Lenten Grace — Dungforks and Slop Pails

Farmer with a pitchfork by Winslow Homer

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory,
but a man with a dungfork in his hand,
a woman with a slop pail,
give Him glory, too.
God is so great
that all things give Him glory
if you mean that they should.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thanks in large part to how messy we humans are, this world is a grimy place.   As an act of worship, we keep cleaning up after ourselves.  The hands that clean the toilets, scrub the floors, carry the bedpans, pick up the garbage might as well be clasped in prayer–it is in such mundane tasks God is glorified.

I spend an hour every day carrying dirty buckets and wielding a pitchfork because it is my way of restoring order to the disorder inherent in human life.  It is with gratitude that I’m able to pick up one little corner of my world, making stall beds tidier for our farm animals by mucking up their messes and in so doing, I’m cleaning up a piece of me at the same time.

I never want to forget the mess I’m in and the mess I am.  I never want to forget to clean up after myself.  I never want to feel it is a mere and mundane chore to worship with dungfork and slop pail.

It is my privilege.  It is His gift to me.
It is Grace that comes alongside me, to keep pitching the muck and carrying the slop when I get weary.

The Angelus by Jean-François Millet

Lenten Grace — Sacrament of the Present Moment

Photo by Kathy Yates

It is in these afflictions, which succeed one another each moment, that God, veiled and obscured, reveals himself, mysteriously bestowing his grace in a manner quite unrecognized by the souls who feel only weakness in bearing their cross…
Jean Pierre du Caussade from The Sacrament of the Present Moment

The past few mornings have unveiled in mist and fog, tentative spring dawns of freezing air and warming soil trying to break loose from the vise grip of a tired and dying winter.

I am struggling under the load of 14 hour work days in addition to keeping a barn clean and animals and humans fed.  Even sleep is not restful when there is so little time to quiet myself in reflection and gratitude.

I am keenly reminded of my weakness as my strength wanes at the end of a long day, having slipped in the mud while trying to gain traction unloading a couple hundred pounds of manure from the wheelbarrow.  Landing on my backside, my pants soaking through,  I can choose to laugh or cry.

I choose to see the baptism of mud as a sacrament of the present moment,  reminding me of my need for a cleansing grace.

I laugh and cry.

Though obscured from view, God is nevertheless revealed in these moments of being covered in the soil of earth and the waste of its creatures.

He knows I need reminding that I too am dust and to dust shall return.
He knows I am too often wasteful and a failed steward, so need reminding by landing me amidst it.
He knows I need to laugh at myself, so puts me right on my backside.
He knows I need to cry, so sends me those with the saddest stories and greatest needs.
He knows I need Him, always and ever more, to restore a sacrament of grace evident in the present moment and every moment to come.

 

Hostelry of Worms

a cross section of 30 months of composted manure

a plethora of red wigglers

A sunny spring day lured us outside for yard and garden prep for the anticipated grass and weed explosion in a few short weeks. We’ve been carefully composting horse manure for over two years behind the barn, and it was time to dig in to the 10 foot tall pile to spread it on our garden plots. As Dan pushed the tractor’s front loader into the pile, steam rose from its compost innards. As the rich soil was scooped, thousands of newly exposed red wiggler worms immediately dove for cover. Within seconds, thousands of naked little creatures had, well, …wormed their way back into the security of warm dirt, rudely interrupted from their routine. I can’t say I blamed them.

Hundreds of thousands of wigglers ended up being forced to adapt to new quarters today, leaving the security of the manure mountain behind. As I smoothed the topping of compost over the garden plot, the worms–gracious creatures that they are–tolerated being rolled and raked and lifted and turned over, waving their little bodies expectantly in the cool air before slipping back down into the dark. There they will begin their work of digesting and aerating the tired soil of the garden, reproducing in their unique hermaphroditic way, leaving voluminous castings behind to further feed the seedlings to be planted.

Worms are unjustly denigrated by humans primarily because we don’t like to be surprised by them. We don’t like to see one in our food, especially only part of one, and are particularly distressed to see them after we’ve digested our food. Once we get past that bit of squeamishness, we can greatly appreciate their role as the ultimate recyclers, leaving the earth a lot better off once they are finished with their work. We humans actually suffer by comparison, so to be called “a worm” is really not as bad as it sounds at first. The worm may not think so.

