#5: Will you weep for Gwynn and Adam?
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
This is the fifth in a series of letters back and forth between myself and my friend Sam Bliss, which we have titled the Anarchist and the Animist in Conversation. Number four, The Ship, is a doozy. You can find that letter from Sam HERE. Thanks for your interest.
With great care, Adam
Dear Sam,
Snow arrives, warm and wet, a heavy blanket laid atop squishy and saturated ground. The water level nears the top of the well now, risen from rounds of snowmelt and strong Winter rains. Light winds allow the Sheep Flock to remain outside. Yesterday, after a long day of work on the book, I walked up to check on the Ewes. Four legs in the air had me over the fence and fast to her side. Gwynn is still breathing, so I roll her over and coax her to her feet. She can barely stand, and her head, which was downhill, is deformed with swelling and stained brown from her many failed attempts to right herself. At this time of year, their wool is fully grown, which means two things. They are very itchy, and they can get stuck on their backs when they try to scratch themselves by rolling. Unlike cows, sheep will not die quickly on their backs. But as I look of Gwynn, I can tell you she wouldn’t have survived the night. And then I realized that I hadn’t checked on them the day prior either. I had taken my first trip away from the Farm in weeks, and returned after dark.
These are the hardest moments for a shepherd or herdsman. When you know you’ve abandoned your post. I’m sure any parent could tell you something similar. The pit in your stomach will take your appetite away in a hurry. I stayed with Gwynn for an hour or so. Her left side was mud-stained as well, and both of those legs struggled to keep her up. Maybe the pressure on her hip and shoulders had pinched a nerve? I put some hay in front of her, and to my immense relief she began to eat. She may have been without feed for nearly two days, during which time an inch of Snow fell on her exposed belly and legs—the only place she doesn’t have waterproof wool. This morning Gwynn is chewing her cud. The swelling in her face has disappeared. She walks over to ask for a scratch between her shoulder blades—the same spot she was trying to reach by rolling on her back. I push my fingers through her wool until they reach the warmth of her skin. And I scratch and scratch and scratch.
Your last letter has been simmering in my imagination for weeks now. You close with the question, “What shall we do about the real-life rulers?” I’m almost a hundred pages into the first draft of the book, and I keep thinking: “Here is the response to Sam’s question.” And then, in the next chapter I think it again. It’s been hard to hold back so many pages of writing from friends and loved ones. And yet, in their raw form those pages are a lot to wade through. I will try to offer a couple of snapshots here.
When I found Gwynn on her back, slowly dying, I lost my appetite for a time. The trip away from the Farm that left her to scratch her own itch was precipitated by spilling coffee on my laptop. For a couple of weeks after that fatal coffee spill, I tried using an older computer, but it froze with enough frequency that I feared losing important files. Each time I buy something like a computer or phone I approach my breaking point. As you’ve described, staring your complicity in the eye can be very painful. In this case, the compound fracture was that my trip to the city for another bag of dope nearly cost the life of one of the founding Ewes of the Gift Flock. Gwynn and her twin brother—whose body provisioned the first Gratitude Feast—were the first Lambs born at Brush Brook Community Farm. In fact, the Farm didn’t find its name until Gwynn was several months old. The generous arc of her life traces the narrative arc of the story I am trying to write down. She was the first lamb born within the boundary we drew around a small patch of ground along Brush Brook: Nothing would be sold. Nothing. That boundary gave birth to a Farm and now attempts to give birth to a book.
I lost my appetite yesterday because I knew I could have done more to keep her from harm. I had abandoned my post. For four years now I have asked the nonhumans who are my immediate neighbors, every day, “How can I be of greatest service?” They often respond, “We have entrusted you with stories. It’s your job to tell them.” Over the past year, as I have worked to build some basic infrastructure and a bit of topsoil here at this long-forgotten Farm, the nonhumans have increasingly responded to my service question this way: “It’s nice of you to keep asking, but we have been telling the same thing for quite a while now. We’re not upset, really. But if you want to know how you can be of service, our answer is to write the darn book.”
“But I don’t know how to write a book,” I reply.
