“Their gums,” said Ben, “would stay white when you push on them.”
Without pressing on any gums, we could see that these sheep were infected. They were scraggly looking and their backsides scoury (that is, covered in shit). First we shaved bottoms, a charming job. Then we caught and inoculated them with vermifuge. Last night I practiced flipping my border collie, Shep, so I have the moves down and can trip these feisty little fifty-pound Texel bucks without too much trouble. I easily flipped and inoculated fifteen without being inoculated back.
The sheep have parasites because they have been on pasture. We are conducting an experiment to compare sheep raised on pasture with sheep who have access only to the barn and its neighboring yards. One pastured sheep is blind from eating milk vetch.
“Factory farming”—often defined in terms of keeping the animals more confined—is a major political issue in Minnesota. Huge pig farms, in particular, with holding tanks of manure that sometimes leak and pollute the water table, are especially controversial. Observing this experiment, however, I see that some degree of confinement may be more comfortable and healthy for the animal.
I BEGAN MEDITATION PRACTICE at eighteen when I entered religious community. We were taught a lot about prayer and given hours a day to work on it, but much of my best instruction came from a book passed on to me by a senior novice. In those days, we postulants (as young women in their first year were called), slept three to a room under the eye of a senior novice (women in their third year of religious life). The senior novices were exotic figures to us aspirants; while we wore knee-length black skirts and blouses, black capes and stockings, they wore the full religious habit, which in those days meant a floor-length serge dress, white wimple, and long veil. We retained our “civilian” hairstyles, pixie or flip: their hair was cut short and, even at bedtime, tucked in a white cap. We were called Jean Hanson or Susie Smith; each of them had disappeared into the identity of Sister Macaria or Sister Paul Joseph—gender and family erased as cleanly as possible. “If you ask my name,” wrote Appolonius of Tyre, “say that I lost it on the sea. If you ask my family, say that I am shipwrecked. …”
The senior novices represented what we postulants most longed for and feared. We watched them covertly and constantly, collecting little bits of data about each one, speculating, mourning when one or another left the community before profession, occasionally falling into austere, wordless love.
For we were not, in the ordinary course of things, allowed to speak to them. Merely by presence, the senior novice monitored behavior in each little room, but the rule forbade interaction between nuns and postulants. Indeed, in the bedrooms, postulants were not allowed to speak to other postulants, even their roommates, excluding illness, emergency, or the vocal prayer that signaled dawn: “Let us bless the Lord!” the novice would intone. “Thanks be to God!” each postulant responded, unless she had gone into a coma.
Denied normal concourse, we grew as clever as dogs at interpreting a frown or tilt of the head. We could pick out each novice sitting in chapel merely by the way she pinned her veil; we knew who came late to refectory by her footsteps. How extraordinary, in this environment of perfervid observation, to come upon Sister Michael Ann sitting like a Buddha, cross-legged in the middle of her bed. At first I saw only her shadow—for each bed was curtained—felt her peculiar stillness. Then, as days passed, I would flounce in from late study in the postulate, throw myself on the bed, and catch a glimpse of her as the bed curtains danced in the breeze of my unrecollected passage. She would be sitting there cross-legged in her black night robe and white cap, eyes closed, hands palm up on her knees.
It was months before I could ask what she was up to: Christmas or Pentecost—one of the holidays on which we were given permission to speak to the novices. She told me she was sitting zazen. Amazing. I had never encountered such a practice, outside of the most esoteric texts in comparative religion. Certainly it had nothing to do with our religion. Perhaps it was forbidden by the First Commandment. That was the point on which Sister Michael Ann set me straight. She gave me a book by an Irish Jesuit who had spent his life in Japan, and whose work involved a careful mediation of every aspect of Christianity and Buddhism. It was an unusual introduction to Eastern meditation practice, taking place in a contemplative Christian community and utterly dissociated from any understanding of Buddhism itself as a philosophic system. Sister Michael Ann’s journey was later popularized by such a famous, male, and surely orthodox monastic as Thomas Merton, but I think that in those days she was almost alone on the zafu.
And I learned to sit there, too.
An oddity of Zen Buddhism, as distinct from the rituals of most religions, is that it has a practice distinct from a belief system. You can “sit”—as meditators say—and remain a Jew or a Catholic or an atheist. So my early Zen training kept me in place, on the zafu, through all the religious inquiry of my later years—for it was not long after I left the novitiate that I stopped attending Mass. One of the great gifts of Catholicism, paradoxically, was a Buddhist meditation practice. I laze away from sitting now and then, sometimes for months, but I always return as though to home. It’s a place where invisible spirits put food in front of me and feed my soul.
They feed it now, as I try to muster enough concentration to handle three-hundred-pound sheep …
I’m getting up with the sun these days, so I can do yoga and have some meditation time before driving across town to the barn. It helps me to focus better and not get stomped, bitten, or killed. Imagine the indignity of being killed by a sheep. How hard it would be on my grown children to have to say, “Mom was killed by a sheep. …” Always that little snicker.
Today a man named Mabu came and bought eight lambs, which we herded into his Dodge Caravan. The lambs were happy to board and left with their noses up against the glass like tourists. It would make a great commercial for Dodge Caravans. I’m told that Muslims, like Orthodox Jews, slaughter in a ritual way that requires reverence for the animal as well as thanksgiving for a meal.
As I wave good-bye, I think about a phrase my son uses when we have discussions about the ethics of food production: meat that has been read its rights. After he evolved this position, we bought our beef and pork from a local farmer whose operation we knew well, and chickens that were labeled “pareve.” But as time went on, we came to shrink from the sight of beef. Pork disappeared from our diet after my daughter raised piglets one summer. I will not admit to being a vegetarian; I’ve lived in too many third-world countries, where even roadkill is retrieved as a gift of the gods, to espouse—I am chattering to myself—such a bourgeois fashion. Excluding a strict religious orientation, Hindu or Buddhist, one can only be a vegetarian from a position of privilege. Besides, many foreign visitors come to my house, and I like to serve them what they crave …
That is to say, I was rationalizing, standing there in the dusty road waving to a Dodge Caravan full of sheep. “Doesn’t it bother you at all?” I ask Ben.
“They die, we die.” It’s one of his koanic little sayings that I go home and ponder on my zafu.
Five young people in the high-status beige jumpsuits of vet students are coming up the road. Our major job today will be collecting blood samples from eighty sheep for a scrapie project in the nearby school of veterinary medicine. The vets are studying whether the disease can be discerned on the DNA chain. Every shepherd dreads scrapie, an appalling neurological catastrophe that causes the animal to go crazy, rip its own wool, and chew its flesh. It’s rare in the United States, but more of a problem in England (where I never heard it mentioned).
Ninety degrees again, and ten degrees hotter in the barn. My job is to catch and hold for the vet students, which can only be done by straddling and climbing the sheep like ponies. Often they get away and bash me into the walls. On the larger ones, my legs don’t touch the ground. I only get smashed underfoot once, which marks progress in my sheep-busting ability.
Afterwards we flop in the office kitchen, have a couple of beers and a round of pizza and donuts—good Minnesota health food.