Warm, late-winter Sun casts Snow in yellow-gold. But the shadows ache, blue and cold. Old man Winter has arrived, finally, just as Sap was beginning to flow upward in the veins, Ground wet underfoot. Chickadees were singing their courtship song—"Phoebe, Phoebe.” Blue and gold will mingle to make green here before long. If we’re lucky, that is. But for now they lay separately, as Winter light and shadow.
This morning, upon waking, many hours before dawn, inky black beyond the pane. Fire lit, tea steeping, a single tallow candle on the writing table. I listen for words.
They respond, in full voice. Three or four of them, I can’t tell. One yips, percussively. The others move through a melody only they can bring into the world. There is nothing else now, as their wild song enters through the small vent above the stove and has its way with my domesticated mind. I have never heard anything so beautiful. Their praise song saturates the thick blackness of night. There is no confusion as to which temple they serve, not a moment of doubt or hesitation in their song. They sing like a kettle come to full boil and overflowing on the stovetop. Giddy with the sheer pleasure of having a belly full-enough to keep one alive through a night such as this one—inky black, still, below-zero, rumors of the greening everywhere.
I, myself, also made it through the night. Dinner was Lamb liver meatloaf and Squashes gleaned last Fall, pitted now with rot spots, carefully cleaned and roasted. A forkful of sauerkraut, and a dash of hot sauce. Wrapped in wool, the stove glowing, sleep came fast and hard and dream-laden. The one that woke me bears telling here, for its story came to unsettle, to remind.
In the dream scene, I’ve been asked to drive two Cows to the slaughter house. As it often goes in sleep-stories, it’s a farm I know, but nothing looks as it should. I haven’t taken a Cow to the slaughter house in my waking hours in more than a decade, thank goodness. I am surprised to see that one of the two Cows is quite small, young perhaps. But as I look more closely the animal is not young, and not fully cow. The face is part human. At that moment I was ejected back out, into the inky pre-dawn black.
As humans, we tend to light candles in our temples. Churches too. And so, here I sit, listening for the praise song that only I can bring into the world.
I recently slaughtered three of my beloved Ewes—Annabelle, Bonita and Beatrice. It was their livers meatloaf that kept me alive through the night. I can see their faces clearly as I remember them now. If you don’t spend time around sheep, you might imagine that they blend in with one another. But I could write pages of stories about these three hardworking Ewes, the way Beatrice sounds like the air brakes on a Mack truck when she calls to her lambs, the way Annabelle waggles her little docked tail every time she gets scratches, the black spots on the back of Bonita’s ears. But they are dead now. Every time I slaughter an animal I say to them, aloud, “It isn’t your idea to die today. You love being alive as much as I do.” In the case of my three beloved companions, those words came out through choking sobs, and it was everything I could do to hold them down, tell them that I loved them, and then slit their throats.
In the book I’m writing about giving food away at Brush Brook Community Farm, I am trying to describe a domesticated imagination. In short, think about the scene here in the candle-lit house. Coyote sings the dark night. Coyote would be well-served to feed from the Sheep flock. But those are my calories. My savings account. My stay-alive-through-the-long-winter-nights plan. As such, I am interested in their defense in a way that I cannot extend to Deer and Moose, the ruminants native to this place. And my interest in Coyote’s survival is, well, speculative at best. Can you see it now? The Sheep and I are, calorically speaking, mutual dependents. We are bound in a monogamous relationship of mutual sustenance. Our temple is not polyamorous, not open-and-affirming. In fact, Coyote is simply not welcome there—in the Sheep yard or in the house where I feast upon their dead bodies.
A domesticated awareness could be blamed for the steady silencing of the wild world. But I think it is actually a bit more complicated than that.
I hear regularly some version of the following: “I could never eat the animals I have known by name.” In fact, such a declaration is so commonplace in the modern West that it creates almost no concern, at least that I have heard. I will voice my concern here. The dream came to remind me.
A domesticated awareness necessarily sorts aliveness and worth, necessarily places more value upon certain lives than others. When you practice monogamy, this is how it goes. Even hunting and gathering peoples modified the landscapes in which they lived to promote the wellbeing of certain prized animals and plants—the ones they leaned upon for food and clothing. For example, forests were burned to create grasslands that would draw Bison east of the Mississippi.
But a domesticated awareness still has the capacity to remember that life is sustained by ending other lives. A domesticated awareness can survive this thought, and perhaps designs its temples, idols, and deities—or deity—accordingly.
The modern, civilized imagination, however, seems to have tossed its troubling carnal embodiment out the window as it speeds down the widening highway, on its way to—disembodiment? A freshly-paved state of mind?
A domesticated awareness might retain the capacity to worship living things because it remembers that it is also a living thing. A domesticated awareness might know how to differentiate killing from violence, and how to proceed in ongoing obligation to the lives it ends in order to live.
Modern humans survive by a different story. We have increasingly outgrown temples and churches, and long ago we stopped worshiping forests and rivers and winds. In our more self-reflective or apologetic moments, we can admit that we have created a hierarchy of worth, or aliveness, which places humans at the very top. As you might imagine, I am going to call these stories into question. As to the issue of modern secularism, I think that any of us could begin to assemble a list of the givers-of-life to which we now pay homage. Big Pharma, Big Oil and Big Tech might get us started.
But what about the hierarchy of aliveness? It sure seems like a handy way to describe the ecological mayhem that we are bringing to pass. As I wade deeper into this book project, however, I am increasingly unconvinced that we see ourselves as more alive than the rest of them. Rather, a modern awareness only survives by denying its own carnal aliveness.
Once killing and violence are synonyms, aliveness is actually intolerable.
Modernity attempts to obscure the aliveness of everything and everyone it feeds upon, including us. Humans. Problematically, still alive. Desperately trying to maintain a belief-system that doesn’t rely upon taking life. As we take more Life per-capita than the world has ever known.
Time’s up. Light bleeds from the Eastern horizon. Black night becomes blue dawn. I’m off to go count the Sheep. Coyotes were that close, just a few hours ago. Encircling the Farm with their wild praise song. Deer must have heard them sing. I surely did. It wasn’t a dream, and it was a dream, all at once. Being alive is that mysterious. And marvelous. Worth giving thanks for. Worshipping, even.
As late-Winter days dream on the greening, many blessings to you and yours.
With great care,
Adam
Inky black, late-Winter praise song
Thank you!
A complicated problem, and an inadequate dangerous distinction. “Killing is not violence” quickly becomes “my killing is not violent” and then all power and its use to any extreme can be justified against anyone and anything. Sacralizing selected violence makes religion to justify it. Why not simply refuse to justify it and embrace one’s own claim of necessary violence in front of witnesses? In complicity we honor the creatures we must kill to live.