ready or not

Where, after all, are the farmer-mama-home-educating-yoga-teacher/practitioner-bibliophile-knitting-weight-lifting-cow-milking-stoners?

I picked up 40 meat birds yesterday. The plan was to have a larger brooder ready for them to be anywhere but in the house or on the porch by the time they arrived. It didn’t quite happen, and so they were in the same old horse trough by my woodstove most of yesterday and last night while I tossed and turned in my bed, fretting over them trampling each other in a brooder suited for 20 birds, not 40.

Our beloved Basset Hound, Jeb, who turned 15 last month, is up every morning between 5:30 and 6, at which point it is a race to get up and get him out the door in a family-wide effort to maintain his dignity. In other words, I was up early, and upon seeing that we had no chick losses overnight (we had one casualty yesterday after dinner), I got busy piecing together the larger brooder that Chris and Maple had constructed, and moving the birds out of the house and into the garage. This is not where we intended to put them, and I will have a significant mess to clean up once they move outside, but it works in a pinch. They are contained and safe, both from the elements as well as their own peculiarly fragile nature.

Meat birds were born to die, and keeping them alive for their allotted 8-12 weeks is an imperative and also a misery. Cute for 5 days, disgusting for 8 weeks, and then delicious. I do not love them. My favorite day is the one when the biodiesel driving conspiracy theorist with the sharp blade and efficient plucker pulls up our driveway and sticks a pin in it.

I was up and out already, soaked nearly through from my trips back and forth between the house and the garage, getting everything situated. I had skipped a jacket, and my muck boots no longer resist the wet, but it’s thankfully warm enough that if you keep moving, you’re fine. I used the momentum to tinker with the electro netting I bought off of Marketplace over the weekend and pound my 5-foot grounding rod 2 feet into the soft spring earth.

Freddy and Maple and I will drive to the western side of Vermont after Forest Friday and pick up three Border Leister ewes. I am so anxious and hedging my bets while also pressing forward. Everyone who knows me knows that the 15-year build to this moment, and especially the last five, have been more than enough to prepare. And yet I cannot help but fret. I have certainly educated myself about the handling and care of sheep, but taking on sole responsibility for their health and well-being seems another matter entirely. I keep thinking about how there is no good time to have a baby and this feels a lot like that.

We are so busy and life is so full and I am so overwhelmed and the stress has been pumping at such a high decibel with very little respite for the past two years that in many ways it is hard to imagine a worse time to take on something new. And yet, if not now, when? I had the spring of 2025 set as my start date, but here we are a year later. Not much has gotten easier, and the world continues to spiral out of control. Delaying in favor of some future fantasy of ease and clarity is the stuff of dreams. So here we go forward into our sheepy edification. Ready or not.

I have opted not for a wild and remote flock start. We cannot handle the indifference. We need love and any overt expression of it that we can find. And so, friendly ewes it is. Ones that will eat out of our hands and take scratches behind the ears, and eagerly follow Freddy around. The plan is to commence involvement with our local 4H group and dig deep into place and animal husbandry and farm community. We are here. The place at this particular end of a long and winding and sometimes incongruent road. But there has been a thread.

There has perhaps never been any time before in my life in which so many parts of myself have been at play. Most seasons have favored one over another, casting parts into bedgrudging and resentful shadow to either atrophy or rise up and rebel. I have always been such a mix of interests, and there have been few, if any, models of similarly, oddly disparate examples to follow. Where, after all, are the farmer-mama-home-educating-yoga-teacher/practitioner-bibliophile-knitting-weight-lifting-cow-milking-stoners? This seems like such an obvious combo to me, but in reality, it’s far more hit or miss than you can imagine. I’ll get a match on two or three, sometimes four, but the entire blend is elusive. A unicorn. A phantam. All legend, no substance.

But lately, more than ever, who cares? Nowhere else has this been more true for me than in yoga. Which, while it may be cliché, is really and truly everything. For all the years we’ve been living in Vermont, I have been spiraling in and out of doubting what it is that I am here to teach. Wondering why so few folks come and why I’m not a match for most. If I should teach differently. Be different. Do better. Whatever. I have often felt the twangs of “What’s the point? Will anyone even miss me if I’m gone? If I quit? Throw in the towel?”

The answer is me. I would miss me if I weren’t the meg that taught yoga. Teaching keeps me practicing, and practicing keeps me in the pulse and flow of the real. Yoga keeps me connected to the cosmos and to love. It tethers me to the expanding nature of reality and the infinite. And what better place could there possibly be from which to raise children and farm soil and wool and meat? What would making sweaters and reading books even mean if I weren’t so fluent at toggling between the individual and the universal?

And so. More yoga. All yoga. To classes of three or thirty. I can’t quit you cuz I can’t quit me. Everything for me is better with breath and shape and wonder. And sheep. I think, most likely, better with sheep too.