Crafting Language

Each glowing Corn seed was pressed in by the muddy finger of one of a dozen folks at yesterday’s Farm Frolic. Damp shoulders and cramping calves all around.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Years ago, a neighbor couple decided that I was a cult leader. They happened to be impassioned vegans, and one of their primary reasons for leveraging that potent, discrediting word in public stemmed from, of all things, the rotational grazing practices that I obliged the sheep under my care to endure—namely not offering the flock shade on every day that warmed beyond their liking. If you watch sheep in the springtime, you will observe them seeking shade at fifty degrees. The pursuit of comfort, it turns out, is not an exclusively-human proclivity. In describing the cult that I was promoting, they wrote in a social media post one day, “He believes that all animals deserve to suffer.”

I’ve never written about that accusation, but I woke early this morning to the sound of cold Rain on the roof and that phrase ringing in my ear. I wondered what the etymological dictionary had to say about the words in question. It would have been safer not to look, or to learn. I didn’t fall back to sleep. Instead, I wrote this letter.

Stephen Jenkinson likens the etymological dictionary to a kelp bed. The contemporary use of the word in question is the short length of kelp laying horizontally on the ocean’s surface. Scuba gear on, you begin to descend toward the root, where the plant is fastened into the ocean floor. But the invisible oceanic current applies a steady pressure upon the plant’s long stem. The lean, or drift, in the word’s meaning over time allows you to see what would otherwise remain hidden from view. Anthropologists say that one’s own culture is like the water we swim in. So, the change in a word’s meaning over time can illuminate cultural drift, or, as the case may be, cultural disintegration.

At the Farm Frolic dinner table last evening I sat next to a remarkable young woman endeavoring to reclaim some aspects of her indigenous North American ancestry. She described the Sun Dance ceremony wherein the dancers abstain from food and water for four days, all the while voluntarily subjecting their bodies to physical pain in the form of piercings. I went to bed shortly after I heard her describe this. Perhaps that’s why the phrase “deserve to suffer” woke me from a dead sleep.

The farmers under whom I studied rotational grazing impressed upon me the danger of domestication—namely our impulse to exclude or exterminate the pest and the predator. For the wild ancestors of sheep and cattle, canine and feline predators ensured the flocks and herds stayed bunched up and on the move. Standing all day under the shade of a single tree, as domesticated ruminants would do if they had their druthers, would render them a tasty treat for their carnivorous neighbors.

The wild has remarkable and mysterious ways of being itself. In the central plains of this continent, the dance between wolves, humans and bison yielded forty-foot-deep topsoil the likes of which the arriving European settlers had never even imagined. Obliging bison to evenly distribute their soil-feeding manure and urine was the wolf’s gift to the Earth, of which future generations of bison were among the many beneficiaries. Other beneficiaries included the thousands of plants and animals who called the native prairies home. Other beneficiaries included the native human people who lived from bison hides, flesh and bones. Some of those human people practiced suffering in elaborate ceremonies called Sun Dances, of which currently-alive humans weren’t meant to be the primary beneficiaries. Maybe that’s another danger of domestication: that we risk forgetting to include the larger collective of Life in our list of beneficiaries.

The intensive rotational grazing practices I began learning in my twenties function to pull domesticated ruminants forward with the enticement of fresh paddocks--often multiple times per day—rather than pushing them along with the threat of gleaming incisors. The resulting topsoil accumulation can be similar. I tried to explain this to my discontented vegan neighbors, but they stopped returning my phone calls.

The word deserve is commonly used to point toward entitlements or rights. But the kelp-bed-etymology I read this morning says that the prefix de- in this case means ‘down to the bottom or dregs’, and the root serve means ‘to act as a servant’. So, a word that once pointed to a quality of humble human responsibility is today used to describe a bundle of rights. Would it be more accurate to describe that change as cultural drift or disintegration?

The word suffer charts an even more surprising path through the cultural currents of time. The prefix is sub-, which in this case means ‘from below’. The root -fer is the same as in fertility, describing the capacity to bear or renew Life. People who spoke the languages that eventually became modern English created a word that draws a link between physical discomfort, diminishment and the renewal of the Life rising from the ground at our feet. I know a few pregnant women and nursing mothers who could probably vouch for this older meaning.

