Making Use, Making Do, Making things Right

You may remember I started this journey with thick rubber gloves, tongs and a package of Trader Joe's frozen chicken breast. 

Well, we're not in Kansas any more Toto. 

This spring we raised our own meat chickens. Fast growing things that required careful monitoring to ensure proper health. The garage flooded during some area wide flooding we had, and we panicked to get the little babes dry and to higher ground. We raised 30+ birds for ourselves and a few friends, marveled at how fast they grew and butchered then by 8 weeks. 

Last month, Mr. Bee butchered our first goat. (Not to worry, it wasn't Lula Mae or anyone you know. Well not too well anyhow. :/)

Desi was one of Lula Mae's babies from our first kidding. She was always destined as meat or selling but we gave her a name and treated her like the others, nevertheless. 

We also put one of the beautiful Pekins down. She suffered what my childhood best friend (turned Vet) surmises was a stroke common in older birds of this variety. 

With the meat birds it's almost easy. "Meat" is even in their name! I've still never done the actual slaughter but it's easy to get detached. You see them and think "wow this will feed us for many months. I wonder if those runts will catch up in size." (In the process if the objectification of meat, it's easy to understand the objectification of women.)

With the goats, it's a little harder. You feel weird taking the life of an animal who trusts you, who you watched enter the world, who is cognizant of its status as prey in the natural world. You tell yourself that it's okay because she's not a pet, she never was a pet, even though that's not entirely true. 

Then there is your pet. Someone you love deeply and powerfully. And it's so hard that you have the neighbors come over and take her life as part of a ceremony where you cry and they sing and you're pain feels so deep you'll never recover from it. Even though you will, and you do. 

We didn't intend to lose this duck so we had to make do and navigate the best way to honor her. E It seemed best to pluck the soft down from her body and let her flesh stay whole. We composted her body and look forward to letting her continue to nourish our lives in another season. I took the down, and combined it with other down I'd saved to fill Baby Bee's special blanket I finished for his 1 year birthday gift. 

I have to make sense of if all. If I'm going to eat meat, I have to come to terms with the fact that life is life whether I give it a name, call it my own or never distinguish it from its peers. It's all the same. It's my relationship to the animal in each of those scenarios is different. 

These experiences have compelled us to examine our practices: is it better to take one life that provides for several? Or take more lives from animals that feel less "evolved"? And how do we get the most put of each life? What do we currently consider waste and how can we put it to use? Can we buy meat at this time from, say, a grocery store,-or do we need to "know" the animals before we consume them? 

 We've come a long ways on this journey but we are no where bear arrived. I'm curious to see where we end up in our thinking. 

Fear

Early on, my life was framed in hyper-vigilance and matted with a fat border of fear. The glass covering was so thick you could hardly see the picture underneath. Still, I worried it might shatter if some foreign, unpredictable object or action came in contact at just the wrong/right time, in just the wrong/right way.

I was terrified of doing the "wrong" things, of saying the "wrong" things, and ultimately, being the "wrong" person. The only encouragement I needed was an environment fraught with the unpredictability and criticism hallmark of a family centered around addiction--from there, my biology and temperament were happy to take over.

As I grew, those dreaded wrong/right things happened (sometimes by choice, sometimes by mistake, sometimes by chance). Each time, the glass covering indeed shattered. And each time, I would replace the glass, perhaps with a lighter, less foggy version of its former self. But the fear never went away.

To this day, fear, or some iteration thereof (i.e. anxiety) is my most commonly experienced emotion. I worry about meeting deadlines, about what I said to a stranger in line at the grocery store, about being perceived as incompetent, about whether my dishes are actually getting clean and whether I am working hard enough in my relationships, all within a 5-minute time span of an average day.

Note: It's impressive, really, when you take into account how much mental coordination it requires to keep all of those things at the forefront of your mind for instant recall. I suppose it is also exhausting, but do give me credit where credit is due!

I have done well reducing the influence these "daily" fears have on my life or my actions. I'm now more inclined to let them pass by unengaged like clouds on a windy day rather than fixate on their shapes and try to make meaning out of them. Instead, it's the big things that paralyze me.

Or should I say big thing, singular?

You see there is one thing I am terrified of still.

Joy.