I hope to prove a worthy innkeeper for these new tenants. May they live long and prosper. May worms be forgiving for the continual disruption of their routine. May I smile the next time someone calls me a worm.

The garden is covered with rich composted manure

Another Manure Tale

I spend about an hour a day shoveling manure out of eight horse stalls.  Wheeled to a mountainous pile in our barnyard,  it happily composts year round, becoming rich fertilizer in a matter of months through a crucible-like heating process of organic chemistry, bacteria and earthworms.  Nothing mankind has achieved quite matches the drama of useless and basically disgusting stuff transforming into the essential elements needed for productive growth and survival.  I’m in awe, every day, at being part of this process.  The horses, major contributors that they are, act underwhelmed by my enthusiasm.  I guess some miracles are relative, depending on one’s perspective, but if the horses understood that the grass they contentedly eat in the pasture, or the hay they munch on during the winter months, was grown thanks to their carefully recycled manure, they might be more impressed.

Their nonchalance about the daily mucking routine is understandable.  If they are outside, they probably don’t notice their beds are clean when they return to the stalls at night.  If they are inside during the heavy rain days, they feel duty-bound to be in my face as I move about their stall, toting my pitchfork and pushing a wheelbarrow.  I’m a source of constant amusement as they nose my jacket pockets for treats that I never carry, as they beg for scratches on their unreachable itchy spots, and as they attempt to overturn an almost full load, just to see balls of manure roll to all corners of the stall like breaking a rack of billiard balls in a game of pool.  Good thing I’m a patient person.

So my stallion discovered a way to make my life easier rather than complicating it.  He hauled a rubber tub into his stall from his paddock, by tossing it into the air with his teeth and throwing it, and it finally settled against one wall.  Then he began to consistently pile his manure, with precise aim, right in the tub.  I didn’t ask him to do this.  It had never occurred to me.  I hadn’t even thought it was possible for a horse to house train himself.  But there it is, proof that some horses prefer neat and tidy rather than the whirlwind eggbeater approach to manure distribution.  After a day of his manure pile plopping, it is actually too heavy for me to pick up and dump into the wheelbarrow all in one tub load, but it takes 1/4 of the time to clean his stall than the others, and he spares all this bedding.  What a guy.

Now, once I teach him to put the seat back down when he’s done, he’s welcome to move into the house…

There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere…

It’s manure spreading time at BriarCroft–time to recycle six months of accumulated Haflinger poop (plus shavings) back to the fields from where it originated. The fields soon will be too wet and mushy to run the manure spreader over without cutting deep ruts, so October is our window of opportunity to reduce the mountains of manure that have accumulated over the spring and summer so we can start “fresh” for the fall and winter. There is nothing quite so satisfying as making good use of what appears to the average citizen to be noxious organic material.

Au, contraire!

This poop is the best fertilizer in the world, because it is produced, with love and not much effort, by our Haflingers.

Scooping poop out of stalls is a therapeutic exercise in more ways than one and usually far more satisfying than pitching the figurative stuff
all day in other settings. There are a few Haflingers that are ‘pilers’—beautifully barn trained creatures that they are, leaving nice neat little collections tidily in one corner of the stall, one deposit on top of the other, so that when you are cleaning, you have only to remove 20 lbs. of manure in one forkful without having to do a thing to the rest of the stall except fluff the shavings. Then some Haflingers are of the ‘the more the merrier’ variety–leaving many small piles around the stall like so many Easter eggs to be found. It is more time consuming to clean, but satisfying as the stall looks so much better when you leave it than when you walked in. Lastly are the Haflinger ‘blenders’ whose stalls remind me somewhat of my children’s bedrooms on a very bad day. If you dare to open the door, you’ll find a whirlwind of everything mixed together, impossible to sort clean stuff from dirty stuff and the temptation is to just walk back out and close the door without even trying.

We pile our manure loads onto cement slab, and as the months go by there is greater challenge to accomplish the dumping of the load as the wheelbarrow must be pushed or pulled up the pile. Eventually one feels like Sisyphus attempting to roll the rock uphill only to have it roll back down again and have to start again. Manure piles do settle though, and shrink with the decomposition taking place, so it is possible to keep loading on top and not see a whole lot of change in the height of the hill over time. When the time comes for spreading, we start digging into the pile, revealing layers as if on an archaeological dig. The steam rises from the opened pile, and sometimes the heat is so great that I barely touch it comfortably with my bare hand. It steams in the manure spreader and as it flies out the back of the spreader onto the fields, it appears to be a great gaseous chemical concoction that we are throwing back to the grass (which of course it is!)

