We’re about half-way through the first wave of goat births; ten mamas have given birth to twenty kids so far. It’s an incredible experience. For the past couple of days I’ve been switching from busy CrowdVine work to baby goat arrivals and back. My brain feels like mush. I’m so fortunate that I work for a company where that kind of context switching is tolerated. Paradoxically, I find that I work harder to keep my focus when I am doing CrowdVine work exactly because it does support the other work I want to be doing.

I’m feeling on a bit of a high from working with the goats. It’s terribly interesting and I love spending time on it. I just love the animals themselves, too. Because I’m new to this, every day brings new edges to push. I’m proud of some of those moments. I’m probably most happy with my growing ability to trust my intuition. One of the things we have to do is observe the mothers-to-be and decide which ones are showing the first signs of going into labor…we bring those into the “garden”, a sort of maternity ward where they actually give birth.

I’m getting good at knowing which ones to bring in; I’m three-for-three on the ones I did all by myself. It’s a task that makes the most of my intuitive skill: my ability to look at an overall situation, and “know” what’s going to happen. Intuition isn’t a magical or psychic thing; it’s a personality trait that all of us have to varying degree. It’s an ability to make a lot of observations and tell a story about what’s happening, often without being able to even articulate what those individual observations are. The signs for a goat about to give birth are discharge, wide pin bones, full milk bag, and going off by herself. I watch for all of those things (and I don’t bring in a goat that’s not showing discharge, but sometimes that’s difficult to tell for sure). To me it often just “feels” like she’s ready, but I know what’s really happening is that I’m seeing the signs and unconsciously bringing them together.

I have the same knack for knowing when to go down to the garden to check on the ones we’ve left there. Probably I’m unconsciously developing a sense for the usual timing of things, and also probably subconsciously hearing the bleats of the mamas (sometimes, of course, I very consciously hear those bleats and know to go check.)

Watching the births has been amazing. Sometimes, when we’re there for it, I feel like we’re all physically willing the kids to take their first breaths, all of us tense and straining, “breathe!!” The baby goats get on their feet impossibly fast.

Today I watched two mamas give birth, having a bit more trouble than some of the others and needing human assistance. Watching one in particular has really stuck with me. I can still see her face, lip curled back in pain, bleating and gasping, eyes wild with pure instinct, pure feeling, a pure engagement of body in life where there really is no difference between life and death, only goat. An incredible thing to witness. I was grateful that she and her three beautiful babies lived.

I came back up the driveway tonight; wet, cold, tired, stinking, exhilarated. Grateful that the fire in my stove was still going, I sat on the floor in front of it, hugged my dog, and started to sob. It wasn’t from feeling bad, nor was it from feeling happy. It was just the enormity of feeling itself. For most of my life, I’ve discounted feeling in favor of thinking. The rational decision was always the right one. The ache in a leg or arm was something to ignore unless it prevents some desire action. The grieving of a heart was something to set aside or hide. Now I’ve done all this work to start unlocking the feeling part of my life, and sometimes, perhaps after a day of nine baby goats being born all at once, I feel like I’m just a puddle in the rain.

A rainy ridge in February in Sonoma county is a good place to be born.

Too tired to write tonight, too many commitments for tomorrow. Except for this: Life is a miracle. It’s nice to be in touch with that for brief moments.

You’ll find more photos of our kidding season rolling into this photo set; newer ones will come in at the bottom.

Last week, word was that the due date for our mama goats was February 14. When that came and went, it was said that the actual date was really February 16. And when that came and went, I heard that maybe it was the 18th after all.

How it works: the buck is put into the pen with the ladies. He begins by rubbing his head on their sides, releasing scent that makes them go into heat, usually three days later. Then he gets busy. Having been penned up for almost a year away from the ladies, he makes up for lost time quickly. The gestation period is about 150 days; usually several mamas give birth on the first day of “kidding” because the buck was so prolific at the beginning of his gig. A doe’s cycle is three weeks, so the buck stays with them for a little over six weeks so everyone gets a couple of chances. After the first day of kidding, things taper off, with babies being born for five or six more weeks.

In my impatience, I went and looked up when the buck was put into the pasture, and that was September 14. Adding 154 days to this gives us February 15. So I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m sure there are a lot of variables and I wish I understood it all better. There is so much to learn!

Usually goats here aren’t bred during their first year. However, because one or more of our bucks got out and into the “baby” pen, all of the young ones are pregnant also. And we’ve had two cases of premature twin goats. I’m tired of digging graves.

“Just wait, Terrie…it will be totally different when we have 60 baby goats here all at once.” I hope that’s true. I hope we’re prepared for it. Failing that, I hope we have better luck going forward.

In the meantime, I’ve made a good friend in the baby pen:

She’s called “Arrow” by most people here, because of a marking on her side that looks like an arrow. I sometimes call her “Blaze” because of the big white blaze on her face that sets her apart from the other goats. She’s one of the more friendly girls; often if I’m standing at the baby pen watching them, she’ll come over for pets and to try to eat my binoculars. I’ve thought about trying to buy her (all of the pregnant “babies” are for sale), but after learning that it would require separate housing and pen, I’ve mostly given up on that idea. It’s not like there aren’t already dozens of goats here available to me at any moment!

