I’ve spilled a lot of words for my monthly subscribers this month, but this piece is a free-for-all. If you’d like to support the observationalist work at The Examine, consider becoming a monthly subscriber.
*For Mike Rusch: Do something that does not compute.
In the evening hours, the familiar feeling: The job sitting on my chest with its hands around my throat. This monster—this ravenous little beast—has dug a trench into my brain, laid cable, and through that cable come the message.
Feed me, feed me, feed me.
His food: achievement, reputation, winning, money, the trappings. It’s always about the trappings.
I receive a text from the client, and he asks whether the opposing party in a contentious case has executed our settlement agreement yet. He has not, because I only sent the agreement two hours ago, and it’s seven o’clock. We won’t know anything until tomorrow, I say, or maybe the next day, and this brings a flurry of questions.
Will he object?
What if he refuses?
Are there legal remedies?
The little beast—the imp, not the client—chokes and chokes, asks me to stop what I’m doing and respond because responding to his autocratic imperatives leads to achievement, which leads to reputation, which leads to winning, which leads to money, which brings the trappings.
Ah, the trappings.
The sun sinks lower in the sky, and through the back windows I see the clouds catching pink and blue hues, but the little beast begs me not to look. It’s a lurid, baudy, lusty sky, and if I pay too much attention, it might pull me from my phone and into the present, fleeting moment. But those clouds. But the tree line. But the white butterflies skittering across the tops of long grass. But the stupid contented sheep.
I type a quick response to the client promising to follow up in the morning. I pull off my work shoes, strip my button-down shirt, and throw on a tee shirt and a pair of sandals. Yanking the cable from my brain, I give the tiny monster two middle fingers and step into the field through a set of double doors.
These are the near-nocturne hours just before Blue Hour, and the clouds are a giant diffusion box. Soft light washes across the ocean of grass. I make my way to the makeshift paddock, where our neighbors are grazing their sheep inside an enormous rectangle of poly wire. They’re “hair sheep” another farmer tells me, and he goes so far as to say they’re inferior to wool sheep. Their dreary coats make me a believer. They are molting, losing large clumps of hair as the spring months wear on. The stress of the heat wears all of us thin, I think.
In my early days as a Southern Baptist, I was told many things, but among them was this: Sheep are idiot animals. They require confines and structure. They think of nothing but grass and sometimes water. They are skittish wanderers ill-equipped to fight off large predators, my pastor said, which doesn’t bode well for these beasts because the residents in these Ozark foothills have said there’s a new mountain lion on the loose. They’ve seen it. He’s been caught on game cameras less than a mile from this paddock, and maybe he’s on the hunt, they say. Maybe we're all being hunted, I say back.
From the edges of the paddock, the sheep eye me at first with suspicion, then with curiosity. An idiot with a blade of grass between his teeth moves closer. He raises his head, as if for a portrait, and I see the truth in his eyes. He's the dumbest beast on the whole planet. Still, there is some unintelligible conversation in that moment. He stares into the lens and tells me he knows nothing of inflation or politics or the trappings. He knows nothing but grass, and isn’t this great grass? Isn’t this sky a wonder? Isn’t the water trough first class? Isn’t life a momentary marvel?
Thunder booms over the edge of the eastern hill, and he turns his head. Storms are coming, he says, and this too is a gift. I do not quite catch his meaning, and he hangs his head, almost in sorrow.
He chews the tops of another plug of grass, and he whispers familiar words:
[Friend], every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.
Lose it all.1
Another rumble echoes over the field. Tonight the storms will come and the sheep will lie in the grass, soaking up the rain. When the sun rises, they will content themselves with the fact that another storm has passed, another day has come, another opportunity to feast and drink and marvel at life. They will eat and eat and eat, unaware of the monsters that dig the trenches in the minds of men. And when we return to their paddock, they will welcome us, and remind us of what it means to live on the shining edge of life.
Thanks for reading along. I wouldn’t keep pecking out these words without you.
Adapted from Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”.
"this lovely world, these precious days" ~E.B. White
Keep a middle finger, or two, in your back pocket at all times. I think that's in Leviticus somewhere, maybe...
Dangit if that sheep doesn't make me want to weep. We all know this struggle way too well. Thanks for the encouragement to continue seeking the peace of the wild things.