Category: Stewardship

Let Live

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Let us not with one stone kill one bird, 
much less two. Let us never put a cat 
in a bag nor skin them, regardless 
of how many ways there are to do so. 
And let us never take the bull, especially 
by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is 

we could watch our tongues or keep 
silent. What I mean is we could scrub 
the violence from our speech. And if we find
truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her

ground-down molars, no matter how 
old she is, especially if she was given 
as a gift. Again, let’s open her mouth——that of the horse, 
I mean——let us touch that interdental space where 
no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip. 
Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle 

empty between her incisors and molars, rub her 
aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her. 
Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call 
broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through 
two thirteen-year emergences of cicadas

and thought their rising a god infestation, 
thought each insect roiling up an iteration 
of the many names of god, because god to her is 
the grasses so what comes up from grass is
god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she

say the word cicada——words are hindrances 
to what can be spoken through the body, are 
what she tolerates when straddled, 
giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After, 
it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl, 
before the saddle sweat is rinsed cool 
with water from the hose and a carrot is offered 
flat from the palm. Yes, words being 

generally useless she listens instead 
to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun
burns overhead, when it’s warm enough
for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the 
dark and fill their wings to make them 
stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound 

of winter-coming in her mane 
or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane——
yes, that sound——a liquid shushing 
like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once 
but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall 
leaves. Yes, that sound, as they fill their new wings 
then lumber to the canopy to demand
come here, come here, come 
here, now come. 

If this is a parable you don’t understand, 
then, dear human, stop listening for words. 
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings, 
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings. 
The lesson here is of the mare 
and of the insects, even of the rooster 
puffed and strutting past. Because now, 
now there is only one thing worth hearing, 
and it is the plea of every living being in that field 
we call ours, is the two-word commandment 
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live. 
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.  
~Nickole Brown “Parable”

When a governor writes about her decision to shoot her wayward dog and stinky goat, our reaction is about the injustice perpetrated on the dog more than her decision to play god with any animal she has responsibility for. I feel a twinge of guilt at the accusation. Who among us can throw stones?

God is clear we are meant to be caretakers of His Creation. Yet I still swat flies and trap mice – there is no pleasure in doing so, so I still ask for forgiveness for my lack of charity and decision to make my own existence more comfortable at the expense of another living thing.

I admit I fail Creation in myriad ways.

I have owned animals whose behavior brought me to my knees, sometimes literally with my face in the muck. I have wept over the loss of a deformed stillbirth foal and a pond of koi frozen in a bitter winter storm. The stories abound of my helplessness in the face of sadness and loss and frustration but I never wanted to become executioner.

I don’t live with cycles of cicada population booms but have experienced their overwhelming din and understood we are mere witnesses and not in control. We are not “little g” gods on this earth. We are its stewards.

Let us live and thrive together.

Please let us live.

photo by Emily Vander Haak

Letting It Go

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Sometimes they
go outside, maybe

move a rosebush
to the back yard or

clean a window.
Usually they

simply stand,
under a maple

or in a snowfall.
And this is often

when they see
a nuthatch on its

dizzy route down
a trunk, or

the quick flick
of a chickadee

across the yard
and onto a branch.

They don’t do
much. That’s for

others. They know
how to take things

for granted, know
what to miss.

Every morning
they make breakfast.

And when the sun
sets, they let it go.
~Jack Ridl “The Neighbors” from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

We are surrounded by acres of farmland, blessed by neighbors hard at work cherishing the land and buildings and animals they own. They don’t take anything for granted and strive to preserve a heritage of good stewardship. Even so, they know when to sit back to appreciate the rhythms of the seasons.

There is joy in simply watching time pass by.

The land continues to teach us all, through the sweet springs, the sweaty summers, the colorful autumns and harsh winter winds. We need each other when the snow drifts high on our driveways, the power goes out, the well runs dry, or the garden produces far more than we can just use ourselves.

And when the sun sets — well, we watch it with awe.

Another day of letting it go, grateful for what our gentle neighbors share with us – those who are next door, those just down the road, and the I’m daily reminded of the generosity of those of you who take the time to stop by to read these words and say howdy.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
~Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

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Undigestible Waste

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Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest. 
~Charles Moore

I beg to differ.
I’m here to say on Earth Day: humans aren’t the only guilty parties.

Over the decades, we have bought various styles of buckets and tubs to water our horses. Thanks to a destructive horse or two, we have a water bucket graveyard on our farm. Buckets, tubs, barrels, you name it – if it once had water in it, it is no longer functional and therefore is not only merely dead, it is really most sincerely dead.

