The Ones Who Call This Place Home
At our sanctuary farm, we have more than 30 animals living on the land as they were intended.
Here, they are not stock.
They are our teachers.
Each week, I write an essay from the porch of the farm for anyone who wants to take a seat. Below these introductions, you can read a recent porch piece that shows you exactly how animals teach us, and how they change us. Read "Time Was Never The Thief" below.
the one who shouldn't be here
Lucille
Lucille was found in 2014 while she was pregnant, suffering from a bullet in her shoulder. She had been shot and left for dead. After extensive surgery, she and her then day-old foal landed in our care.
We spent years trying to teach Lucille how to live inside our world until one day we realized she was the one who was teaching us, all along.
Lucille is the reason we know what it is like to stand inside of the circle.
No animal teaches presence and communication on the sanctuary like Lucille. No other animal will see you for exactly what flaws you offer in this moment, but still wait for what they can feel you have inside.
Woolsworth
the one who marches to his own drum
Woolsworth was a youth 4H project rescued from the auction line. He then got wrapped in Hotwire and lost control of a hind leg and ended up on the auction block again.
That's when we took him home.
Wooly is a playful spirit who shows resilience every single day.
Wooly is supposed to live with the small animals of the farm, but he thinks he is a lot bigger than that. You can find him most days following the horse herd around like a puppy.
Woolsworth is how we know stories about life are never written in stone.
When Wooly is around, you can't help but smile inside.
Dolly
the one who found her calling
There's a mini Highland Cow craze sweeping the country. And Dolly was supposed to be a part of that in a big way. She was sold and passed around as a high-dollar breeding cow for the future of a program.
But Dolly's body had different plans. She is infertile.
Not being able to participate in production is usually the end of the road for a cow. That was never Dolly's story.
We took Dolly into our herd as an ambassador. She isn't just an ambassador for the breed, though. She's an ambassador for every animal that has outlasted a label.
Most farms would not have space for Dolly because they can only think in terms of line items and future growth.
Dolly shows us the important part of life is what you give to it right now.
Poca
the one with the wild spirit
Kiger mustangs are one of the most rare mustang breeds in the wild, isolated from other herds by the mountains of Oregon. Poca was a part of that herds legacy.
But we try to manage wild spirits and she ended up in captivity. They tried to "break" her, but she is not one to be broken easily.
We ended up with Poca because she just needed time to find her place with people.
Poca is the reason we know to protect wild spirits.
Here, Poca will always be able to run free on land that cannot be taken from her.
Time Was Never The Thief
originally written for The Weekly Porch
Earlier this week I was listening to a song that meant a lot to me a few years back. It’s called “The Good ‘Ol Days” by Macklemore. I hope you’ll grab a coffee with me and think through what nostalgia and time has been stirring in me this week on the porch.
I found relief in the song, but my perspective has grown a lot, and I wanted to share why that relief was really a resignation, and that’s not the way I’m choosing to live anymore.
The song has a hook that cut me. “I wish somebody would have told me, babe, someday, these will be the good old days.”
I needed to understand at the time that staying present was the active choice, and dwelling in the past or focusing on future goals made you miss it. And, that’s definitely correct.
But when I moved to the farm and changed my life to live in this moment, focusing on only what’s here felt flat.
Before the farm, my life was future-focused. That leads to an anxious life because the only way to reach our goals is to control the process to get there. I talk a lot about this because it’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned here.
The land brings me back because it demands presence.
Plans, goals, life be damned, there is work to do now.
This is why kids balance us. This is why the answer to so many angsts is “get a dog.” When we are filled with commitments to something right now, future-tripping fades away.
I thought I was in the clear with my hands in the dirt and my mind on the work. And then, I came face to face with loss.
First, I lost a horse. My first one, the one I hung my future on. The one that I was supposed to go places with. She was a dun (primitive buckskin) colored Kiger Mustang/Arabian cross. She got laminitis and was gone.
I think I overfed her. There were days I did not know how to carry that. It was a loss of life and a loss of my innocence as a farmer and a steward.
And then, I lost Garrett.
Garrett was a ruby Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and the light of my life. He was a mess. A rescue with abandonment issues, but that was the least of it.
He had a level V heart murmur, chiari malformation (a painful neurological condition), and seizures. Each issue revealed itself over time until I was running a virtual hospital in the laundry room each night.
His seizure medicine would often take him over and give him a condition called mega esophagus. His body was so tired, his esophagus didn’t work.
When that arose, I would have to hold him upright for an hour and hand feed him balls of wet food to let gravity pull it to his stomach.