We are rewarded with the growing grass in the spring–indeed this is the ‘pony’ in this pile of poop–in fact many ponies! Brown smelly organic material returns back to the land to provide sweet green organic material for the next winter. It is a remarkably simple formula. We purchase no additional fertilizers, we buy little outside hay. The Haflingers provide for the fields, the fields provide for the Haflingers, then the Haflingers provide for the fields once again. Our mission, as we choose to accept it, is to get it back out to the fields, and when the grass is ready to harvest, bring it back in. Transformation of waste to nourishment all in one year’s time.  In this day and age, this is referred to as “sustainability”.  I call it good stewardship.

Can I say the same of the things I cast off as “worthless waste” in my own life? There are stinky, yucky, messy and ugly parts of myself that I wish I could throw away, flush and never see again.   Is it possible that I should be figuratively gathering it up, to haul off and pile up to decompose all on its own, in the fervent hope it will be somehow transformed into something useful?

Instead I tend to let the piles accumulate around me in my daily life.  Rather than shoveling into a transforming clean-up, I remain messy too much of the time.

So perhaps I better start looking for the “pony” buried deep in my own pile . I know he’s in there just waiting to be found.  I just have to get dirty and start digging…

Bed Spreading

When I glanced out the  window and saw the large shavings truck pull up to our barn to dump its load in the shavings shed, you’d have thought it was the Second Coming.  I could almost hear the trumpet sound and the heavens sing.  It was that welcome and long anticipated.

We’re in the middle of a wood shavings shortage in the northwest and have been for over a year.  Even pellet stoves are going wanting. Here we are in the land of the evergreens, of thousands of acres of woodlands, and in the old days, a saw mill on every corner.  Many factors have threatened the lumber industry in our part of the country: less expensive lumber coming down from Canada, the spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act, and most recently, a new housing slump because of the economic down turn.  The mills shut down for extended times so the shavings stockpiles have evaporated quickly.  In addition, the mills have decided that their own shavings can convert to pretty decent fuel for steam powered machinery, so they are keeping it and burning it themselves, when previously, it went to whoever would haul it away–free.

No more.

I always try to plan ahead for when I’ll need my next truckload of shavings for bedding the horse stalls.  A two week lead time used to work pretty well, and by the time I’m scooping my last wheelbarrow load to haul to the barn, the truck will drive in ready to dump the next mountain for me, usually lasting about 2-3 months, depending on the time of year and how many horses we have.

I called in early December, knowing I’d need more shavings soon, but hadn’t run out yet.  The local friendly shavings guy said he was out of the business.  It’s not looking good, I was told.  Orders were backing up and the stockpiles were gone.  They were totally dependent on the mills starting back up after Christmas and I was totally dependent on them.

Meantime I was starting to be very careful in my stall cleaning strategy.  No more wasteful scooping of shavings and poop–I needed to filter out the good shavings as best I could.  It easily doubled the cleaning time, this “panning for poop” approach.  But I stretched the shavings I had another week or so.

Then I had to go buy baled shavings at the feed store to tide me over.  This is an outrageously expensive way to go–easily 6x the cost of bulk shavings hauled in by truck.   Pretty soon, even the baled shavings were sold out and none anticipated any time soon.  Then we resorted to straw bedding–a truly desperate measure.  Cleaning straw beds in horse stalls is one of the most difficult jobs as the horse manure just sinks to the bottom of the straw bed and has to be searched out like so many brown Easter eggs.    Straw makes Haflingers happy though–it is like a constant brunch underfoot.

So I was near despair and so were all my local horsey friends.  Then my ship came in from British Columbia today.  Yes, it is costing 150% more than it did when I last had a truckload hauled in a year ago.  But it is sweet fluffy shavings and it made my day.

When I came home tonight, it was pure joy to put on my muck boots and head to the barn.  I started in on the cleaning process and realized that two months of scrimping had left these dirt floor stalls in a sad and mired state.  They are not damp, but they are in dire need of a deep clean that I cannot even begin to do–it will take weeks to dig out all the old stuff so the new bed can be spread.  All I could really do was put on a coating of fresh clean shavings tonight on top of the layers, knowing full well they will be mixed up thoroughly and spoiled by the morning.  However, over time, I will manage to get back to the clean beds I once had.

