Sometimes when new baby critters arrive, I stop and notice just how many non-humans there are to look after around here.
At last count the ratio was two humans to about 80 pigs, chickens, turkeys, cats and dogs. Not a lot, really, for a farm.
But when friends come to visit they always remark on how many creatures we have to look after and how much work it is. It’s true, we spend a lot of time doing animal-related chores each day, although it never occurs to me to think of it as a lot of work. I guess I’m used to it, but I also think the difference is that, when you live in the country, “work” takes on a different meaning.
As more and more of us live in towns and cities, we are farther and farther from the work that meets our basic animal needs and connects us to the rest of the living world. When invisible forces provide for us and lights come on when we flip a switch, water comes out of a tap, whatever food we want appears in the grocery store whenever we want it and regardless of climate or season “work” becomes the thing we do because it is valuable to someone else and they will pay us to do it.
We work so we can afford to do the things we actually want to do; like take a vacation, for example, maybe even to a place like Lund.
It is a funny feeling to be living my life in the place where people come to escape from theirs and then to be told my life seems like “too much work” for them.
I guess people would rather sit in an office for eight hours a day than shovel manure, although I would choose pig poop over a boss with a clipboard any day. But I wonder how many of those vacationers have ever experienced work the way I do.
Lebanese-American poet and artist Kahlil Gibran said, “To love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.” When the work you do is valuable to you directly because it meets your own needs, you lose that feeling that your work takes away from your life.
People tell me they would never want so many animals to look after because they would not be able to travel, but I always wonder what is so great about their lives that they need to get away from it so much.
Gibran also said, “Work is love made visible.” To me, my work is how I live out my love for this place.
Some people want to keep their attachments to one place to a minimum, so they can have the freedom to take a vacation. I would rather live in a place I love so much that I do not want to leave it, and have a life I do not need to get away from.
Plus, I get baby chickens.
