Sunday, July 31, 2011

Rehab

Luke: Come on Jasmine, you have to want to live.
Me: Yay! Jasmine you are doing great!

I think it is clear here who is the mom and who is the dad in this family.

Jasmine is still struggling mightily. She is now so weak that, although looking clear of worms and eating well, she cannot stand without help. With two exhausting PT sessions today, I am sure she will sleep well tonight!

Keep the prayers coming!

Friday, July 29, 2011

Road to Recovery

My dear sweet Jasmine almost died this week. She came down with Bottle Jaw. Basically the over the counter wormers don't work in our area (humid, wet, warm, lots of goats), and despite worming my goats regularly, she was so infested with worms her cells could no longer hold fluid.

Spent 20 hours chasing down injectable B12, injectable iron, stronger wormer, fresh bedding and new hay. Then I bleached all the food bowls, dug out the barn, put down fresh bedding, and worried and worried and worried.

My kids prayed for her at bed time. I lost sleep.

Today she is still too weak to walk, but looking less swollen and eating well. She has abandoned the introspective gaze of the gravely ill and is looking more like a convalescent.

So on my way to running a sustainable, organic, crunchy farm I am learning that life is a compromise. Can you live "naturally?" Sure, but nature is brutal, and I would have to be willing to let the weaker things in my sphere die. I am just not ready for that. Are Nigerian Dwarf Goats a weaker breed because we pamper them? Yep...but I love my Jazzy Belle. Sorry, nature. Maybe next year.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

How is it with your dirt?

So I began this blog under false pretense it seems. I said I was going to write about vegetables. I don't think I have gotten to that.

Update: I have a garden. It grows zucchini, tomatoes, peas, squash, green beans, broccoli, peppers and potatoes. Also weeds. Some weeds are very pretty. We also have a volunteer pumpkin. I have three goats. Five chickens. Three children (the youngest is still in the cooker).

What am I learning from this? Slow down stupid. Things take time. Soil must be respected. Animals need tending. Children need rocking. Mommas need time to read stacks of novels. Every meal can feature zucchini. Line dried clothes are happier. Of course wooden toys are best and undirected play is ideal, but my children and I are regular people, and there's room for Buzz, Thomas, and Winnie the Pooh in our house too.

So, I hope to get my camera out and show you around this dream come true. Soon...right after I fold the clothes (the unhappy, electrically-dried kind) and finish this book, The Riddle: the Second Book of Pellinor by Allison Croggon.

There can be nothing original as we all use words someone else created. Take for instance the peace sign. As we haughtily profess that we only believe in peace (regardless of the many benefits of war in which we indulge...oil). I am sure that everyone else reading this will already have encountered the staggering truth I stumbled across today. The peace sign originated as the victory sign during WWII. Seriously? I am admittedly too young to understand what a cultural phenomenon the peace sign became in the anti-war climate of the 60's, but it seems overwhelmingly pitiful that the iconic gesture of defiant peace embraced in the 1960's was only 20 years earlier used as a gesture of wartime solidarity.

Maybe, just maybe, the sentiments are not so different...by whatever means, give us our peace back. Still it makes all of our pacifism sound a bit hollow.

Christ seems to be a rather rattling leader to follow. I am convinced that my vision is unclear. We are born with such violence, it is hard to imagine that we could possibly live without violence. Maybe our call to die to self is revealing. While our births are universally violent, the slipping from life to death, even from violent means, is so diaphanous that it, at times, defies recognition. Can we really choose a gentler way? A way of grace that soothes our violent nature and allows us to live into the joy of life that we saw in Christ. And if we do, what will happen to our world?