We can tend to accumulate a lot of muck in our lives, never really doing a deep clean when it is needed.  We get pretty used to sleeping in it, eating in it and not even noticing it after awhile.  But the day when fresh new clean stuff arrives in our lives, how do we react?  Just put it on top of the muck and hope no one will notice what is still underneath?  Abandon the old stalls and build new ones, ready for a fresh start?  Or dig down and really get rid of the old dirt, working as long as it takes to remove it?  What an amazing thing to have a chance to clean it all up!

All I know is that I celebrate that there is still renewal that can come into my life when I least expect it or deserve it.  I can start again and hope for the best.   There is nothing like a sweet fresh bed to rest in.

The Scents of Spring

I admit it.  Right this minute, I should be doing our taxes.  We’re down to the last minute and I have all the paperwork stacked on the desk beside me, but I’m not doing it.  It is too miserable a task to even contemplate.  Instead tonight I went outside to capture spring.

The last few mornings, when I have risen just before dawn, I have gone outside to breathe deeply of the scents that hang heavy in the cool moist air.  The perfume from thousands of orchard blossoms on our farm is heady and intoxicating.  There is nothing quite like these two weeks each year when our farm becomes a mass of snow white and pink scented flowers, busy with honey bees and eventually showering petals to the ground as the fruit starts to form.

Unfortunately, I’m allergic to tree pollen.  I breathe deeply and… sneeze and wheeze.  Even the best medicine can’t stop my reaction. So much loveliness causes so much misery.  So I retreat back to the house and look out the window and enjoy the view from afar, dabbing my dripping nose.

Ironically, this is the same time of year our dairy farm neighbors start to empty their manure lagoons and begin to spread their thousands of gallons of liquid manure on the surrounding fields, readying the ground for the hay or corn crop to come later on this summer. That scent hangs heavy in the cool moist air as well, pungent and unforgettable, penetrating even into our clothing so we carry the smell back into the house with us.  Of course I’m not allergic to manure.  In fact, as nasty a smell as it is, it’s invigorating in a perverse sort of way.  I know where it comes from, I know what its potential is, and I know the crop it yields.  It is, in itself, as treasured as the blossoms that yield fruit on our farm.

Taxes are the manure in our lives.  They are pretty stinky too.  Just like manure, an inevitable part of our daily existence, just as disagreeable.  Yet, spread out where needed, those collective taxes fertilize and grow our communities, our schools, our roads, our health care (and a few other things we may wish would not be funded).

So I must get to work spreading numbers across my desktop in the hope they may yield fruit of their own, sometime, somewhere.  The Cents of Spring.

Steaming in the Pile

(yes, another story about manure–sorry!  Given I spend an hour or more a day dealing with it, it tends to absorb my creative energy!)

A mid-March cold snap swept down from northern Canada last week, freezing daffodils in mid-bloom, withering berry plant and orchard branch buds, and causing general mayhem in the Pacific northwest.  After a few weeks of rain and temperate weather up to the high 50′s, 17 degrees felt cruel indeed.

Our barn is fairly draft proof, but in northeasters like this, the water buckets ice up and the manure sits in cold hard piles, like so many round rocks.  It is a great temptation to put off the stall cleaning when the weather is this bitter cold and push the poop to the walls for later pick up when it is warmer.  After all, it doesn’t smell when it is frozen rock hard, and certainly loses its “squish” factor, so the horses seem to not mind too much.  So when I went out this weekend to start the digging out process, there were several days of accumulation to contend with.

As I wheeled the loads out to the manure pile, and dug into the pile to tidy it up, the steam poured out into the frigid air–there was nothing left frozen there.  It was hot and getting hotter–its destruction assured through the composting of so much organic matter.  No wonder the cats find a nice sunny spot to stretch out next to this smoldering mountain of poop.  It is as comfy as a tropical vacation spot.

How often have I similarly piled my metaphorical “poop” in piles to deal with another time?  Frozen it seems innocuous, inoffensive, not worthy of my attention, not enough to bother with.  It is so tempting to pass on cleaning up my messes, by shoving mistakes and errors to one side or “under the carpet” and trying to ignore the growing mounds in my own nest.  Admitting one’s sins and proceeding to clean up after one’s self  is not fashionable in this day and age of not wanting to be judged or to pass judgment.  All types of behavior, even some of the most self-destructive, are tolerated as freedom of expression, and referring to anything as sin is considered impossibly old fashioned.  Our pastor is doing a study series on Christian “respectable sins”, like ungodliness, discontent, pride, etc.   I have a ton of them that accumulate daily that I want to simply pile up and ignore.

