Blessing the Ewes at Goose Landing
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
Moon travels the clear Southern Sky from East to West this week, waning as she goes. Song Sparrow begins chortling from the hedgerow before Sunrise. Geese fly over in Northbound formation, in near-constant, cacophonous conversation, South Wind on their tails. Ewes graze contentedly in what looks to be an all-brown field. And yet they’ve got green Grass falling from their mouths as they run to greet my call. Those fine, nimble lips are amazingly adept at sorting. Take a close look at Sheep grazing and you might fall as hard as I have. They make Cows look coarse by comparison. Less than a week now until their Lambs come due.
Last Sunday a group of Friends and Family gathered here on this wind-swept hilltop—where Ewes sort the Winter leavings—for a Spring Lambing Blessing and some Storytelling. The first to speak was Big Sandy River, telling of Winter Storms that draped the distant peaks of the Adirondack Mountains with Snow, melted and mobilized by recent sunny days, now flowing energetically through rocky narrows just below the Farm. Two hydro dams amplify the falls above the cliff-lined Chasm. The Spring Melt has come on fast this year, and the story is told in volumes—of Water and Sound. The humans were going to need to speak up to be heard above the roar. But they stood silently for a good long while. How might we speak if we knew that all of the neighbors were listening? Author David Abram describes such reticence with the following sing-song eloquence:
The material reverberation of your speaking spreads out from you and is taken up within the sensitive tissue of the place….The activity that we commonly call “prayer” springs from just such a gesture, from the practice of directly addressing the animate surroundings. Prayer, in its most ancient and elemental sense, consists simply of speaking to things—to a maple grove, to a flock of crows, to the rising wind—rather than merely about things (Becoming Animal, 170).
Imagine for a moment that you grew up in a house where you knew the names of the others who lived alongside you, and you spoke aloud to them every day. Maybe a Dog or Cat also lived with you, and you thought nothing of speaking to this non-human housemate in English words, though you never received a like reply. Some years pass, and now you’re part grown. You suddenly learn that there have been other people living in the house the whole time and you’ve never once acknowledged them, never spoken to them directly. Rather, you have spoken about them in their presence using the pronoun reserved for such non-living people—it. Imagine this reckoning comes to you and you’re asked by one of your seniors to walk down the hall to the room where these people live, to knock on the door and introduce yourself. How do you feel? Embarrassed? Guilt-ridden? Tongue-tied? Nervous? Have you ever noticed the unique vocal patterns we employ when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak our same language?
Here’s a more tangible example: Immigrant Farm Workers. I am embarrassed to admit that, despite the longing I carried to forge relationships with the three men from Central America who milked the Cows at my neighbor’s Farm—the ones I passed by and made eye contact with hundreds of times over the four years I lived there—I never did it. Sure, I could say that my high-school Spanish was rusty. Or tell myself that they probably wanted to keep a low profile anyway, given the uncertainty of their immigration status. But standing here at the river’s edge, looking out at the roil of consequence set in motion by our carefully constructed capacity to withhold personhood from others, this life raft of excuses strikes me as a bit flimsy. Some have suggested that what we call Climate Change could be more accurately be described as the terminal accumulation of our countless abandoned relationships, and that we cling to the words “Climate Change” because they afford us a convenient distance from the intimate, painful and awkward work of relational accountability and repair. Imagine if we responded to the latest dire climate data by inviting neighborhood farm workers over for a halting dinner conversation?
All of this was in the air on Sunday during that prolonged human silence on the hill with the Ewes above Big Sandy River. I had invited those in attendance to offer blessings to the expecting Ewes rather than offering blessings for the Ewes. Can you see the subtle difference here?
I began to practice this type of speaking—what Abrams calls prayer—several years ago after I experienced a reckoning such as I’ve described above. Starting out was as painful and awkward as you might imagine. My initial impulse to apologize to my non-human neighbors for years of disregard soon took on the tell-tale, stale odor of a trash can needing to be emptied. Saying “I’m sorry” over and over again doesn’t do much to foster a relationship. Think courtship rather than repentance. Here’s what I noticed very quickly as I moved beyond apologies: This is surprisingly difficult. And then multiply that difficulty exponentially as soon as you try to speak in this direct way—to Sheep, to West Wind, to Cedar, to Grass—in front of other humans. If you haven’t tried it, you might think I am exaggerating. I promise you I’m not.
On the hill there with the Ewes on Sunday I was the first human to speak. I figured I’d better go first to show that what I’d invited others to do was indeed possible. Intimidated by the size of the group, I summoned a few halting words to praise the Ewes for their beauty and their hard work, to promise them I would be attentive during their lambing time, and to acknowledge that we would slaughter a good number of their sons and daughters upon Winter’s return such that we might be fed as well—all the while speaking to the Ewes directly. Then came the long silence. Or rather, the prolonged period of humans listening to Big Sandy sing her watery tales.
I’d like to offer a reason why it might be so damn difficult to begin speaking to the world again—to practice what Abrams calls praying. According to the story of enlightenment, once humans outgrew their superstitious, animistic belief-systems, a newly-arrived, rationally mechanistic worldview proved so immediately obvious that it spread effortlessly across the world—like a benevolent wildfire. Finally, the natural order of things had come to pass. There are other ways to tell that story from the point of view of those upon whom that natural order was imposed. But standing there on the hill with the Ewes I had another thought—what about those upon whom that rationality must be constantly renewed, or re-imposed? That would be us. What if the work of remembering how to speak to the world is not actually the work of re-animation? The world never stopped being alive after all, and we are certainly not the ones granting it life. What if we might do better to identify de-animation as the ceaseless work of rational civilization—every time a crack opens in the pavement it must be immediately covered over, lest it sprout Dandelions. And what if that exhausted work of patching—of repairing and re-casting the spell that allows us to withhold personhood from others—is done in large part by asking us to circumscribe the ways in which we speak. Particularly when other humans are listening. Maybe speaking as if the world were alive is a bit like trying to kick a stool out from under your own feet. As hard as you might try, you can’t do it while you’re standing with your weight on the thing. You can’t break the spell that binds you by yourself. Others are needed. To lift you from the stool and lower you slowly onto the soft ground—by their ways of speaking. To report that they’ve seen Dandelions sprouting from your open mouth. Even to prove it by plucking the mature seed head, pursing their lips, and giving a good, hard blow. It sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
That’s all I’ve got for today. Next week I’ll write more about what happened once the humans stirred to speech there on the hill with the Ewes above Big Sandy. Many thanks to you for reading.
With great care, Adam