Sheep's Clothing

It's the Year of the Leap, and I am taking time to blog about the strange experiences of a big life change.

This past week was my first as an unemployed.....er....self-employed person.  On Monday I cleaned out my office and walked out into a brave new world.  Oh, the freedom that awaited outside those doors, oh the liberty!  I imagined the first days would be filled with leisurely reflection, a slow and careful assessment of the path ahead.

Right.

There is an interesting psychological backlash to becoming suddenly vocationally unattached - rather than creating a sense of freedom, instead I experienced an immediate and overwhelming urge to get some stuff going, to get irons in the fire, to get things FIGURED OUT!  Probably not a mystery, my "provider" identity was suddenly in real crisis and the compulsive business that resulted was a predictable reaction to fears of destitution.

And so I launched into a maelstrom of productivity, a near fit of projects, chores and new initiatives.  My to-do list has been enormous and unfocused, my days so full that I felt a gnawing frustration that there were not enough hours in the day to address my ambitions.  Though it scratches that little insecure itch that says, "you're not DOING anything," it is otherwise impractical and unsustainable.

There are lots of things that are disorienting about a big change, stuff that is confusing to yourself and to others.  I had occasion to reflect on this while I was doing a chore that comes up around the farm in the springtime - the time for sheep shearing has arrived.

I have been keeping a little flock of sheep for several years now.  You can go into the Wayback Machine and check out some of the genesis story here.  Since those first days we have grown that little flock, which, with the addition of 10 lambs this spring, now numbers 23.  Their wool grows with relentless consistency, and each spring I take up shears and commence trimming.  It is not particularly easy work, but it is satisfying in many ways.  Certainly I am standing in the footsteps of my Scottish ancestors, those muddy, manure laden footsteps - and that is sort of a nice feeling.

The sheep are corralled and picked out, one by one, to suffer the indignity of a haircut.  With each blow (thats what they call a cut of the shears, in sheep-handling parlance), their heavy coats are cut back, revealing a creature that is by many degrees cleaner and smaller than they appeared before.  Their wool, if white, glows anew, and if they were caramel colored before, their wool bleached by a season's sun, they are returned to the pure black of their younger days.  It is a pretty remarkable transformation.

Now, sheep suffer from a poor reputation in the smarts department and though they are winning creatures in many other ways, that particular slight is at times well-deserved.  One annual demonstration of their dimness inevitably arises at shearing time.  A freshly-shorn sheep is unrecognizable to his or her peers - really.  Sheep don't recognize their colleagues after a haircut, to such a degree that, for instance, the rams will set upon one another with all kinds of head butting and other displays of dominance because Odin, our younger ram, believes that old Atlas, freshly shorn, is really a new kid on the block that needs to be put in his place.  But Atlas is still Atlas - the king of the pasture, something Odin will rediscover in short order.

I think we are prone to the same mistake, in our own ways.  Our culture associates so closely the ideas of "who we are" with "what we do" that when someone makes a dramatic change in the latter we are tempted to translate that change to the former.  In my own case, leaving behind a career in church ministry has brought about all kinds of confusion in some folks.  It is as if, having embarked on this change, I have become unrecognizable.  And it's not just them - I think that half of my frenetic doing of all the things this past week is rooted in the same misconception.  Cut loose from what I have been doing for so long, I have been instinctually filling in the gap with lots of other stuff, scavenging a new identity from bits of activity.  A fearful shield to guard against the inevitable question, "So, what do you do?"

As I have been working through this big life change others have reached out to talk about their own life transitions and I realize I am not alone in this.  One of the impediments to embracing a needful change is a sense of identity conflict.  We get wed to a particular path, a career trajectory, and some of the reluctance to changing that is the sense that it somehow it would be inconsistent with who we are.  A friend of mine was struggling with this very problem, wondering if his desire for a change somehow painted all of his past endeavors as mistakes or misjudgments, a grand waste of time.

I don't believe that's the case.  Old John Locke, that english thinker from the 17th century, used to talk about things having a "real essence" and a "nominal essence."  The nominal essence was what we could observe and describe about a thing, but the real essence was what lay underneath, a kind of core.  Maybe I can suggest that we have similar layers to our own identity - of course we are in some way reflected to the outside world in the things that we do, the work we engage in, etc. - but those identifiers are not who we are, our real essence.  Underneath the dirty woolen fleece we are the same person - a big change just gives us a chance to shake off some of the tangled, matted accumulation of life and step out feeling lighter, fresher, newer.

There was a story out of New Zealand that ran around the interwebs a couple of years ago about an old sheep named Shrek.  This cagey fellow managed to avoid the indignity of the shears for six long years, apparently he'd taken to hiding in caves when the shepherds came calling (maybe not so dim after all).  His fleece, left unattended and unchanged, grew....and grew....and grew.  Impressive, but not particularly healthy.  He was finally caught and shorn, yielding a 60lb fleece, stepping out into life a new man...er...um...sheep.  New, but also the same.