We discovered early on that Haflingers do have a variety of creative techniques for letting me know it is feeding time. Over the years, we’ve had the gamut: the noisy neigher, the mane tosser, the foot stomper, the stall door striker, the play with your lips in the water and splash everything, and most irritating of all, the teeth raked across the woven wire front of the stall.

A few Haflingers do wait patiently for their turn, without fussing or furor, sometimes nickering a low “huhuhuhuhuh” of greeting. That is truly blissful in comparison.

We raised one filly whose chosen method of bringing attention to herself was to bump her belly up against her hanging rubber water buckets, making them bounce wildly about, spraying water everywhere, drenching her, and her stall in the process. She loved it. It was sport for her to see if she could tip the buckets to the point of emptying them and then knock them off their hooks so she could boot them around the stall, destroying a few in the process. Nothing made her happier.

Our current bucket destroyer is intent on making the kill rather than making noise for attention. I estimate he has gone through over a hundred buckets in 17 years. Nature does not digest this residue of his misbehavior.

Now when I buy a new bucket, I’m reminded:

I need to quit stomping and knocking doors in my impatience, as well as quit hollering when a quiet greeting is far more welcome and appropriate. I need to quit soaking everyone else with my splashing drama – after all, it yields me nothing more than empty broken buckets. Eventually, when I destroy every bucket in the place, I will get very thirsty and wish I hadn’t been so foolish and brash.

So if my horses are potentially trainable to have better manners, so am I. In fact, over the years, my horses have been busy teaching me a thing or two.

Now I need to find a recycle use for dead buckets.

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The Neon Night

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Tonight his airplane comes in from the West,
and he rises from his seat, a suitcoat slung
over his arm. The flight attendant smiles
and says, “Have a nice visit,” and he nods
as if he has done this all before,
as if his entire life hasn’t been 170 acres
of corn and oats, as if a plow isn’t dragging
behind him through the sand and clay,
as if his head isn’t nestling in the warm
flank of a Holstein cow.

Only his hands tell the truth:
fingers thick as ropes, nails flat
and broken in the trough of endless chores.
He steps into the city warily, breathing
metal and exhaust, bewildered by the
stampede of humanity circling around him.
I want to ask him something familiar,
something about tractors and wagons,
but he is taken by the neon night,
crossing carefully against the light.
~Joyce Sutphen “My Father Comes to the City” from Straight Out of View.

Photo by Abby Mobley

I’ve lived a mostly quiet farm life over the last four years – minimized air travel and avoided big cities, as I was never fond of either even before COVID. Flying recently to visit family reminded me how challenging it is for me to get used to large crowds again, navigating unfamiliar urban highways and sitting with a hundred people in a winged metal tube 35,000 feet in the air.

But even farmers have to leave home once in a while. We shake the mud off our boots and brush the hayseeds from our hair, and try to act and be presentable in civilized society.

But my nervousness remains, knowing I’m out of my comfort zone, continually yearning for the wide open spaces of home.

Travel will take some getting used to again, but there is a world to be explored out there. It’s time to see how the city’s neon night compares with one illuminating barn light on the farm.

Like a Cat Asleep

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All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of the master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.
~D.H. Lawrence “Pax”

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
          His ineffable effable
          Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.
~T.S. Eliot from The Naming of Cats

The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
~J.R.R. Tolkien from “Cat” from Tales of the Perilous Realm

I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
~Mary Oliver from “I Happened to be Standing” from A Thousand Mornings

Our cats seem to have no sense of time — until it is mealtime.

Otherwise they pussyfoot through the hours of the day, unworried about what comes next, or what just happened. They find a convenient patch of sun, or a particularly soft cushion, or sometimes a most unlikely place like a cardboard box or pile of shavings or top of a fencepost.

Then they yawn, become rubber-boned and curl up for a nap.

How do they contemplate the fact of their existence?
How do they appear so relaxed, in peace and serenity?
Do they understand their place in creation and give thanks?

God wants us to rest comfortably in our own skins, as adaptable as a sleeping cat. And He wants us to count our days without wasting a moment for thankfulness. We are meant to be more than just hungry and sleepy and rubber-boned.

We are created in His image, acutely aware of the privilege of our existence.