Next time I hear someone say, ‘no one deserves to suffer’ it will be difficult not to hear it as, ‘no human or domesticated animal has any responsibility to live in such a way that they ensure the ongoing capacity of Life to renew itself’. It will be difficult not to hear it as, ‘Others have suffered so that I can live, but I am not willing to suffer so that others may live’. That’s what the words that we are using actually mean. It would have been less disturbing not to scuba dive in the kelp bed of modern English this morning.

A naturopathic doctor told me recently that human fertility is decreasing at alarming rates. She doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about it. Then I learned of a study wherein soil scientists warn that, given current rates of topsoil loss, we may be just a few decades away from widespread food shortages. Listening to people who look into such things describe honestly what they see can be terribly unsettling. It would be safer not to look or listen.

There is another reason that this phrase ‘deserving to suffer’ has kept me awake on this particular night. Today we will re-unite the flock, sick and healthy, so that they can most effectively take up the work of turning sunlight and rainfall into topsoil.

I wrote a couple weeks back about the illness in the sheep flock here, for which the vets still haven’t found a diagnosis. A small number of the oldest ewes and their lambs are thriving, while their younger flock mates are still losing weight even as they graze the highest-quality pasture of the whole year. For six weeks now I’ve had them divided into a ‘sick group’ and a ‘healthy group’, but it has become clear that some of the ewes I thought were healthy are not. If there is a contagious agent, all have clearly been exposed. Isolation felt like something to hold onto as I watched the once-thriving flock slip away. It was something to do that made me feel less powerless.

When the sheep illness came to light back in late March, my attention immediately, and I’d say understandably, focused on the sick and dying animals. I sorted out the sick ones and moved them down to the lower field, in part, because I didn’t want people visiting the Farm to see them. I didn’t want to have to tell a story over and over again in which I didn’t have any action plan—a story in which I had no ability to alleviate their suffering other than slaughter them. All treatments I attempted early on yielded no visible changes. Impotence in the face of illness doesn’t make for a palatable story.

But the generative consequences of their dedicated sheep-ly labors—grazing and trampling grass, laying down manure and urine, birthing and rearing young—have become increasingly clear as I’ve watched the grass grow. These fields, degraded by sixty years of hay export, grow twice as much grass now as they did three years ago, when the sheep and cattle arrived at this abandoned Farm.

The sick and dying sheep in the flock will produce significantly less meat for humans this year and next, but even as their individual lives slip away, they are continuing to feed the ground from which other sheep and humans—not to mention deer, turkey, woodchuck and others—will rise at some point in the future. Even in their dying they are renewing the capacity of Life to continue. As it turns out, that’s what the word suffer actually means. Their way of living and dying is their Sun Dance. Their list of beneficiaries includes the larger collective of Life. I find myself falling ever-more-deeply in love with them, even as they slip through my fingers.

Over the past seven weeks, it has felt impossibly difficult to discern how to attend, faithfully, to a sick and dying flock and simultaneously uphold care for the healthy herd of cattle, the thriving garden plants and the expanding circle of human relationships that also comprise the larger Farm organism. I’ve spent untold hours researching obscure sheep diseases on the internet and many hundreds of dollars on vet bills and blood tests with no answers. Some might read this newsletter and say that the most humane move would be to ‘euthanize’ all of the sick animals. I’ve considered that route. In a lot of ways, it would bring emotional relief.

But last week I watched warm Sun bring on the grass, now well past my knees in places. And then I watched clearly-sick sheep give every bit of their remaining life force to the work that they are here in the world to do: turn standing grass into soil food. They aren’t done serving those who will come after them. It is a remarkable and heartbreaking thing to watch, and it is working me.

Do the sheep deserve to suffer? Do humans? Do we even have words fit for the task of responding to the compounding crises of our time? Maybe we can set out to craft such language together. I’ll keep my eyes on the flock, the herd, the gardens and the topsoil. You’ll have your own teachers in your neighborhood. We can meet back here and compare notes every once in a while.

Until then, take good care.

Adam