Finding, You...Part II

Finding, You...Part II

    Listen to this opening: There is no beginning, and there is no end.  The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go.  The days, months, and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow, and frost.  The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring.  The earth spins through the vastness of space.  The grass comes and gores with the warmth of the sun.  The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person.  We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter.  We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true.  Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape.

    The words are from James Rebanks, author of his new book, The Shepherd's Life (and the book's reception is surprising to him, at least from what he writes in the credits in a quick note to his Twitter feed --@herdyshepherd1-- who follow his farming life and "...who have been hugely supportive and encouraging.  I've learnt loads from you.  You might be surprised my name is on the book...I have clung to being anonymous as long as I could get away with it!  I have no interest in personal celebrity; our way of life is much more important to me.).  He is a modern day shepherd, doing what his father and his grandfather did, working his land, even if he actually owns very little of it (most the land is "common" land shared by the shepherds, land put into a trust from the late Beatrix Potter).  But here's what his grandfather told him:  We don't give up, even when things are bad.  We pay our debts.  We work hard.  We act decently.  We help our neighbors if they need it.  We do what we say and say what we will do.  We don't want much attention.  We look after our own.  We are proud of what we do.  We try to be quietly smart.  We take chances sometimes to get on.  We will fail sometimes.  We will be affected by the wider world...but we hold on to who we are.

    Bored in school (I knew from the start that school was just a diversion from other things that mattered more...We never did any kind of history of us or our landscape.  I think the teachers might have been surprised at the idea that people like us had a history of any interest.), he scrapes by with hard work, selling the male lambs for meat (wool, once the primary source of income from a sheep, is now virtually worthless, bringing in less than half a pound per sheep) and realizing that quite likely, his children might not follow in his passion and his footsteps (I don't care if you become farmers or not; I just hope this book helps you understand us and go into the world knowing who we are.  Proud.  They can't take away the stuff in your head and your heart.  Hold on to it.), and recognizing that his lifestyle and farming friends may also fade away in the future, but recognizing them just the same ( There are too many of you to name individually, but thank you one and all.  This is my version of the story of my family, but there is nothing exceptional about us--we are just one of hundreds of such families.  This is just one story, one perspective, amongst many.  I hope the book helps other people to see what w all do, and show it greater respect in the future.  I don't want to lose the amazing patchwork of family farms that make this landscape what it is, and I don't think many other people do either.  Keep going.).

    His book and voice could resonate for many, times fading or lives and living missed...a strong father or grandfather (or mother) that guided you, a pastoral life we gaze at with envy while on vacation (bringing us puzzled looks in return, almost as if they were asking us why we were still searching for something), a forgotten tribe or trade or history, a land left in order to survive but one that keeps calling you back even if means you might be too old to return.  We, especially those of us in the U.S., seem to like comfort and part of that comfort is in not changing or moving far from where we are.  As the recent issue of Time wrote: ...Americans tend not to venture far--2 out of 3 moves end in the same county; only 16% cross a state line.  And just 3% leave the country, a prospect of dislocation that leaves many mortified and, at some primal level relevant to Europe's migrant crisis, unsettles even the worldliest.  Why else do seasoned travelers ask, "Can someone meet me at the airport?"  Airports are not scary.  They are purposely bland, simple to navigate, reassuringly similar.  What's scary is the uncertainty embedded in any journey, a vague foreboding that informed the theory of a flat earth, which merely assumed the horizon was exactly what it appears to be: a precipice.  Beyond lay a void like the one at the pit of the stomach when you find yourself in a place where you know no one, darkness is gathering and nothing is like back home. 

    For many of us, this could almost be the scenario of our passing, our death, a scary precipice of which we know nothing, so we seek assurance from people and from faith and religion.  The thought of returning to ashes and dust is almost inconceivable when we are so alive and so "flesh and blood."  And, as with the gazing at the people in the field --doing what they've done for generations on end, content and puzzled at our worry-- we try to reach their level of not wondering about it all, about being grounded.  The monk, the farmer, the villager, the peasant...the little drummer boy.  But they have nothing, we seem to think, and yet they seem happy.  They are dying, and yet they seem happy.

Photo by Paul Nicklin for National Geographic

 
    The glimpse of a shepherd's life from James Rebanks or a bit of Italy from Douglas Gayeton is just that, a glimpse.  But like a kaleidoscope, those tiny pieces of life are everywhere.  Simple, non-questioning, the sun rising and setting day after day, the people and their lives coming and going.  It is not a knowledge of what is to come, but rather a knowledge of what is simply here now.  It is what it is, as the old saying goes.  As photographer Gayeton put it after his trip to his ancestral home of Italy and now settled into a small farm life back in northern California: This life isn't easy.  At times I wish it were simpler, but mostly I'm just happy to feel connected to this world.  I'm an active contributor and participant in all that's around me.