My identity became wrapped up in the care of Garrett. To the outside, it looked like a burden. I think most people felt sorry for me and hoped I could get relief. And when he did pass, relief was the furthest thing from my mind.
I had lost my identity. Garrett gave me meaning, and there is absolutely no relief in losing that. I felt nothing short of emptiness. People knew there was a loss, but no one else knew the size but me. I received several sympathy cards for the loss of Garrett.
But I didn’t receive a single one for the loss of me.
Around this time is when I met a man named Buck Brannaman, a horseman that exceeds the capability of description. A larger than life figure in the horse world who has a way with horses that is unmatched.
In the horse world, we talk a lot about “feel”, the space where you and the horse remain in contact and communication, tethered to one another without a pull either way. I can only describe it as a magical place of presence. Everything else floats away, it’s like when an Avatar links to their banshee.
Feel is impossible to master, you have to live it. One persons feel will never be the same as someone else’s, because feel is not simply touch. It’s what is behind that touch that is important.
When Buck performs in a clinic, I’ve always been mesmerized. I remember one night after a long day in class talking at dinner about what Buck was doing. A friend said to me “honey there are 70 different messages going to that horse in 2 seconds, and we will never be able to know what they are. It’s all in his feel.”
There’s a movie about Buck where he says something I can’t forget. Buck comes from a violently abusive upbringing. This larger than life man says straight to the camera, “I know what it’s like to be scared.” That’s how he can understand horses. That’s how he talks to them.
It was never magic. It was a felt common ground.
As I drove my horses back from my first Buck clinic, I cried on the interstate as I pondered my feel. Alone on that drive I figured out exactly what made my feel my own.
It was Garrett.
And now I knew why it hurt so much to let it go. The dog had changed me, how am I ever supposed to “let go” of that?
I’m not.
I don’t think that’s actually possible, I don’t think we are ever supposed to let go. Relief from grief is never resignation, and this is where I have evolved past nostalgia for “the good old days” and a desire to be present for the sake of presence.
Buck, these horses, farming and most certainly Garrett have taught me that life is a cascade, never individual moments. Those good old days aren’t actually gone, this moment doesn’t fade.
It can’t for us.
Humans get to experience subjectively. We get to carry more than this. It may never be possible to flatten that into something simple.
That’s beautiful, and it is never too much.
I’ve known for years on this farm that perspective is a choice. But for so long, I have lived in a place where any relief is really resigning myself to saying if I don’t live in this moment, I’m going to lose it.
That’s far too passive for me now. It doesn’t respect what Garrett gave me. It doesn’t respect my journey to now.
Grief is not grief just because you lost something. It’s grief because you are trying to put it away like it’s no longer a part of you.
When the wave of grief hits, you are not supposed to bury it, and you can’t run the other way. We have choices in life where want to stand, and I’m choosing to stand in the cascade.
Sometimes we try and make a safe space for ourselves outside of the waves. We avoid, simply so we never lose.
And other times, we try and outrun it. We are avoiding the crash and calling it relief.
But all either of those things are is avoiding the messy but beautiful cascade that now is made from. The cascade is the moment where all of the energy rushes forward, creating our momentum.
This moment contains, it doesn’t just exist. It is made and formed by what we bring into it. It means nothing without the past that came before it.
Often, we ignore so much of our past that feels heavy, leaving it behind in a misguided attempt to lighten the load. That’s because others have made us see our loss as a burden to bear.
But here’s what I’ve learned. Grief and loss are only that because we intimately felt the abundance. Knowing abundance came, knowing it is possible, knowing it exists is never something I want to leave behind.
The isolation of loss can feel like a cage, because we are the only ones standing inside of it. The abundance was intimate to us, and it filled us. And because it was so private, no one else can feel the shape.
The only thing I can resign to is that my experience cannot be flattened for comfort. We must learn to live in proportion to our experience. The fact that our experience is only ours never makes it any less real.
Our feel, and how we carry it, is ours. Our identity never erases, it compounds. Everything we are has been paid for in the past, with love, and you can’t sand down the truth of that.
So you feel it. Fully. And you do that by carrying it with you.
Not as loss, but as who we are.
Not as the past, a part of the cascade.
Not to reduce it, but to integrate it.
In feeling fully and living in this moment.
Time itself was never the thief. In fact it is time that shows us who we really are.
One of my lines for the farm and the sanctuary is joy grows. It’s very true, but it’s made punchy to be a piece of marketing. The truer version I live in is this.
Joy grows. Abundance grows. Grief grows.
And in that, so do we.
I’ll see you next Saturday.