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When From Death I’m Free: Made Happy By Simple Things

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I know a bleeding-heart plant that has thrived
for sixty years if not more, and has never
missed a spring without rising and spreading
itself into a glossy bush, with many small red
hearts dangling. Don’t you think that deserves
a little thought? The woman who planted it
has been gone for a long time, and everyone
who saw it in that time has also died or moved
away and so, like so many stories, this one can’t
get finished properly. Most things that are
important, have you noticed, lack a certain
neatness. More delicious, anyway, is to
remember my grandmother’s pleasure when
the dissolve of winter was over and the green
knobs appeared and began to rise, and to cre-
ate their many hearts. One would say she was
a simple woman, made happy by simple
things. I think this was true. And more than
once, in my long life, I have wished to be her.
~Mary Oliver “The Bleeding-Heart” from New and Selected Poems
Volume Two

My Grandma Kittie grew flowers–lots of them. Her garden stretched along both sides of the sidewalk to her old two story farm house, in window boxes and beds around the perimeter, in little islands scattered about the yard anchored by a tree, or a piece of driftwood, a gold fish pond or a large rock. Wisteria hung like a thick curtain of purple braids from the roof of her chicken coop, and her greenhouse, far bigger than her home, smelled moist and mossy with hanging fuschia baskets. For her it was full time joy disguised as a job: she sold seedlings, and ready-to-display baskets, and fresh flower arrangements. 

She often said she was sure heaven would be full of flowers needing tending, and she was just practicing for the day when she could make herself useful as a gardener for God.

Visiting Grandma meant spending summer evenings in her yard heavy with wafting flower perfume. She especially loved her bleeding hearts bushes that returned every spring, dripping their red blossoms over her unruly lawn.

Another of her favorite flowers was the evening primrose.  It was one of a few night blooming plants meant to attract pollinating moths. Its tall stems were adorned by lance shaped leaves, with multiple buds and blooms per stem.  Each evening, and it was possible to set one’s watch by its punctuality, only one green wrapped bud per stem would open, revealing a bright yellow blossom with four delicate veined petals, a rosette of stamens and a cross-shaped stigma in the center, rising far above the blossom.  The yellow was so vivid and lively, it seemed almost like a drop of sun had been left on earth to light the night.  By morning, the bloom would begin to wither and wilt under the real sunlight, somehow overcome with the brightness, and would blush a pinkish orange as it folded upon itself, ready to die and drop from the plant in only a day or two, leaving a bulging seed pod behind.

I would settle down on the damp lawn at twilight, usually right before dusk fell, to watch the choreography of opening of blossoms on stem after stem of evening primrose. Whatever the trigger was for the process of unfolding, there would be a sudden loosening of the protective green calyces, in an almost audible release. Then over the course of about a minute, the overlapping yellow petals would unfurl, slowly, gently, purposefully, revealing their pollen treasure trove inside.  It was like watching time lapse cinematography, only this was an accelerated, real time flourish of beauty, happening right before my eyes. I always felt privileged to witness each unveiling as Grandma liked to remind me that few flowers ever allowed us to behold both their birth and death. The evening primrose was not at all shy about sharing itself and it would enhance the show with a sweet lingering fragrance.

Grandma knew how much I enjoyed the evening primrose display, so she saved seeds from the seed pods for me, and helped me plant them at our house during one of her spring time visits. I remember scattering the seeds with her in a specially chosen spot, in anticipation of the “drops of sun” that would grace our yard come summertime.  However, Grandma was more tired than usual on this particular visit, taking naps and not as eager to go for walks or eat the special meals cooked in honor of her visit. Her usually resonant laughing brown eyes appeared dull, almost muddy.

The day she was to return to her home, she came into the kitchen at breakfast time, wearily setting down her packed bags.  She gave me a hug and I looked at her.  Something was dreadfully wrong.  Grandma’s eyes were turning yellow.

Instead of returning home that day, she went to the hospital. Within a day, she had surgery and within two days, was told she had terminal pancreatic cancer.  She did not last long, her skin becoming more jaundiced by the day, her eyes more icteric and far away.  She soon left her earthly gardens to cultivate those in heaven.

I’ve kept bleeding hearts and evening primrose in my garden ever since. Grandma’s heart dangles from the bushes and she is released from each primrose bloom as it unfolds precipitously in the evening. She wafts across the yard in its perfume. Her spirit, a drop of sun coming to rest, luminous, for a brief stay upon the earth, only to fall before we’re ready to let it go. But as the wilted bloom lets go, its seeds have already begun to form.

I’m sure Grandma is still growing flowers. And my soil-covered hands look more like hers every day.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
    Surely the people are grass.
 The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of our God endures forever.
Isaiah 40: 7-8

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Laid Aside His Crown: Help Me Push Myself Aside

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I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
~R.S. Thomas “A Bright Field”

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. 
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever 
I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts
after any lunatic at all. 

