Jody and I drove to Oklahoma this weekend to spend the Easter holiday with her family. They live in the country, and going out there is like being on a mini-vacation since I’m able to be somewhere different in tempo and environment. The air is fresh and full of different smells and you find yourself breathing in deeply to catch things. It’s quiet and not quiet in the sense that the sounds you hear do not overwhelm you. What you hear normally is the wind blowing and grasses stirring. When it is quiet you look around more, you try to pinpoint noises and you find yourself attuned to the subtle background of sound. I do like being alone like that. It allows me to get outside my head more. I find myself observing and listening more as if my senses unfold and uncurl themselves to bask in the gentle presence of nature. When you are in stillness you match its rhythm and find yourself becoming more quiet and attentive.
One of the highlights of my weekend was that I got to bottlefeed a calf who had lost its mother. For a baby he was pretty big; about the size of a big dog. The first night I saw him he was very weak and could not stand on his own. Jody’s father said he thought the calf had not gotten his first drink of mother’s milk, which meant he would not have the necessary antibodies to ensure surivival and that the chances are good he would not make it through the night. His joints were swollen and his eyes were tearing. It made me sad to think that he might only live to be five days old. At first, he was not interested in the bottle, but then he finally started going at it and drank most of it. He actually made it through the entire weekend and he seemed to be getting hungrier each time we fed him. I felt a little embarrassed in my concern for the calf since I’d expect anyone with experience raising cattle would deal with the situation more pragmatically. I mean, if you get attached to each calf that comes along you’re going to be putting yourself under a lot of emotional strain. I felt like it marked me as a naive and squishy city dweller. But, being there patting him on his curly brown head and feeling the large bones under his hide wishing he’d get up made me feel like a little kid, in awe of the experience of life, on my knees making secret prayers within myself.
insert obligatory don’t-you-wish-you-were-still-vegetarian comment here
They have the prettiest eyelashes, don’t they?
No, but it does make me want to eat less beef and more chicken. Yea, they do have nice eyes and eyelashes.
Steve read this thing once about these rural Tibetan Buddhists. They lived in the mountains where it would be really hard to get by without eating meat. They believed in only killing really big animals for food since you could get a larger amount of meat per soul. Eating a bunch of little birds would be, to them, a waste of souls, whereas splitting an entire yak with your village was OK.
Not trying to pick on you or anything, I just think it’s interesting.
Life and death have been on my mind quite a bit lately, ever since the death of Eric’s grandmother.
There’s nothing like feeding a baby (of whatever species) to make you think about the wondrous fragility of life.