Yes. You heard me right. (And if you are honest with yourself, you may be equally afraid of this powerful emotion too.) As usual, researcher/storyteller Brene Brown put it into words before I could find my own, in a recent interview. As she puts it:

How many of you have ever sat up and thought, ‘Wow, work’s going good, good relationship with my partner, parents seem to be doing okay. Holy crap. Something bad’s going to happen'?...You know what that is? [It’s] when we lose our tolerance for vulnerability. Joy becomes foreboding: 'I’m scared it’s going to be taken away. The other shoe’s going to drop…' What we do in moments of joyfulness is, we try to beat vulnerability to the punch.”

She goes on to say that when joy is in the moment or just around the corner, instead of practicing gratitude and vulnerability, we "dress-rehearse" tragedy. I'm very familiar with tragedy and trauma. Most of us are in some capacity. I know what it is like to hurt more deeply and more fully than I ever imagined humanly possible and wise enough to know the depth of future pain is not bound by the threshold I've previously experienced. I am more comfortable hiding from my vulnerability through known and self-induced fears than sitting with the joy that is inside me knowing that at any time it may end and bring about worse hurt than I've known to date.

Of all the secrets I know about myself, this is one I am most ashamed of. It is the one that keeps me from moving forward from my past, achieving my personal goals, and ultimately relishing the beautiful life I know I already have.

Now, its usefulness is no longer as relevant to my life and it's time to find a way to let it go.

Radical Love

Perhaps I, like the rest of Americans, have been subconsciously influenced by all the candy hearts and chocolate boxes. I try not to be too consumer-focused, but it is true that I've spent the last month contemplating love. And here it is Valentine's Day and I've got a love-filled post ready to go. Coincidence? Perhaps. All I can say is that correlation doesn't indicate causation and you never know the other factors influencing the outcomes. Right?



Zelda reference or otherwise, bringing your heart along for love is the difficult part of the journey.

In any case, I'm beyond expounding the wonders of puppy love and cheap love wrapped in low-quality tissue paper. I'm talking about Radical Love. It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And you know, in the funny little way that you feel small yet as expansive as the Earth, when you practice it.

It is the silent chant inside your heart, as you stare at the screen watching a heartbeat and listening inattentively to the doctor speaking her foreign language of abbreviations. "Please don't die, please don't die..." is all you hear inside.

It happens when, after you hear that dreaded diagnosis, the nightmares return, recovery gives way to relapse, or life requires you to move in a direction that you otherwise wouldn't, you step out of the shame and anger, and say, "I can do this. We can do this. We get through things. Remember?"

It courageously surfaces when you decide to take on the great risk of vulnerability for the equally great reward of authenticity. You purchase baby clothes before the doctors are certain the life inside you is "viable" outside your protective womb. You get excited about the great interview and let yourself tell a few friends about its potential. You open your heart to a foster child and come to view that child as your son, before you know if they'll even stay another week. All the while, you remind yourself that allowing yourself to move forward doesn't diminish or increase your sorrow if things don't go as planned.

It is not some "name it, claim it" doctrine that guarantees great outcomes if you ask right or act like they are coming your way. Nor is it willful ignorance of the facts, or a belief that you'll beat the odds this time (because, trust me, I have a tendency to lose even when the odds are in my favor). In fact, it doesn't impact the outcome at all.

Radical love is knowing everything you can know, leaving room for everything you don't know yet and may never learn, and choosing to be vulnerable enough to love wholeheartedly anyhow.

<3 <3 <3 Happy Valentine's Day

Adoption

It's been quiet around this electronic homestead, but don't for a moment think it's been quiet in our physical world. Generally, I like to write about things that are solid, or at minimum, unsettled things whose uncertainty I can count on. Instead, life has consisted of "we'll-have-to-see" or "we-won't-know-till-we-get-there"  moments, with a whole lot of decision-making thrown in. Over the coming days and weeks, I'll find the space to write about it all, and hopefully whether through this process or through time, will find solid footing I want.

One thing I know for sure is that homesteading takes you over, and over again, through the full cycle of life.

We recently lost two of our ducks. Butry, one of the big white ones, and one of "The Littles" that we hand-raised. It was torture. I went outside one Saturday morning to let the Ducks out and I counted. But before I could finish counting, I knew they were not all there.

