There are mild descriptions of animal death and grief below; skip this section if you’d like to avoid that.
A friend tells me they think death will be like Spring; I look at the cold lamb at my feet and I hope they’re right.
Sometimes when a lamb dies, the ewe will call for it for days, especially if she never sees the body. Other times, the ewe will reject the lamb in the hours before it’s actually gone; I’ve even seen ewes lay on her child, smothering it. I am angry at the mom who kills her baby, and I am gutted at the good mom whose lamb is now gone.
I learn that dogs will eat their owners as soon as a half hour after they die, always starting with the face. I learn that dogs look to a human’s face for emotion and response. I learn that dogs learn with their mouth.
I no longer think the sheep killing her lamb tells me anything about her grief.
Read MoreThere are days the lake is an ocean, white capped and cold. I walk at the edge of the trucked-in sand and hold myself against the wind, dodging the rolling water at my feet. What I see are seiches, standing waves that form in a contained body of water. It’s not a tide or a weather event, just movement; the physics are the same in Lake Michigan as they are in my bathtub.
There is an initial force, my hand or wind or the pressure from a storm system, which disturbs the water. They call the crest and basin that form harmonics. A high and low point in sync, the seiche maintains equilibrium in the water. It holds the energy from displacement; the lake is a system in balance.
Read MoreNot all things burn to dust.
Charcoal is formed through incomplete combustion. The air is starved of oxygen, through close quarters and high heat. This can occur naturally or by force; what matters is that all water and volatile compounds are released, risen, invisible to us except through flame. What’s left behind is nearly pure carbon. Charcoal is matter unmade, life in its earliest form.
How have you learned to be undone?
Read MoreCrane flies metamorphose like any butterfly: egg, larva, pupa, sky.
As larvae, they live near water. They feed on rotting plant matter in the soil of the bank. They chew the wet ground into oblivion, releasing it once it becomes small enough for soil microbes to finish off. They consume and excrete, tiny engines of decomposition in the fecund earth. A crane fly larva, the leatherjacket, may live like this for as long as three years.
Then, in the lazy heat of late August, they burst forth from their pupa and emerge as crane flies. There may be thousands at a time fleeing the ground.
They have ten days to find a mate, lay all their eggs, and die.
Read MoreHi everyone,
We are once again finding ourselves in Spring, which feels like the right occasion to finally dust off this mailing list and put it to use. I hope you are feeling born too.
I can say that word more honestly now, in all its beautiful and disgusting truth. I’ve spent the beginning of this year at a seasonal lambing job, helping lambs be born, and trying to keep the born lambs alive. I talk about this a bit below, so content advisory for brief mentions of animal death- nothing graphic.
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