There’s still blood on my hands as I sit down to right this. I lie, I’m not sitting down. I’m lying naked in the grass with that blood on my hands. There’s a redtail hawk calling in the sky above me telling me I should share what’s true in the true that I see. That hawk was my mentor and my best friend Richard’s favourite bird. He could tell you what every prairie bird in his prairie world was by call and sight. He’s the one that taught me what life is, what it really is. I didn’t know before I knew him. He’s the one that taught me how to enter into the sanctity of nature - with humility and obedience. He knew creation in its wholeness and he showed me. He introduced me to death and death has walked alongside ever since.
I never stop missing Richard.
< And, on cue, the redtail hawk calls in response. >
It was in a Safeway that I first learned that I had been eating dead animals for the few short years I had been alive back then. I had recently learned how to read so I must have been in kindergarten or grade one. I looked up at the signs above the meat coolers and saw the words “beef” with a cow beside it. I looked over and saw the words “pork” with a little pig shape cutout. I looked at the cellophane packages with “pork” and “beef” in them and it all came together. Alarmed at this revelation I asked my mother, “PORK IS A PIG?!” “Well, yeah”, she said. “What did you think it was?”
I felt betrayed. If pork was a pig and beef was a cow, why didn’t they just say so? Why call it something else? It wasn’t enough to make me stop eating meat, but I realized then that there were some sort of mysterious practices around food. Why not just call it what it is?
Last fall we harvested two steers. One beef animal too short. We had four lamb, ducks, geese, meat rabbits, and some chickens. It would have been fine if it were just Troy and I, but our middle daughter has been here eating along with us. It also would have been enough if we had successful hunts last fall. We did not. So, we, as of today, are officially out of beef save the last two blade roasts in our freezer. It meant that we had to harvest an animal now. We had a steer that we were going to harvest in the fall but his penchant for stealing milk from mother cows trying to feed their calves (he really did this with no shame whatsoever despite the fact that he was twice the size of the poor cow) and his good condition meant he was the chosen one.
I don’t like harvest days. In fact, I get a knot in my stomach as they draw near. I deal with that knot by saying a little prayer when it comes. That works. But it’s a solemn task and my desire for everything to go just right builds a lot of pressure into the moments before we have to kill any living thing. I spend hours sharpening knives. Troy confirms his rifle zero. We sanitize the meat cooler where we dry age the meat. We get chains and winch cleaned and set up. These are quiet, serious tasks. Each of us doing what we need to do.
< And now the turkey vultures are circling overhead. Their enormous wingspan making shadows across my page. “It’s not me you’re after, dear birds. The gut pile is coming as soon as the human man is done cleaning up. Patience, patience…”>
Quiet and serious tasks for a quiet and serious day. Why would I do it? How could I do it - this killing of a beautiful animal. How could I ever give such beauty to someone who doesn’t recognize it? How could I take this animal, built of these grasses and sunbeams, the ones that landed here, only here, on our little farm. Our little piece of land that grew his mighty body and good natured spirit. How could I ever put him in a trailer and tell someone else, someone in a concrete bunker to kill him. Mercy. Who gives him mercy? Reverence? Nobody reveres a commodity. We have to do it because I cannot bear the idea of his last moments being automated by the numbness of a human that has killed too much.
How bizarre that we are even here as a species. Where I write of something that is as natural as breathing. That I must warn anyone from going further if they don’t want to see. Where are we? What world is this where our wedded relationship to nature comes with content warnings for anything other than koalas sleeping cradled in each other’s arms or a silly duck that thinks a dog is its mother?
You must remember? You must hear that clanging in your rib bones, your ancestors rattling away, reminding you that you already know? Listen! You must hear them somewhere in there! Don’t let the sounds of screens and traffic and the busy, busy busy-ness of this world dull you. There are bigger things. More beautiful things.
Less than a couple of generations ago, we all knew. We all understood who we are here in this world, in the real world of Creation. You knew how to live with life and death. You killed things to live. You held your dead loves in your arms. You understood that safety is a lie and anyone promising you it is a deceiver. Because if you didn’t remember, you would die. Your children would die. That was you. That blood still lives in you.
< Making love on a bed of dandelions in the middle of the day. Our bodies still covered in the blood and sweat of a harvest day under the sun. Life’s only promise this singular moment. That’s it. Bumblebees singing a sweet serenade. >
We must not forget. Everyone that survived so that you could be here lives or dies through you. If we forget, if we are convinced of our civility and the uselessness of death in our pasteurized world, we are doomed. We are too dependant, too weak in our assessment of our capabilities. We cannot depend on systems of greed and corruption. They giveth (with a price) and taketh away (without a care). I don’t want them. I want wild birds and blood and nourishment from deep earth. I want to taste the salt on my lover’s lips and feel dandelions against my naked skin.
I’m too old to be civilized. I want less of it in every moment. One day I will walk into the open arms of the natural world, our mother on earth, our home. I will walk in and I won’t walk out. It’s already happening. My feet are on the path. And with every harvest, every night I sleep with my cheek on her pounding chest, every moonlit night sitting around the fire while stars fill her endlessness, I can feel it. I can feel more of me. Me, real me. The me that was put here unshaped and limitless. The wedges this world has put between me and the gifts of God dissolve. The illusion of separation fades. It’s all right here. It always was.
There’s no way to put a tidy end to this essay. There is no end.
And that reminds me. My husband and I are having our headstone carved. People used to do that, you know. They bought their headstones before they died so the burden wouldn’t fall to their children. We bought ours. It’s the same limestone as our daughter’s headstone, pulled from the same piece of earth that her’s came from. Both of our names are on it. The dates of our births with a dash after them. That dash is now.
On the bottom of our headstone the following words will be carved in the stone: “Steadfast to the end. There is no end.”
Note to readers: There will be no Saturday post this week. This weekend marks the third year since our youngest daughter, Mila, died. We are taking our canoe and heading to places wild and unfettered. Best to find her there. I will return next Wednesday. ❤️
The following pictures from today’s harvest may be too graphic for some. I think they’re beautiful. You decide if you want to scroll on.
We harvested our beloved milk cow last night, so these images are fresh in my mind and still the feeling on my hands. We were correct in our intuition of a uterine infection, and thus did not feel right saving organs or blood this time.
I learned about some more uses for blood at the ancestral skills cow processing class I went to this March- the woman there quite creatively had made a recipe for blood ‘egg’nog and blood cookies. Both were divine, and my still-anemic body craved them on sight from then on. How do you like to use the blood?
Also, any tips on bottle feeding a 2 week old calf? We don’t want to go with replacer, but all our goats aren’t in milk until June..
That photo of you collecting blood while Troy supports next to you, backs of your hands facing, teamwork - how beautiful. I've never met you. I've never met Mila. But I think of her almost every day. And I'll think of her, and your family, this weekend.