But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all: 
although it comes to those who wait for it, 
it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, 
a gift and a total surprise.

I return from one walk knowing where
the killdeer nests in the field by the creek
and the hour the laurel blooms. 
I return from the same walk a day later
scarcely knowing my own name.

Litanies hum in my ears; 
my tongue flaps in my mouth. 
Ailinon, alleluia!
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see
and my self is the earth’s shadow
that keeps me from seeing all the moon.
The crescent is very beautiful
and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see;
but what I am afraid of, dear God,
is that my self shadow will grow so large
that it blocks the whole moon,
and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

I do not know You God
because I am in the way.
Please help me to push myself aside.
~Flannery O’Connor from A Prayer Journal

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God…
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I am learning to step aside so my own shadow stops obscuring God’s gift of illumination. I can be so blinded by discouragement, busyness and distraction that I lose sight of God Himself.

I stand in the way and need a push to let the Light shine forth.

Surprise me, dear Lord. Cram this common bush with heaven. 

Though I regularly lament in the shadows, help me lift my voice in praise and gratitude for your gift: the pearl of great price you generously hold for me to find each day.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Matthew 13: 44

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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For My Soul: Hidden Grain

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  “All Christian thinking is resurrection thinking.” —Jay Parini
Let this sorrow be a fallow field
and grief the seeding rain.
Then may I be hidden, a grain
in night’s still mystery,
until the day
I’m risen, yield
bound in sheaves of joy,
and Negev is an ecstasy.
~Franchot Ballinger, “Let Me Be Like Those Who Dream” from Crossings

Ears of Wheat – Vincent Van Gogh
Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh
Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh

The love of God most High for our soul
is so wonderful that it surpasses all
knowledge. No created being can fully know
the greatness, the sweetness, the
tenderness, of the love that our Maker has
for us. By his Grace and help therefore let
us in spirit stand in awe and gaze, eternally
marveling at the supreme, surpassing,
single-minded, incalculable love that God,
Who is all goodness, has for us.
~Juliana of Norwich “God’s Love for Us”

…you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God;  for

“All flesh is like grass
    and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
    and the flower falls,
 but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
1Peter 1:23-25

The fields around our farm still show no signs of wakening.
They are stubble and moss, mole hills and mud.
It is unimaginable they might soon produce anything.

Then grief rains down on buried seed and the grain will rise.

All winter everything, everyone,
has been so dead, so hidden, so hopeless;
His touch calls us back to life.
Nothing can be more hopeful than the barren made fruitful,
the ugly made beautiful,
the dead made alive.

Love is come again, digging deep
into the fallow fields of our hearts.

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Still Open for Business

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Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be.
Unto us, so much is given.
We just have to be open for business.
~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

It was my privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaited me behind each exam room door.

During an average clinic day, I opened those doors 36 times, then close them behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes allocated per patient. I needed to peel through the layers of a problem quickly to find the core of truth about why a patient was seeking help.

Sometimes what I was looking for was right on the surface: a bad cough, a swollen ankle, a bad laceration, but also easily were their tears, their pain, their fear. Most of the time, the reason was buried deep and I needed to wade through the rashes and sore throats and headaches to find it.

Once in a while, I could actually do something tangible to help right then and there — sew up the cut, lance the boil, splint the fracture, restore hearing by removing a plug of wax from an ear canal.

Often I simply gave permission to a patient to be sick — to allow themselves time to renew, rest and trust their bodies to know what is needed to heal well.

Sometimes, I was the coach pushing them to stop living “sick” — to stop self-medicating when life is challenging, to stretch even when it hurts, to strive to overcome the overwhelm.

Always I was looking for an opening to say something a patient may consider later — how they might make different choices, how they could be bolder and braver in their self care and care for others, how every day is a thread in the larger tapestry of their one precious life.

At night I took calls and each morning woke early to get online work done, trying to avoid feeling unprepared and inadequate to the volume of tasks heaped upon the day. I know I was frequently stretched beyond my capacity, stressed by administrative pressures and obstacles I faced in providing the best care.

I understood trials my patients were facing because I had faced them too. I shared their worry, their fears and vulnerabilities because I had lived through it too.

Even now, I try to simply let it be, especially through troubled times, when I have been gifted so much over the years. So my own experience is a gift I can still share here, even in retirement.

