LESSON 1

We must take a stake in the future

We try and live simply but the world is complex. It has always been this way.

It is early autumn and I am standing in the sheep shed of our farm. Before me stand twelve sheep. They are, to be precise, twelve hoggets, the name we give to maiden females. These twelve ladies are mine. I have bought them from my parents with the money I earned from my words, from my books. I am a shepherd for the first time in my life. I am in the twilight of my youth and the budding of my middle age. I am older than Christ when he died and the same age as Buddha when he attained enlightenment. Both figures have walked beside me for so many years now. They have been part of my continuance in ways I think that count for some good, though I’m no sage.

I’ve known sheep for seven years now. Seven years as a farmhand, seven years as a midwife and seven years, at times, as an undertaker. It has been a long apprenticeship. I came home to Ireland from Australia to try my hand at being a writer, but in the process, I became a farmer. It happened naturally: it began with the sheep. It has been a sojourn into the earth and its creatures, albeit one in which I have never been an owner, never before as a farmer in my own right.

I have bought the twelve animals for many reasons but perhapsthe one, the most important, is that they are a stake in the future but sheep also challenge you to live in the now. I like this mission. I must be ready for both situations, and as I look at the girls in front of me, I come to think that this is the right thing for me to do. The right journey to undertake.

Sheep are earthly creatures. They eat, they live, they die: they are wholly of this world. The sheeping business is part of this journey of life. Our work with the animals provides food for the people of the cities and towns of this world; their wool, though not of much monetary value to us, provides the raw material for clothes, for warmth in these cold times.

The girls will live in our fields; they have run with our blue Texel ram and come to be in lamb. It is this journey that interests me. This journey from youth to motherhood. The coming of the lambs will drop life on me and maybe there will be a wisdom in that. A learning in that. I am a man in search of new life: it will be brought from the wombs of these creatures. In the lambs, I set my aims. They will be my goal, and their passage to this world my prize.

I have worked cattle and horses but there is something that is calling me in these sheep. In their quiet nature upon this earth. In their nibbling over grass, their gentle walks upon our soil. The sheep give me calm; they ease a busy mind with their approach to the world. The sheep wants nothing more than to be a sheep and maybe I can learn something in that simple wish.

In working with sheep as I do now, I know that there will be labour. Hard work is not something I will shy away from. There will be feeding and probing. Dipping and shearing. All of this is the way of a shepherd. It is physical, intensive work. Work that demands a strong body or a body that is willing to be put through its paces. To work with animals needs a factor of strength and perseverance. Of course there, too, will be life and death. And perhaps in some queer way, heaven and hell in the days that come.

Though the work is only now beginning, I can say that these sheep have already saved me. They have brought me back from an edge. Before the twelve, I was suffering from what I can only call a fatigue, one that was perhaps soulful as much as physical. For six months before the sheep, I was empty and worn out. I had finished a book and found myself