken-winged crash.

It turns out that her talk (available as an MP3 here) included that very story of the woman in grief. I still don’t know why we need to be broken, but I realize that it is a deep truth. Lately I feel that my biggest problem is simply surrendering to what is. I am not in control. Migration season does not stop for a broken wing. Nor are we any less a part of life for our brokeness.

Wendy closed her talk by telling us, “Leave the wind to the wind and the flowers to the flowers. And be yourself. Be a fully alive, awake, ready, broken human being.”

What else can we be?

During the week, I had a thing to write for Sunday, and was obsessing over it way too much, especially during chores. So I tried adding a reminder to my boots.

I don’t think it helped a lot.

I like what writing does for me; I’m happy to have this way of expressing myself privately or publicly. But I don’t need to be doing it in my head the whole damn time!

Spring is continuing its crescendo over our ridge. Everywhere I look, things are blooming. Some flowers are sudden and spectacular, like the California Poppies that are suddenly there, open in the sun. Others have a more subtle entrance, like the Calla Lilies that quietly turn from green to white, until they, too, demand to be noticed, bold and graceful, luminous in the moonlight. And scores of wildflowers bloom over the landscape; the closer I look, the more I realize that everything blooms.

The garden and pasture are alive with frogs, lizards, snakes. One must drive slowly up the road at night, because the deer and foxes are on the move and seemingly distracted.

Even the wind has new energy. On Tuesday, I was feeding the goats when I heard a harsh cry, and ran from the pens to look to the sky…a Peregrine Falcon, circling above the tall trees. Our pair of Red-Tailed Hawks noticed, too, and dove on the falcon with their own cries. A few minutes later, I noticed an Osprey soaring high over the pasture. I wondered if they might be harbingers of another storm coming in from the coast, and five minutes later I smiled when the big wind blew through.

That pair of Red-tailed Hawks have been putting on their own show this spring, hovering on the wind, screaming and diving on each other, rolling in the air. If I watch them long enough, I can feel the lift and swoops and the wind rippling through my own feathers.

Here it becomes clear why the great god of spring, Pan, takes the form of a goat. The bucks battle in the pasture, Don Juan and Emilio rearing up and smashing heads, Leroy Brown pacing the fence line and looking at us with disdain…it is only a matter of time before he is over the fence and back with the girls again. And all these baby boy goats…they dance on top of their overturned feed buckets, have their own battles and hump their sisters and each other at every opportunity, wielding their obscene bodies with glee.

I had been warned that the ranch could be affecting in spring. And now I know why. We’re living in the middle of a vast orgy.

Sometimes I feel like an old crone…happy to be in that energy but somewhat removed, the rekindling of that feeling with the tang of pain that renders it so poignant.

In the winter, feeling miserable and even guilty for any pleasure I had in life, I dreamed of being invited to the dance. I held back, unsure if the invitation was really for me even though I was told it was.

Paying attention to my dreams has been one of the biggest gifts of therapy. It has given me a profound connection to something bigger than myself, something I realize I’ve been aware of all my life and yet unable to form a neat rational explanation of. Jungians call it the collective unconscious. When I look back at the dreams I’ve written down, I feel like they are like a mystical snake…partly coiled around the past, and partly coiled around the future. I start to sense the power of this something-bigger, and I know instinctively that it is not something separate from this big interconnected infinite-cycle-woven world of Nature. I could be carried away with how the dreams loop back and forward in time, but my feet on the earth (and goat manure) ground me. A voice in me says: honor that it is meaningful, but do not fix a meaning to it.

Now in the spring, my dream life changes; I am less the observer, more a participant. Released from the stranglehold of my rational mind, my dreams do not escape Pan’s influence. Who am I kidding? My conscious life does not escape it, either. It is not so simple to join the dance, yet I am happy to bask in it, to surrender to this…yes, to this higher power. To let my spirit have its feathers ruffled by the wind, and to let it do its jig on top of the overturned feed bucket.