I’ll never forget: no matter who waited behind the exam room door, they never failed to be astonishing and revelatory to me, professionally and personally.

I’m so grateful I was open for business for 42 years.
I don’t see patients in an exam room any longer.
This Doctor is In, writing every day, with friendly advice.
Let it be so.

Peanuts comic by Charles Schulz

What is it You see
What do I possess
Oh how could it be
I should be so blessed

I am nothing much
Neither saint nor queen
I am just a girl
And You are everything

But if You ask
Let it be so
Let it be so
and if You will
Let it be so

I am so afraid
Of this great unknown
They may turn away
I may be all alone

My life is so small
so small a price to pay
to see my savior come
and take my sin away

I will bear their scorn
I will wear the shame
All things for the good
All things in Your name

Father be my strength
Shepherd hold my hand
Open wide my heart
to welcome who is there
~Sarah Hart

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Everything is a Parable

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Every happening, great and small,
is a parable whereby God speaks to us,
and the art of life is to get the message.
~Malcolm Muggeridge

I’ve banked nothing, or everything.
Every day
the chores need doing again.
Early in the morning,
I clean the horse barn with a manure fork.
Every morning,
it feels as though it could be
the day before or a year ago
or a year before that.
With every pass, I give the fork one final upward flick
to keep the manure from falling out,
and every day I remember
where I learned to do that and from whom.

Time all but stops.

But then I dump the cart on the compost pile.
I bring out the tractor and turn the pile,
once every three or four days.
The bucket bites and lifts, and steam comes billowing out of the heap.
It’s my assurance that time is really moving forward,
decomposing us all in the process.
~Verlyn Klinkenborg from More Scenes from the Rural Life

He <the professor> asked
what I made of the other Oxford students
so I told him:
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. 

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.

We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.

And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.

I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrow-full,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.
~Maxine Kumin “The Excrement Poem”

For well over thirty years, my husband and I have spent over an hour a day shoveling manure out of numerous horse stalls and I’m a better person for it. Wintertime chores are always a character-building experience. It feels like everything, myself included, is in a process of decomposition.

Everyone should spend time simply mucking out every day; I think the world would generally be a better place. I enlist any young person who happens to visit our farm as an object lesson in better living through composting the stinky stuff in our lives.

Wheeled to a mountainous pile in our barnyard,  our daily collection of manure happily composts year round, becoming rich fertilizer in a matter of months through a crucible-like heating process of organic chemistry, bacteria and earthworms.  Nothing mankind has achieved quite matches the drama of useless and basically disgusting stuff transforming into the essential elements needed for productive growth and survival.   This is a metaphor I can <ahem> happily muck about in.

I’m in awe, every day, at being part of this process — in many ways a far more tangible improvement to the state of the world than anything else I manage to accomplish every day.  The horses, major contributors that they are, act underwhelmed by my enthusiasm.  I guess some miracles are relative, depending on one’s perspective, but if the horses understood that the grass they contentedly eat in the pasture, or the hay they munch on during the winter months, was grown thanks to their carefully recycled waste products, they might be more impressed.

Their nonchalance about the daily mucking routine is understandable.  If they are outside, they probably don’t notice their beds are clean when they return to the stalls at night.  If they are inside during the heavy rain and frozen winter days, they feel duty-bound to be in our faces as we move about their stall, toting a pitchfork and pushing a wheelbarrow.  I’m a source of constant amusement as they nose my jacket pockets for treats that I never carry, as they beg for scratches on their unreachable itchy spots, and as they attempt to overturn an almost full load, just to see balls of manure roll to all corners of the stall like breaking a rack of billiard balls in a game of pool.

Wally, our former stallion, now gelded, discovered a way to make my life easier rather than complicating it.  He hauled a rubber tub into his stall from his paddock, by tossing it into the air with his teeth and throwing it, and it finally settled against one wall.  Then he began to consistently pile his manure, with precise aim, right in the tub.  I didn’t ask him to do this.  It had never occurred to me.  I hadn’t even thought it was possible for a horse to house train himself.  But there it is, proof that some horses prefer neat and tidy rather than the whirlwind eggbeater approach to manure distribution.  After a day of his manure pile plopping, it is actually too heavy for me to pick up and dump into the wheelbarrow all in one tub load, but it takes 1/4 of the time to clean his stall than the others, and he spares all this bedding.

What a guy.  He provides me unending inspiration in how to keep my own personal muck concentrated rather than spattering it about, contaminating the rest of the world.

Now, once I teach him to put the seat back down when he’s done, he’s welcome to move into the house.

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