was months before I could ask what she was up to: Christmas or Pentecost—one of the holidays on which we were given permission to speak to the novices. She told me she was sitting zazen. Amazing. I had never encountered such a practice, outside of the most esoteric texts in comparative religion. Certainly it had nothing to do with our religion. Perhaps it was forbidden by the First Commandment. That was the point on which Sister Michael Ann set me straight. She gave me a book by an Irish Jesuit who had spent his life in Japan, and whose work involved a careful mediation of every aspect of Christianity and Buddhism. It was an unusual introduction to Eastern meditation practice, taking place in a contemplative Christian community and utterly dissociated from any understanding of Buddhism itself as a philosophic system. Sister Michael Ann’s journey was later popularized by such a famous, male, and surely orthodox monastic as Thomas Merton, but I think that in those days she was almost alone on the zafu.
And I learned to sit there, too.
An oddity of Zen Buddhism, as distinct from the rituals of most religions, is that it has a practice distinct from a belief system. You can “sit”—as meditators say—and remain a Jew or a Catholic or an atheist. So my early Zen training kept me in place, on the zafu, through all the religious inquiry of my later years—for it was not long after I left the novitiate that I stopped attending Mass. One of the great gifts of Catholicism, paradoxically, was a Buddhist meditation practice. I laze away from sitting now and then, sometimes for months, but I always return as though to home. It’s a place where invisible spirits put food in front of me and feed my soul.
They feed it now, as I try to muster enough concentration to handle three-hundred-pound sheep …
I’m getting up with the sun these days, so I can do yoga and have some meditation time before driving across town to the barn. It helps me to focus better and not get stomped, bitten, or killed. Imagine the indignity of being killed by a sheep. How hard it would be on my grown children to have to say, “Mom was killed by a sheep. …” Always that little snicker.
Today a man named Mabu came and bought eight lambs, which we herded into his Dodge Caravan. The lambs were happy to board and left with their noses up against the glass like tourists. It would make a great commercial for Dodge Caravans. I’m told that Muslims, like Orthodox Jews, slaughter in a ritual way that requires reverence for the animal as well as thanksgiving for a meal.
As I wave good-bye, I think about a phrase my son uses when we have discussions about the ethics of food production: meat that has been read its rights. After he evolved this position, we bought our beef and pork from a local farmer whose operation we knew well, and chickens that were labeled “pareve.” But as time went on, we came to shrink from the sight of beef. Pork disappeared from our diet after my daughter raised piglets one summer. I will not admit to being a vegetarian; I’ve lived in too many third-world countries, where even roadkill is retrieved as a gift of the gods, to espouse—I am chattering to myself—such a bourgeois fashion. Excluding a strict religious orientation, Hindu or Buddhist, one can only be a vegetarian from a position of privilege. Besides, many foreign visitors come to my house, and I like to serve them what they crave …
That is to say, I was rationalizing, standing there in the dusty road waving to a Dodge Caravan full of sheep. “Doesn’t it bother you at all?” I ask Ben.
“They die, we die.” It’s one of his koanic little sayings that I go home and ponder on my zafu.
Five young people in the high-status beige jumpsuits of vet students are coming up the road. Our major job today will be collecting blood samples from eighty sheep for a scrapie project in the nearby school of veterinary medicine. The vets are studying whether the disease can be discerned on the DNA chain. Every shepherd dreads scrapie, an appalling neurological catastrophe that causes the animal to go crazy, rip its own wool, and chew its flesh. It’s rare in the United States, but more of a problem in England (where I never heard it mentioned).
Ninety degrees again, and ten degrees hotter in the barn. My job is to catch and hold for the vet students, which can only be done by straddling and climbing the sheep like ponies. Often they get away and bash me into the walls. On the larger ones, my legs don’t touch the ground. I only get smashed underfoot once, which marks progress in my sheep-busting ability.
Afterwards we flop in the office kitchen, have a couple of beers and a round of pizza and donuts—good Minnesota health food.
I SELDOM THINK ABOUT how young Ben is, because he’s smart and competent and worries at the skill level of a forty-year-old. But he recently made a few days’ holiday of turning twenty-one and getting married to a girl he met in Future Farmers of America. She’s from a cattle family. Then, at the beginning of the week, he called me with a note of urgency in his voice: “I’m back! Come in and help me deworm.” I’m honored by this panicky call from the Real: to be valued as a common worker calms my spirit, agitated by too much abstraction. What Ben tells me daily, though not in words, and what the sheep tell me in their own language is, you are enough.
After our little hiatus, I relish the patient work with animals—patient, if not always perfectly skillful. Leaving the barn, I carry a sense of groundedness and practical focus that seems to improve even my driving. Tending sheep is a more symbiotic relationship than anything except perhaps motherhood. In some odd way I need these sheep to feel wholly myself.
We drenched about forty ewes and rams, quite large ones (eighty to three hundred pounds). I discovered that if I managed them in a small pen, I could control them easily (this being another operation where you sometimes have to sit on them). Drenching is an alternate deworming procedure; you suspend the vermifuge like an IV and slide the nozzle of the drench gun, which resembles a caulking gun, along the animal’s tongue and insert it deep in its throat. Unpleasant as it sounds, the sheep don’t seem to mind this much and it’s a quick procedure. One squirt and off they go. It was relatively easy, and I proudly drenched most of the flock on my own while Ben went about his business.
Then I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree: you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers.
I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.
TODAY I ATTEMPTED my first solo shearing. Rather like the society hostess who broke a teacup to set her clumsy guest at ease, Ben nicked the demonstration animal five or six times before handing me the electric clippers. He told me he had cut the ears off two ewes yesterday and had to suture them back on. My first shearing took about an hour and left half an inch of wool all over the animal.
Next, with light, relentless rain beating on the corrugated iron roof of the barn, we accomplished step one of fixing the prolapsed rectum of ram #5004. First Ben cut the syringe casing with hoof trimmers and wrapped it in surgical tape so it would stick inside the sheep. The sheep’s rectum, when we had him flipped over in the tipping cradle, protruded four inches. Ben slid the casing into the protrusion and banded it with the elastrator, a device we use for castrating. Then he squirted everything in sight with Betadine and gave the sheep 5 cc of penicillin in each glut. (The ram is also on cortisone to impact its coughing; we have to