Are there lessons here?  How about this one...don't hide in a cave when it's time for a change.  Step into it, welcome it, let the old trappings fall off like sheep's clothing.  The you that is always you (ewe that is always ewe?) will be happier for it.

Shear Joy

One of the things I have noticed is that the cultural distance from activities that were once commonplace in human society has resulted in a powerful mystification of otherwise mundane tasks.  When we decided to harvest our own pigs last year, we found ourselves piercing through layers of mystery that have been erected between the average meat consumer and the source of their food.  Butchering meat, once a household skill, is now arcane knowledge, kept by disciples in white lab coats who pass quietly behind swinging doors.  What happens behind those doors?  Who knows, certainly no one in polite society should like to find out - instead, we are content to be handed individually wrapped portions, developing our specific tastes and preferences with little to no consideration of the whole from which it comes.  Even among those who raise pigs, harvesting and butchering is most commonly left to the professionals.  When striking out on our own, we found that we were flying in the face of what is now conventional wisdom.

In the same manner, when I began this new venture of raising sheep, one of the tasks that every shepherd would have taken upon him or herself is the annual need to shear the woolies, ridding them of their thick fleeces in time for lambing season and the warming of spring.  But, similar to changes in most other areas of agricultural life, when sheep raising moved from smallholdings to vast herds in corporate operations, tasks that would have been achievable by a small community were put into the hands of professionals and specialists.  And now, even among smallholders, the instinct is most often to call a professional shearer (a profession growing more rare every year) to schedule a haircut for the sheep at what one hopes will be a reasonable price per head.  For those wishing to try their own hand at it, the industrial model (using expensive mechanical shears) tends to maximize efficiency over the comfort of the animal - as a result, one gets the impression that the only good way to shear a sheep is to get it done as fast as possible.

There are other ways to do this.  Traditionally, shearing was done comfortably and peaceably using hand shears and some patience.  The goal, rather than emphasize efficiency of time, is to work well with the animal and to get a quality fleece for fiber work later.  Often these skills were learned on the job, under the watchful eye of a skilled shepherd, but in the Information Age, recommendations on tools and approaches are just a click away, and after research is done all that is left is to give it a try.  There is an old Russian saying that translates: "Repetition is the mother of learning."  - my aim was to learn to shear our own little flock, using the five sheep as five lessons in shearing.

My brother Alex had put me on to some hand shears that seemed like they would do the job right.  They are called Jakoti Shears, and let me tell you, they are, as they say in the east, "wicked shaap", they are extremely comfortable to use, and they hold an edge like you wouldn't believe.  Although they are made as garden shears, I would recommend them as a more than adequate tool for the task of shearing. They are manufactured in the UK but carried by several dealers in the US.

I started first with the lambs, and began figuring this whole thing out.  In some ways, it is just a haircut of sorts - but there are some tricks that make it work better for man and beast alike.  In order to make shearing possible, the sheep is flopped onto their backside and leans against the legs of the shearer.  In this position they are completely docile, even slipping towards sleep every once in awhile.  What follows is a kind of greco-roman wrestling match, as the sheep is gently rolled around to different positions in order to get the angles best suited to cutting wool and not flesh.  That distinction is harder to maintain than one would at first imagine - the wool is so dense, and the flesh so soft, that the line between them is sometimes difficult to discern by eye or even by touch.  But there is a feel to the thing that develops in a short amount of time and though we had to administer some minor first aid care to the long-suffering sheep, no major cuts were inflicted.

Keith and I worked our way through the first two lambs and our cutting technique began to improve.  A week later I did two more yearlings, and got pretty decent looking fleeces off both.  And finally, I turned my attention to "Mama", our bred ewe (due in June), with her impressive shaggy coat.  The lambs were easy to move around, but Mama was a different story.  Just getting her in the shed and onto the working platform we built was a challenge and it made me think about what kind of system we would need to develop next year when our flock was more fully grown.  But eventually she and I worked things out and she sat back and relaxed for her trim.  Thirty minutes later, she emerged with a daring new look, and I was able to take some pride in a beautiful and intact fleece.

The fleeces are getting washed, then the plan is to send them off to a local fiber mill for processing.  Our plan is to get a bunch of yarn back and put them to use in some knitting projects, that kind of thing.  Hopefully we'll have a lot to work with, and can hand some out to talented knitters and see what they can do!  Meanwhile, lambing season approaches and all the new learning that will come with it - Mama is ready, now, for an easy time of it with her new, sleek spring outfit.  The curtain has been pulled back, the great and powerful Oz has been exposed - shearing is a task well within the grasp of any that would care to learn to do it.  For me, there was a recognition that this ritual, a Scotsman shearing his sheep, has been repeated countless times through the ages - and I am glad to continue on in the tradition.