And many more to come. Soon, I hope.

I’ve wanted to write more here, but have had a hard time getting started. With this blog, I wanted to start the process of writing publicly about very personal things. But when I start to do that, something holds me back. It’s the usual stuff…afraid of what people might think, afraid it’s all too stupid to post, that it’s trite, or just that it’s wrong. A familiar reluctance to speak my own truth.

Part of the problem with that is that I often don’t know what my truth is. The past six months have been a big identity crisis for me. Literally. I have a vision of me sitting in the middle of cards facing outward, and on each card is something I am showing the world of myself. To the world, what’s on those cards is what I am. Then, some of those cards got knocked away, and then all the rest fell, and there’s just me in the center. And who is that? No idea. Honestly, sometimes I look at my own thoughts and it’s clear that I’m insane (or at least part of me is). Sometimes, thankfully, it’s thoughts I can laugh at it…no, no insane-terrie, I really don’t want to create a fake facebook man to fawn over my posts to make everyone think that I have a plethora of potential mates at my beck and call. Thanks for the suggestion, insane-terrie, maybe you can go back to tweeting for your dog now…try to stay out of trouble…

I have been in a real funk. But, that is part of what I wanted to do here in this yurt during the rainy season…to go into the depths as far as I dared, and to try to bring something back up to the light. The problems of my psyche manifest most clearly in my eating. The most useful author to me in this regard has been Marion Woodman. I’m reading Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation now and am both fascinated and horrified with how clearly she understands what goes on inside me. But still, in trying to dive deep, I haven’t yet gone deep enough, and sometimes I fear that I won’t accept the sacrifice that I’ll need to make to get there. I sit, doing nothing, unable to get the obsession with food out of my mind, trying to ask it what it really is, what the food symbolizes, and getting nowhere. In my dreams I accept what happens against my will, unable to speak up for what I want. I am served pasta that looks like snakes, and though they tell me that it’s not, some fall to the floor, and wiggle. I stab the snakes with my fork, cringing inwardly but pretending not to notice, because they’ve told me to eat it.

On Saturday, I sat outside, trying to get back to my sit-spot practice. Turkey vultures flew in close. “Go away,” I thought, “Don’t be hanging around here so closely. I don’t like it.” I tried to understand why I was feeling so morose. I have so many things to be grateful for; I have the best friends in the world, an amazing place to live, the wealth of pets and good food and beautiful climate, hyacinths blooming at my doorstep. Where had my optimism and my gratitude gone? Then I remembered. Oh yes.

It’s February.

I don’t know why the poem says that April is the cruelest month. I’m certain that February is the cruelest month. Even here, on a ridge on a sunny day, I’m unable to escape February.

On Sunday morning, I was heading out with Laika for a walk when we were called over to the house. They needed help; a mother goat had been found dead in the field.

So the four of us got the cart and went to bring her in. She was in the mud and muck, and we all grabbed parts of her so we could get her over to the gate and into the cart. I hadn’t thought clearly enough to change into my boots, and the shitty mud rose over the tops of my hiking shoes as I grabbed the goat’s collar and pulled. There is no escaping the thought that this is what they mean by “dead weight”. But we got her into the cart, and wheeled her to the driveway. There, P had us stop so she could rinse her off. I was touched by this kindness and show of respect. I ducked into the barn to check the collar number against the name list; it was Iris. P said that it is not uncommon to lose a mama goat this time of year; sometimes there are stillborn kids that are not ejected and they cause death in the parent.

We took the body to the empty field in the corner of the property, one that the bucks can get into. There, the four of us dug a grave and then worked her into it. P had us position Iris so that she looked somewhat at peace. Don Juan and Emilio came over and watched us, standing at the grave; hard to tell what awareness they had. And then we covered her up. There were a few tears, and it was ok that there were a few tears.

It doesn’t seem right to call the death of a goat a good thing. But I felt a surge of gratitude that I am here, on this piece of property, learning how to care for the goats from P. I like how she does things. I like that we respect the animals, give them names, and also accept that sometimes things aren’t pretty or ideal. It’s hard when animals die. But it is appropriate and good when we take as much care with how we see them out of the world as with how we help bring them into it, and that is one reason I like working with animals in the context of producing food. The great wheel turns.

Today was my day to feed the goats, and I watched them as they ate. Their bellies are getting big, and some of the milk bags seemed huge to me. We’ll have kids within the week, and my excitement is growing. I reported to P about the big milk bags and she smiled and told me that the older mama’s are always like that, and told me some other things to look for, and thanked me for telling her (making me feel not too bad about being such a greenhorn with all of this.)

Although February’s tend to be heavy and morose for me, they have also been times of great change. Much of that change has been positive, usually after dragging through the depths of some inner muck, and surprising me by holding the seed of something new. So I hold that hope. I don’t want much. I’m not looking to jump into another relationship or to push forward in yet another new endeavor. I’d be happy just to feel a creative spark again, enough to actually push me into an action of creating.

Well, that….and baby goats.