Milking Honey

We raise a relatively rare breed of cattle, the British White, on our ranch.  It's a breed steeped in mystery and romance - the prized cattle of Celtic druid priests, Irish warrior-queens, and English lords - raised in the wild forest of wild Britain, and later in abbey parks and noble estates.
My daughter chose a pure-bred British White heifer to raise and named her Honey.  Honey had her first, much-anticipated calf in November.   Much anticipated because I had been plotting for years to do something really weird - have a milk cow and milk her by hand everyday (or almost everyday anyway.)
Now, with a month of reality behind the endeavor I have a report to make.
Needless to say it's a wildly anachronistic endeavor - labor-intensive, time-consuming, and "economically inefficient" - I could go to the store and buy the milk for much less than it costs me in time (what is my time worth anyway?), even at Hawaii prices.  But...I've now become completely spoiled by the taste of Honey's milk  such that store-bought milk tastes dead, flat, and almost insulting.
Not that the idyllic experience of milking a cow outside in a grassy field with the cow munching happily on grain is for everyone.  For instance, little bits of udder skin fall into the milk at first, and often a fly drowns in it before you can get it in the house.  These things have to be filtered out.  So, not an activity for people with sanitation anxieties.  Or who haven't spent quite a few years studying bovine motivational techniques, as there is a lot of persuading, convincing, and cajoling involved. And then there is the fact that Honey is not the greatest milk cow, and it seems like Bumblebee, her calf, is always getting to her milk before I do.
Yet I find the whole exercise deeply gratifying - not necessarily a huge success in terms of product, (actually quite pitiful in terms of product, but then I don't need much), but in terms of understanding what milk is and what it was originally before you could buy it in the store, and in terms of understanding what the age-old relationship between cow and human is and has been - in those terms it has been a great success.  Honey and I have become partners.  I lean my head into her flank sometimes and it feels like something humans have done for a long time.  I've watched her more closely than any cow I've ever known, and she has come to recognize her name even from across the pasture.  I've been around cows all my life and I've only now learnt anything about them.  I've drunk milk (and grew up on a dairy) but only now know what it actually is.

Coming Home, Part II

Coming home means asking different, fearfully different, questions of ourselves - how to give back? how to contribute to the biosphere instead of merely taking, harvesting, feeding? 

Even more simply, how do we recognize our fellow beings, how do we simply recognize their existence, in the midst of the ongoing destruction?  It would be a small but important step simply to recognize, without sentimentality, hysteria, or other emotional excess, the existence of other beings on this planet as equals.   

Yes, I am talking about animal rights, but also plant rights, and microbial rights as well.  And the un-dodgeable fact that one must kill something to stay alive,  that it goes on constantly, that something is being killed to feed you at this very moment, whether you are a vegan, fruitarian,  breatharian or not.  And, in that fact, if it can be faced squarely, which is not an easy thing even for someone like myself for whom it looms daily, is the beginning of a knowledge about living honestly on this Earth, as an animal among animals, a life enmeshed in life.   

How to hold the terrible knowledge that life ineluctably feeds on life (unless one is a lithotrophic microbe) with an absolute respect for what one feeds on?  How to refuse that little mental trick that makes it bearable - the one where one simply denies respect, denies existence to what one consumes?   How to keep civilization from taking that question away?  How to demand (and one must demand it mostly from oneself) that discomforting knowledge as a birthright, as one’s path to full citizenship on this Earth?   How to keep demanding it day after day, not just as knowledge to play with in one’s head or talk about in prideful, vacuous debate, but to live and practice, to seek and ask questions about, to look for and value in the humblest of places?

How to stop idolizing the gleaming surfaces of polished glass, plastic, metal (this Mac I am writing on) and start idolizing the weeds and the trash-heap, the home-less and the broken,  because they hold the key to being honest with ourselves, with finding the way of honesty, that way that does not throw anything “away” because there is no such place, and does not try to escape into some kind of childish fantasy of purity - of vegan blamelessness, or transcendent singularity (transformation into pure consciousness, really?)?

How to come home to the family of life?  That humble, embarrassing, funny, imperfect but honest family that we thought we kissed off years ago.