Having grown up this way, with responsibilities to the past, I must write also from the crossroads of speech and silence. Writers, my kind at any rate, are rather like field biologists: they want to understand, quite simply, the quality of a given life. Nothing much needs to happen; merely to see and feel the shifting light of a moment suffices. The Barn at the End of the World grows, in part, out of years of teaching spiritual autobiography, and lamenting, at least in the classic texts of that genre, the suppression of the body and the created world. To be a spiritual person, do you have to climb out of your body? It’s a long climb and not worth the trouble. This book attempts to view the issues of spiritual autobiography from within the world. It’s full of the names and habits and habitats of created things, and the point of it is (in Philip J. Bailey’s words) that “All who breathe mean something more to the true eye than their shapes show; for all were made in love and made to be beloved.” A thesis like that is not really “arguable,” so the book is structured more like a long poem than a short treatise. Themes are introduced imagistically, then recapitulated in story, and sometimes, if the matter is appropriate to that inquiry, framed in a few words of discursive argument. Whatever is going on elsewhere, or available to read about in books, my Quaker religion obligates me to a unique discipline: speak only from experience. From early times, spiritual autobiography has been central to the Quaker path; it constitutes a body of experiential theology. Nobody knows much, really, about how the universe is put together in its private parts. We can only speak about what we ourselves have witnessed. Being an academic, I have a habit of trying to frame things in a broader world of ideas and some of that goes on here, too—I hope not too much.
I’ve spent a lot of time arranging, rather than organizing, this material. Writing is rather like quilting, in that you have to use the materials at hand and, at the same time, discern the pattern in them. There always is a pattern: that’s how the mind works. But one wants to avoid controlling the outcome; to do that is to miss the revelation, both for reader and writer. Having written this book, I “know” what happens, but then my job is to go back and arrange the material so that the reader can take the same journey I took. For a year, I’ve been living with a soft old quilt in various shades of brown and rose, and night after night I follow the needleworker’s journey over what at first seemed a random design. By the time I figure out the point of this soft golden patch, this heathery shift, I am, in a way, friends with this long-dead quilter. Similarly I hope the reader will be my companion on this road.
I’m trying to lure the reader into participating as I introduce a theme, then drop it behind the fabric—hoping the subconscious will retain it and perk up when it comes forward again. The spiritual life is full of paradoxes: finding the self and losing it, rest and motion, presence/absence, solitude and community. The human mind and body can hold together these opposites, but argument cannot. A poem can hold them, and on one level, much of this text must be read according to the logic of images. On another level, it’s a “how-to” (or “how-I-did”) book about raising sheep. When you do any craft well and consciously, however, you explore the whole structure of the universe. When you pick up a piece of any ancient pot, you know something about the whole pot, the potter, the culture that produced it, and yourself.
The personal essay is not an exercise in self-expression as much as it is an exercise in perspective. As a Buddhist practitioner, as well as a Quaker, I try to negotiate my teacher’s repeated admonition, “Are you sure?” No, I am not. If “I” am not entirely congruent with the self who speaks here, even less can I speak with authority about the lives of others. My sister, for example, read an early draft of this manuscript and commented, “We grew up in different houses.” Well, certainly, we did.
All that’s told here is true, true at least to the perspective of the narrator. However, I’ve changed the names of anyone who isn’t a public person (like the Venerable Thich N’hat Hanh) or a member of my family and intimate circle. In one or two cases, I’ve altered the details of an incident sufficiently, I hope, to prevent embarrassing anyone who might otherwise be recognized. It pains me to do this, especially in the case of my fellow workers in the barn, who are such heroes to me. I’d prefer to honor them, but they are unassuming people and would hate the publicity.
The Barn at the End of the World
RESTLESS, I GO DOWN to the barn and attempt to dissect the concept of “peace…”
As I help Anna clean out the lambing pens, my skirt pinned up under an apron, mind and body begin to alter their usual relation to each other. I cannot think about “peace”; I cannot think about anything. This is a natural consequence of doing the kind of repetitive work called “mindless” by those who disdain it. Yet my mind is not so much absent as still. It’s not at its usual station in my head, but diffused throughout my body. Or, slid beyond the body, even, to encompass all that’s going on in the barn.
My hands are efficiently chucking down clean straw and, as I watch the ewe position herself for the scrambling lamb, my nipples contract in the reflex of a nursing mother. If I were not well past the childbearing years, my blouse might be soaked with milk. This is a passing, negligible sensation, a product merely of being present. I do not stop working to examine it. A casual dissolution of boundaries body-to-body happens when you work in the barn. With animals, it’s safe, and pertinent, to have no edges. It helps you to manage sheep and them to manage you. If I bother to retrieve my mind, I find it shared out among the ewes, who have made good time with it.
There is deep rest in this loss of self. Peace, which implies stillness, and ecstasy: every hair in motion. Thus lovers and people who read each other’s poems breathe the other, if they love or read well. Thus music. If you play the fiddle, no matter how badly, and you go to hear a great violinist—as last month I went to a concert of Isaac Stern’s—you hear the performance in the hollows of your own body (or has it ceased to be your body?)—that lilt of Stern’s at the tip of the bow is in your fingers. If I am flowing in this moment through one pride of skin and not another, it’s accident. And I test the limits of this bubble as once I tested the limits of the womb.
When you go down to the lambing pens you can tell from the doorway if something’s gone wrong: a ewe whose lamb is dead will have slipped back in the fold with her sisters. Most animals are pragmatic and have little patience with weakness—perhaps you have seen how a mother cat will favor her strong, aggressive kitten and paw aside the runts. Last night Anna struggled till 3 A.M. to save a lamb too short to reach the teats, tubing colostrum into her stomach, then bottle feeding every two hours. This morning the lamb came to me with her tail shaking, a sign of health, and took two ounces of formula. In the barnyard, I try to volunteer a shift with Anna, sparing her the night work since I’m fresher.
But—“I don’t think we will have to stay up tonight,” she says. Her tone is the oblique and respectful one used by my dad and his pilot friends when refusing to pronounce the word crash. Over her shoulder I see four ewes in the fold where three had been standing.
We put the dead lamb in a plastic bucket, later to bury. “Poor little mauser,” says Anna. “Still, she had some good hours.”
Philosophers make distinctions between varieties of dispossession; it cannot be the same, they say, to surrender to love, to music, to animal creation, and to prayer. (But stand with someone you love, palm to palm, eyes closed, and sing a perfect fourth…) Since I experience these slips of consciousness as similar, I can only speak from what I know. Intensity of presence is the common element, though in the next moment one could say, intensity of absence.
Without