Like frozen poop shoved aside and not dealt with, sin eventually warms up.  It starts to stink, and generally becomes obnoxious and overwhelming.  Once it gets big enough, it becomes its own steaming inferno, burning and destroying everything else within. The only safe place for it is to move it far away from where we dwell everyday.

I remember a young mother of three children who died three years ago as the heat of her drug addiction overcame efforts to clean up her life, though she was a Christian believer.  Many family, friends, church family and health care professionals handed her the tools to help scoop up the mess her addiction had left behind, but she chose to shove it into frozen piles around her, unwilling to admit how it was mounding up higher and higher, to the point of blocking any eventual escape.  It consumed her before she could dig free with her rescuers’ help.  It crushed her and her family is still trying to recover.

Such tragedy convinces me we must face our own messes without turning away in our shame.  We must dig ourselves out everyday from our mistakes, ask forgiveness for the harm we cause, and gratefully accept the tools handed to us that make possible the impossible job of getting clean.   We cannot do it by ourselves.  Our wheelbarrow is too small, our shovels too inadequate, our muscles too weak.

Blessed are the barn cleaners, for working together, they will find hope beyond the steaming pile.

A Shovel Full of Songs

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls in the evening.  We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia.  This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.  But standard issue American melting pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 30-40+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”.  Oldies has always referred to music from the 20′s, 30′s and 40′s, not the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s!   I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens.  I can think of faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, remember special summer days picking berries and hear long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.   There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 40 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed.  Or has it? One  (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has and I have.

Yesterday, I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend.  There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and then Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now,  You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand.  Come Saturday Morning we’re Born to Be Wild. Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To?  Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples.  Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You. I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence – If– Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.  Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to.  I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well.  Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants.  Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And manure still needs shoveling.

Rearranging the Pile

The sun has actually shown itself for two days, after weeks of rain, then wind, then snow, then sleet, then rain, then flooding, then fog.  The light above finally reappeared and it shone brightly, cheerfully, unblinkingly…. on my manure pile.

During all the bad weather, the chief barn cleaner (that would be me) really didn’t enjoy wheelbarrowing all the manure out to the pile, through the elements, whether it was an arctic blast wind, or a foot of snow, or ice covering the pathway, or huge deep puddles.  I went for a “dump and run” technique which meant I didn’t pile things up in a careful methodical way.  Instead I left piles randomly everywhere.  This is not the way to build a manure pile.  Nothing really heats up and decomposes when it is not piled together.  Instead it just sits there, taking up space and not doing what manure does best–become useful fertilizer for the spring pastures.

So I had no excuses yesterday.  It had to be done.   I had to pitch and move the manure pile into a semblance of orderly compost, flattening it out into a sloping ramp for ease of future dumping.  Yes, it took time and muscle and patience–all things I did not exercise much of in the last few weeks of excuse-laden poor weather.  Today, when I went out to the barnyard to survey my good work,  I only had to lift one shovelful to see the steam rise happily from beneath.  This is now happy manure, if there is such a thing.

My life is too often a dump and run affair too.  I don’t measure out my minutes carefully enough to take care of things in the orderly way they should be managed.  Anyone who has been to my house knows this about me.  I know what are in those piles of books, papers, clothing, etc.   It just doesn’t look like I do when I start searching for something…

I know what is in the piles of stuff I’d sooner forget about, kind of like the manure pile in the barnyard.  There are parts of me that I’d like to dump and run away from: things I say or do or think that I’m certainly not proud of, that I regret the moment it happens. I leave it in a little pile, all by itself, not wanting to ever return to it and do what really needs doing.  Instead it needs to be ceremonially heated up and decomposed so it never happens again, or with all the other stuff I do every day, it needs to someday become fertilizer for a better life lived down the line.

Maybe my children will learn from watching me manage my personal manure piles,  and benefit from my mistakes, rather than being busy creating their own.

The Light is shining on the manure piles of my life.    It is unblinking, stark and at times blinding.   It is time for me to quit the “dump and run” and to face the heat, knowing it will inevitably create something better out of me.  I will become the fertilizer someday.