“Watch out for the ram.” Surrounded by sheep, I turn quickly, trying to find the one ram among the twenty plus ewes in the pen. They all look alike in their thick winter fleeces on this January visit, dashing away from me when I approach like minnows in a pond. I move closer to Bridget Kavanaugh, the owner of Happy Goat Lucky Ewe farm, to make sure there isn’t enough open space for the ram to follow through on his name. Sheep bump against my thighs, and I feel like I’m being hit by toddlers with pillows, their fleeces are so thick. It’s a barnyard comedy show: I’m darting after the sheep to see how long their fleeces are, they are running away from me while chasing the hay that Kavanaugh is tossing to them for their late morning feed. Finally, I spot the ram, fortunately across the pen from me, horns hidden by fleece, leaving the black straps of his chest harness the sole identifier.
Posts tagged #Issue #76
Nocturne
One Halloween, the night when barriers are said to dissolve between dimensions, as perhaps they do every night, my friend Marin and I took a ceremonial walk after dark through Bird Hills Nature Area. We stopped to read poetry and tell dreams at places we knew in the forest.
Honoring Our Ancestors
I was 18 years old when the telephone rang. My grandmother had passed. In a moment of stunned disbelief—this was my first experience of death in our family—I was also informed that in two hours my flight would leave for Boston. There was much to be done and very little had to do with processing emotions. I had to arrange for someone to cover a shift at the restaurant where I was waitressing, contact my college about missing class, find someone to care for my cat, and pack a suitcase. I had never been to a funeral, and my only reference was the movies. Yet, somehow, I managed to sort it all out and found myself surrounded by family, all mourning my grandmother.
Healing Writer's Block Through the Mystery School
The temptation to hang up the phone burnt my fingertips like I had touched a car bumper that had been sitting under a hot sun for hours. I did not call Lynn Andrews—a shaman healer, mystic, and an internationally best-selling author with 20 books to her name—to talk about my childhood as if I was sitting in front of a psychiatrist or a talk show host. I’d hoped that this one-hour phone session could resolve some issues I had been having with my writing career.
Squirrel Sense
They call it birdseed for a reason, but squirrels don’t know that. For those of us who enjoy feeding birds, squirrels can be crafty, and sometimes costly, adversaries. A hungry fox squirrel can chow down a dollar’s worth of sunflower seeds faster than a small flock of finches, which can be annoying. Or it can be entertaining.
The Art of Sangchen Tsomo
Born in Indiana, college at University of Michigan, it was not until her mid-20s that Sangchen Tsomo encountered the Tantric Buddhist path as taught at the Tsogyelgar Dharma Center, which has been located for more than two decades on a beautiful piece of farmland a few miles west of Ann Arbor. (See the Crazy Wisdom Community Journal cover story on Tsogyelgar in Issue 64, the Fall 2016 issue, available on our Archive at: crazywisdomjournal.com.)
