Stagtine, 27. Husbandman to Hunter
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Husbandman to Hunter
We saw our farming lives as nature’s savior, as rational man dictating and demanding nature’s marvelous return. But Paddy opened another door, or another gate. We had long pushed for green grass in the spring and we had long pushed for soil health and enriched vegetative communities through stocking densities and the mathematical management of time—through tight and moving mobs of cattle, sheep, and goats.
Yes, our soils increased and the vegetative communities developed with it. But we never found a herd that invariably effected and was intimately affected by its environment. While we thought our grazing mimicked the natural landscape, her co-creative and fluid energies—her fungal circulatory systems, for instance—never welled to the surface and a putrid, ecological stagnancy like bog water infused the landscape.
“Then, what do we do?” I asked, again embarrassed.
“What if we do nothing at all?” Morgan whispered just above her breath. As much a question to herself as a question in response. “If fungi transform individuals into an enmeshed and tangled web of life,” she thought out loud, “maybe even life forces that are animated and extended with the spirit’s and the wind’s vibrating energies, then what are we doing when we pull the bull out of the herd?”
“Are you asking what is reproduction?” I questioned. Trying to follow.
“No. I am asking—” she allowed the thought to mature, to birth a new reality, “—why are we getting in the way?”
All of winter is left to nurse its yearly wounds and stumble and weep and sleep through the cold, grey dawn, awaiting her rebirth.
We had long worked through the grey dawns and we had long questioned the point. Living seasonally was important to us but we worked when the winter slept, shoveling heaps of hay that stand uneaten amongst the muck. As if a great tide swept in and took its fine time draining away, Earth rises to meet the hay midway.
Life rises as it freezes, like agriculture rises to meet the ecological miracle that they tell us looms lovingly in the distance. If we all just work hard enough. We will see it. The miracle. Just keep looking. Keep working. Hard. Harder!
The next morning, with fungi at our feet, we did what felt like the impossible. We opened Paddy’s gate, like a hydrostatic squirt gun, and did what all of our mentors and all of the podcasts and all of the books and all of the grazing conferences told us not to do: we released control.
Opening the barn’s paddock gate, Paddy erupted downwind. He immediately and happily ran right past us, and our smiles and their joys followed. I cannot remember the day or the time but I well remember the joy. Morgan was laughing as we both tried to keep up with his playful, bucking gate. I remember how her icy breath struggled to compensate its joyous energy spend and I remember how her many laughs were marked between inhaled heaves for air and exhaled explosions of life. A loving laughter.
Like two lovers lost in love’s lucidity, we laughed as we ran and we ran together—the three of us.
“Is this allowed?” I questioned, laughing as we ran.
“Is anything?” Morgan returned, obstinately.
I remember my boots skating over the icy, February landscape and I remember feeling weightless, like the dark-eyed junco emerging from her ashen inertia. We were late but we were finally moving. Our fixed and focused attention on soil health and its regeneration lifted heavenward and a peculiar lightness that was also a partic- ular permutation of life’s true chaos settled on the scene and we approached the main herd’s gate.
Paddy’s happy plunge halted at the gate and with a subtle twist of his neck. His eyes looked into ours. Time stopped, for a moment, or many moments, and he looked at us. He was not asking for permission. As though a grown child leaving home, his was a look of deep remembrance and a yearning to actualize what his body and its ancestors long knew—autonomy.
He stood still as I nudged passed him. He did not even twitch. My coat brushed his jet black curls and my adrenaline-energized blood rushed heavily through its veins. In the silent cacophony of remembrance, his ancestors screamed and danced but he did not move. He was a marble monument of muscle. A teacher waiting for his student, patiently.
The gate opened and he walked through it as though he walked through a grove of chestnut oaks, evenly and kingly. We shut the now singular herd’s gate and turned around and walked away. We did not wait to see what happened. Paddy was now a permanent member of his herd. The moment said enough. We never looked back.
The drums erupted; the fungi pulsed; the heavens seemed to open up and life, in its more-full, unadulterated form, descended.
The commons of Earth became less enclosed.
Thank you for being with us and sharing this space. It is a blessing, a deep honor to have you!
If you enjoy this content, if you find it meaningful to you, we encourage you to become a paid member for $3/mo! With a paid subscription, you get access to all of my previously published and award-winning books (digital and audiobook versions) and so, so much more! It may be a cup of coffee for you, but it is the nourishment that keeps up alive, and we are so very thankful!
Latest Unshod Podcast Episode
SOLD OUT!
Our August 23-25, Kincentric Table: A Sacred Beef and Goat Harvest Workshop has SOLD OUT! What an unbelievable blessing and honor it is to host this class, while simultaneously receiving such an exciting response from our community. Stay tuned in the coming months, as our scheduled courses open for 2025—there will be a number of these classes / workshops for you to select from!
About this workshop:
What if the husbandman became the hunter? What if the field harvest erupted as a ceremonial and kincentric art? What if becoming a 'student of your survival' emerged as a hope-filled and 'sacred reawakening' of our human form, as Earthlings?
Grief and glitter: together we will become Earthlings. Together, we will work to unbind and untether ourselves from the uncreative sciences of today and learn our humanity through the sacred gift of the field harvest.
No corrals, no cages, no fear. Using nothing but our hands and simple, human-scale tools, we will track the herd in over 100-acres of the Wildland and then harvest a Wildland bull and bucks while they are yet with their herds, letting go of our control and allowing the herd's ceremony to rise and walk with us, amongst us, unabated. We will cry together. We will light fires and eat while we work, honoring and learning what we honor.