Musing

By The Call of The Cranes

I slip into my rain pants and reach for my hiking boots. The sleek and warm head of a Kelpie dog nudges me strongly. Gibson. Three other hopeful black and tan faces are right here, peering at me. Ears and eyebrows alert, eyes eager. I could just be stepping out but they know I’m heading out to the pasture instead. The anticipation speaks volumes about the uncanny intuitiveness of canines. How I long to tap into my own intuition with such depth and confidence. I’ll only be taking one dog with me. Gibson it is, just be way of making a fast choice. I open the drawer of dog collars and pull out a bright orange collar and fasten it on Gibson’s neck, aware of the disappointment in the others by way of making my choice.

It is cool and wet, the guardian dogs are anticipating a meal tonight. On warm days it’s hit or miss whether or not they eat but tonight five of the six guardians meet up with me near the edge of the flock.

I lean against the ranger while they eat. Gibson sits on the seat looking out at the sheep. Movement in the far distance, just above the marshy flats of this pasture space, catches my eye. Not sheep but low flying Sandhill Cranes. Birds are gathering now. Along the route out to pasture we stirred up Killdeer birds, 10-15 of them at once. Swarms of smaller black birds have been sweeping in aerobatic flights for a couple weeks. More recently, the cranes have been gathering.

I watch without much thought or concern. I can barely make them out in the dimming light of the evening but their calling is clear. Something falls into place.

The moment before I was thinking about social media – of all thoughts to bring to this sacred prairie place I am embarrassed to admit I brought concerns of social media along. Not very conscious or intentional of me at all. None of these animals, none of this land, this place, this nature, this way of being, exists on social media. I can look around as far as my eye can see and no other Being here is concerning itself with social media or who likes what. When did I get caught up in focusing so much on the rat race? I miss this blog. I miss the more frequent stints of writing for it and for my long-silent, Crooked Fences Newsletter which I used to send out monthly.

The guardian dogs are finished eating. Gibson and I head off in search of the sixth dog. The sheep have all gathered at one end of the pasture, there really isn’t much purpose to letting Gibson gather them up tonight, they have done so themselves. As we exit the pasture I let Gibson off the Ranger to run home. This boy lives to run and without missing a beat he stretches his long body out in full, effortless, ground eating stride.

When we return to the yard I collect the remaining Kelpies at the house and head out for a late evening walk. The light is fading fast and we are accompanied by the call of the cranes, the sound clear in the calm evening air. Their half birdsong, half purring trill is a soothing balm of sorts. The call of the cranes is a reminder to come back to nature’s pace and that all my answers are here, as they always have been. I know that I have to make a shift toward writing again. And to make a shift back into Nature’s psyche, both in the offline world and the online world. It’s no matter if the online world may not always support such tendencies, because those tendencies are what support me.

Friends Beyond Facebook. Series of five, each about 11 x 14 inches in size. Felted, made with wool. Awaiting framing.

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A Little Big Month

It has been a big month; I have missed being here, writing. It doesn’t help that we’ve had all sorts of internet service trouble while our service provider claims to be improving our internet service.

We received rain through late June and July and I am writing to the sound of raindrops on our tin roof. With the arrival of rain came an unfolding of sorts. An unfolding of tightly held concern, an unfolding of hope, an unfolding of the grass as the earth opened up and took a drink. On a morning walk with the Kelpies the place was utterly still and while I sat in the grass trying to match the stillness I thought for sure I could hear the land sipping water. The grazing land bounced back beautifully (forgiveness received, bless you Mother N) and having grass available for grazing means there is less urgency about selling animals and a little more wiggle room about where and when they go. For the hay land, the rain is too late. We might get a small crop of late hay although not nearly enough to feed our flock for the winter.

Another reason for the big month is that my dive into doing artwork and sharing it has become another type of unfolding. In July I attended a studio trail event and right after that a national sheep show hosted in our province. I’m just coming off of the buzz from the latter event. I was hopeful this show would be a good crowd and it was.

Setting up one’s artwork in a public display space and then standing there, cleanly dressed, answering the questions of a very curious public feels a world apart from day-to-day, solitary life on the ranch, fiddling with floats on water troughs, mending gates, and wearing guardian dog drool on your jeans. I feel foreign and out of sorts at every public trade show. But then the questions and comments begin and perhaps because my art is so closely tied to my daily scene, and to what I know, I become settled enough to get through the day. Never comfortable, but settled enough to let it unfold as it will. The reception and feedback to the artwork was very strong and once again I am amazed at the folks who popped by to say they love the photos and the art and are following it online.

Back at home I settle into the peace and quiet of sheep, dogs and prairie land, and merge into the familiarity of ordinary work for my hands once again. The buzz subsides but the creative juices are turning. The more I dive into artwork and into writing the more tightly interwoven the facets of me and this land and livestock life become. There is no piece separate from the other now. Land, animal, nature, artist, human, humanity – every piece within the self and the self within every piece.

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Do We Love Nature Tug Of War

It’s early in the morning, it is the dead of winter, snow is on the way and the cold wind is sharp and angry. I can hear the whining with intermittent gusty howls. It will be an ugly day for animals and for people doing the work of feeding and sheltering them. It will likely take the life from some creatures, I just hope not from any of mine.

When I wrote and posted the last blog post Do We Love Nature I was conflicted as to whether or not to include the photo of the magpie on the dead sheep. Ever since I have been reflecting on why the conflict of showing a slightly offensive photo of mother nature at work is there at all. Why the feeling of treading a slippery slope when all I want to do is talk about and share the real deal of life and death that I see in this land and livestock life? Why didn’t I feel brave enough to post that photo and others like it as the first headline photo, or post it to social media? Instead I posted beautiful photos of the birds in flight. In public spotlight I too am caught in the trap of playing into nature as an entity to be worshiped for its glory sunrises and healing sunsets.

I find myself smack in the middle of a tug-o-war because I also find myself, if not loving every moment nature hands out, respecting every moment. That respect is what drove me to begin this topic in the first place. I know mother nature can take this rug right out from under me. I know she is kind AND cruel, she is peace AND war, she is calm AND she is chaos. She has a design crew, a detail crew, a killing crew, a clean up crew… Deciding how I will position myself amongst all of it is the key. But knowing and sharing what you know are two different things in todays animal worshiping world.

Those of us in a line a work that regularly presents such visceral occurrences of natures true identity develop an undeniable respect for mother nature. It’s one sided too share that in a worshipping viewpoint alone because while mother nature’s inescapable beauty certainly fills us up, her inescapable ugly just as certainly takes us down. So we are always seeing two sides. It’s very hard on us to deny and hide one side of the picture of our lives. I get that people do not want their days tampered by photos of the ugly side of real-life nature but I would venture to offer that it’s human ugliness we are most offended by, not Mother N’s.

What I am deeply bothered by is that we have become a people of all or none, a people of extremes and hence a people handing out ever more laws and regulations both spoken and, in the case of me dithering about a photo of a dead sheep, unspoken. Meanwhile Mother N goes on righting the balance for us, showing us the way. Sure enough, I don’t wish to see photos of extreme ugliness and cruelty either but the resulting protective shield we’ve thrown up for the 97+ percent of the population who live removed from land and livestock is removing us from the reality of mother nature’s brilliant balance. The very balance we need in order to get by in this world. She’s got this folks. We are not going to do a better job of this than mother nature, however with mother nature as an ally we’ll do a very truthful and purposeful job. We need to trust in this, all of it, good, bad and ugly, because within the trusting is where we find the nature of ourselves, and our land and environment certainly needs folks who are connected to nature, not just using her to further a propaganda agenda or a bottom line.

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