“You don’t have to know how to write a book. You just have to know how to type, maintain a working laptop, and a phone to call a publisher. We can’t do any of those things. That’s why we need you.”
This might sound fanciful to you as you read it—perhaps quaintly allegoric. It wasn’t easy for me to believe them either. And then I finally stopped doing other things and began waking each morning long before dawn, lighting a fire in the stove and a single candle on the table. And placing my fingers on the keys. After three weeks the book draft had swelled to eighty pages. Stories I didn’t even know I remember came tumbling out onto the page.
Okay, I’ll admit they didn’t actually say that I had to write on a laptop. That is how I could translate their instructions. I don’t know how to write with a pad and paper. Some of the authors I admire compose by hand, but they are a generation older than I. I was born to a digital time.
Imbedded in your question, “We can’t dethrone the rulers simply by pretending they don’t exist, can we?” are a whole string of other questions. Here are a few that come to mind: Who is to blame for this mess? How can we most effectively reduce the insane harm that is being perpetrated every day upon countless humans and nonhumans? How do we know when we’ve done enough? When we have abandoned our posts? How do we keep going when the magnitude of the tangled wreckage dwarfs us? You do cite some examples of real rulers, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. I don’t believe that they are subscribed to this Newsletter, so I will use their names.
But my unwillingness to learn to write by hand with a real pencil on real paper led me to perpetrate real harm upon a real, nonhuman person named Gwynn, whom I love dearly. You talk about this in your letter, the way in which we are employing the master’s tools to try to pick the lock of the golden cage of modernity. Or, to stay with the ship image, we are trying to build life rafts for real people who are suffering out of the flotsam and jetsam that litters the ship. And yet, in doing so, we are also causing real harm to other real people. Mostly these other real people are out of view, which allows us to keep going.
But yesterday that collateral damage was one of my beloveds. I held her as she tried to keep her left rear foot from buckling under, as she tried to move her swollen jaw to take her first bite in days. I didn’t need to image Jeff Bezos of Elon Musk in that moment. I needed only to weep for Gwynn and for Adam. If there weren’t so much outrageous beauty trapped in the wreckage of modernity it wouldn’t be so exquisitely sad. Here’s the thing: The Sheep know how to forgive. In this, they are miraculous teachers. Sheep are highly domesticated—to the point that they must be righted when they get stuck on their backs. And yet they retain a degree of wild wisdom that I lean upon heavily as I figure out how to keep getting up and out the door every morning.
I didn’t weep for Gwynn and Adam yesterday. Believe me, I wanted to badly. But the tears don’t come that way. People tell me that my writing often makes them weep. I always tell them I’m jealous.
I’ll leave you with a scene I have imagined many times. It takes place along a well-worn hiking trail. The woods there are composed of hardwoods mixed with a few conifers. Ash, Maple, Birch, Hemlock and others. Among them are Fern, Moss, Grouse, Hare, Owl and myriad Mouses. The humans walk by in twos and threes and fours, talking amongst themselves. The nonhumans have grown used to not being greeted. It still stings a little bit, but they don’t hold a grudge. As they listen to the human conversations, they can’t understand most of the words, but they do notice that the tone is remarkably light. This strikes them as strange. Their friends and family members are being clear cut and poisoned and burned alive, disappearing at a never-before-seen rate. This doesn’t make them angry so much as it makes them very, very sad. And so it is confusing to them when they don’t hear the clear notes of sorrow in the human conversations. Old Maple says to the others, “If they’re not able to weep, maybe we can try to teach them. If that doesn’t work, we can at least weep for them.”
Sam, I know you’ve grown used to the way I refuse to answer questions head on. Clearly you’ve found a way to avoid total frustration or we wouldn’t be friends. I’ll leave it there for now. The Sheep are waiting for their morning back scratching, wondering why I stray so far from their side. “What could he possibly be doing that is more important than scratching us, or refreshing our hay?” They are probably right. There is one more thing you should know about Gwynn. She has a single black mark on her otherwise white body, a small black teardrop below her right eye. You will see it if you look closely at the photo I’ve attached.
With love,
Adam