Each morning, four quacking ducks gather at my feet waiting for treats and love. This morning there were only two. "Why couldn't it have been one of the other ducks?" I asked myself over and over again as I struggled to make peace with the truth. You know the outcome. You know it already happened, but  somehow you want to change it so it's just a little bit better. A little more palatable. Why I couldn't it have been a duck without a name?

I was scouring our property, scouring every bush and suspecting every owl that dare cry. I had to find them.
I searched each night and each morning. I would look into the thick forest and hope any moment the ducks would come waddling out, having had a great adventure but ready to return home. I was consumed with a longing I've rarely known.

Hope springs eternal.

In the end, I found something, though not what I was hoping for. The neighbors who sold us the goat, called us and asked if he had a home for their now-lonely Peckin, whose flock-mates had become the recent dinner of a raccoon or dog. We arranged the adoption, and are grateful for the addition. Our flock-family feels a little more complete, but I think there's still room for more.

Welcome, Ms. Duck.

Death & Taxes

I shy away from controversial topics. Unless you count things like recycling, water conservation, living off the land, and eating meat. Which, really aren't all that controversial in the Pacific Northwest. Except the eating meat one.

But faith is something that I'm realizing is embedded more and more into every day life as I continue my journey so  I find it cropping up here, though not in a way I could have predicted.

It's strange because I used to think I lived my life walking by faith. I wondered why a mustard seed or any other smidgeon of faith was so hard to come by for the remainder of the population. 

Turns out, I used to be a person of certainty--not faith. I knew what I liked. I knew what I didn't like--even without trying it. From the time I can remember, I knew what I wanted my future to look like and set about achieving it. I knew what I believed. Sheesh! I even knew that what I believed was right. 

It was so easy. Life went like this: Something predictable happens. I respond in a predictable way, with confidence that this particular way is the "right" way. Predictable event ends. Repeat.

For years, this is how life played out. Sure, things occassionally deviaited from the predictable plan, but for the most part I got what I wanted and I wanted what I got. Certaibly there were times, large periods of time in fact, when things didn't happen the way I wanted, but they happened the way I expected. Even in the worst of times, I knew they were coming, and had a detailed plan on how I'd handle it according to my familiar set of rules. "There are advantages to being a pessimist," I'd tell myself. "Expeccting the worst means you are prepared for the worst. And never disappointed." It felt good.

Do you know what I am talking about? How can I articulate the safety and comfort that comes from  the rigidity only certainty can provide? It's cautiously wonderful and, dare I say, beautiful? For those of you concerned, I say "beautiful" fully knowing that beauty is only beauty to you when it is subdued and possibly sedated. After all, when you are that guarded against pain and surprise, you are equally guarded against the pleasure and goodness you can take in. And for good reason: When you live within the columns of a tightly controlled spreadsheet, where all inputs are automatically tabulated and summarized at the end of the page, you come to believe that beauty rests in the order and that all pleasure is best when muted. Anything more than that might impact your tightly calibrated system in unanticpated ways.

All of this goes along smoothly as it always has. Maybe you go to college and concentrate on your already decided major. Or maybe you've done your research and know that "higher education" isn't needed for your career of choice, so you save yourself the debt and take pride in your risk-benefit analysis at the ripe age of 18. At some point you may choose to find a partner (or not), start a family (or not), and maybe take on your own flock of ducks (or not). 

 

Then it happens.

 

A small, unexpected thing. A huge NIMBY. A series of events that individually wouldn't matter, but in sum amount to more weight than you can handle. A repition of the family cycle you worked so hard to avoid. A birthday or milestone that snuck upon you in a way nothing else has. Whatever it is, it wedges itself beneath your foundation, pushing itself under the fulcrum of your grounding and tips you over into a new reality.

Then suddenly you are left with the profound shock that you have nothing you can truly count on. Something as simple as turning on the light in the kitchen requires a trust and faith in electricity, your light bulbs and your ability to flip the switch, and something as natural as ducks laying eggs is as out of your control as the length of harvest. Death and taxes are likely occurances, not certainties.

I wonder if most people started out where I've ended up or if others go through a transition like this at some point in later in life. I'm still learning what life looks like on the other side of the mirror, and mostly, how to cope with it.

"The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty." Anne Lamott

A Eulogy for Jerome

The real slaughter day came and went. It was nearly a week ago. Somehow silence seemed superior to an instant recap without reflection.

I still don't have many words. In truth, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw so I'll begin with our unanticipated slaughter day.

(read more after the jump)