guardian dog & guardian gates

indiana joan is our new livestock guardian. i guess, more like potential livestock guardian as she is only six-weeks old. that might seem a little young to be leaving mama yet, but that's what is typically suggested for working dogs to bond with their protectorate.

her upbringing will be so very different than any other dogs we've own before. she is a working dog.  her primary purpose is to fiercely guard both the property, our family & all of our livestock ranging from the tiniest chick to our two-thousand pound horse.  she is nocturnal and will take down anything from a rat to a bear to a person with bad intentions. as such we have to treat her differently right from the start. she never comes into the house & will never leave the property. she is not my running partner & will not be joining us on long horse back rides. we have to teach her where home is and what the boundaries look like so we don't encourage wandering but rather a very loyal homebody. from day one, she sleeps out with the livestock not her friends. any posturing, pestering or playing with us or the livestock is strictly discouraged. she is to ignore the livestock completely. she can never become too over familiar with what she is protecting, or she will end up killing it.

as i have been studying this new world of bringing up a world class guardian, it has got me thinking about my guardianship. little things that i have let within my boundaries. postured and played with negativity & selfish indulgence, gotten way too familiar with complaining and bitter diatribes. i've let little mice & seemingly small vermin scamper in, simply because no alarm was raised about them being in my garden. maybe because those little rascals have burrowed deep down into lots of gardens & didn't seem that out of place. in fact, they're commonplace & they've opened the gate to bigger uglier pretators without me even noticing.

in order to be a good guardian, indie has to know what belongs to us & what does not. what she's responsible for & what animals are intruders. she primarily learns this by exposure to what belongs to the farm, the spirit & the smell of it. she has to know what she's for, before she can know what she's against.

i know i have fought hard for my revelation of faith & confession but i suddenly find myself having become too over familiar with such prize processions, not valued their guardian qualities as i should have. gotten lazy about my borders and my mouth has become like an unguarded, overflowing gate. and i can feel it. after a not so uplifting conversation or after i've allowed my mind to wander negatively into something, i feel all slimy. like i was promised one thing & then was robbed when i wasn't looking. all those negative thoughts, promising to make me feel better. promising justice & then stealing my peace. my faith. my joy.

big paws to grow into

i want to take my guardianship seriously. know my gates & borders well. not leaving my post or becoming relaxed no matter the context. no sleeping on the job. for i'm sure we all know how hard we've fought for the gems we now hold and not worth sacrificing to old-run-of-the-mill apathy of in the time of peace.

indie's paws are huge even though she is currently quite small. but she will grow into them & her working role & so will i.      

the blind will see, the lost is found {part 3}

it is true that everything always looks better in the morning. especially once one realizes they haven't permanently lost their sight. God took pity on me and the blister had disappeared but so had the goat. for good it seemed.

not a footprint. not a broken branch. no indication of where she had roamed off to, steve canvased the neighbourhood by four-wheeler. all. day. long. one neighbourly farmer, in particular snickering at my dedicated husband's perseverance.
"she's gone for good i tell ya! she's dead! there's no way she made it through the night!" he taunted only to be followed up a few hours later by an inquisitive text asking if we had found her yet.

and then we got our lucky break. as dusk was quickly settling on the open miles upon miles of back fields, steve's eye caught sight of that sorry goat's rump foraging in the far back corner of a corn field, on the very edge of a trepadacious wilderness. we flew at his beckon to help corral her. he had her backed against an old cedar rail fence that separated the farmer's field from the deep & impending ravine. thickets of fierce shrubbery & prickly vines swelled & swayed against the fence, surely discouraging anyone's passage through. i silently climbed the fence further down, parting the wilderness with my hands, to block the back way out just as insurance to her capture.

mom & steve slowly inched towards the now shaking fugitive, talking sweetly so as not to alarm her. we had found her, we all smiled. we could see her with our very eyes and were inches from touching her. suddenly, she took flight over the fence & the thick shrubbery swallowed her up as she came crashing through other side of the bush towards me. i fought hard to swim through the raspberry thicket that entrapped me, missing her completely as she bounded down the ravine, cannonballing into a swamp ditch with a enormous splash.

my heart now thudding in my chest, i knew i could trap her in there. the ravine turned into more of a deep, steep ditch that streamed slowly out to the main road. i could hear steve now position the car on the road waiting for the moment she would emerge if i could push her forward. the steep banks and bramble hid my hovering presence as i followed the wet jingle of her bell closer and closer to the road until i tripped on a rock and fell with a thud and she stopped dead. i had given myself away. i cautiously peaked over the bank and she looked straight at me and i knew in that very moment i was going to have to pull off that move from swiss family robinson where they wrestle the snake in the river. i poised and catapulted my body hard over the bank, belly flopping flat out in green swamp just inches from that dreadful goat. i scrambled and she scrambled up the other bank, getting snagged & cut by every kind of branch and bramble imaginable. she momentarily snagged her collar on a low hanging cedar and i desperately clawed through the mud & vines, grabbing her by her back leg just as she cut herself free from the cedar and bounded over the fence and far away, her bell angrily jingling all the way off into the maze of corn fields. it was dark now and the mosquitos were thick and swarming. i dared open my mouth, although my legs had become an open feasting ground. wild celery stalks grew taller than my head, flapping in my face as i scampered fast enough to not lose the sound of that bell. i tried not to think of the consequences.

i ran hard and fast, starting to panic that i was alone now in the deep darkness and wouldn't be able to find my way back until i stumbled into the neighbours cow field. their three teenage sons had now joined the search party with their four-wheelers ripping it up which rightfully frightened the cattle who would stampede from one end of the field to the other without warning. i felt like i was living some impossible video game, except without the superpowers. soon i had lost the sound of her bell and i felt sick to my stomach again at the thought that our farmer friend might be right.

just as i was losing hope, i stumbled across a fresh trail where the wet dewyness of the grass had clearly been disturbed. all those episodes of mantracker came fresh to my memory. i followed the trail sprinting with renewed spirit, zig zagging this way and that. i was so focussed on following the trail that i forgot to look up and ran straight into the butt end of the most enormous, very white tailed deer. the deer bounced off indignitly and i, in complete & utter shock, clutched my chest and fell to the ground crying uncontrollably, letting the mosquitos have their way.

nothing but the sound of coyote howls, calling for her, filled the moon-lit cold air.
we were never going to find her and i knew it. i briefly weighed up the horrid pros and cons of shooting her. and decided against it. and picked myself up off the ground and started to make my long trek back.

as irate as i was at that goat, the nothingness of having lost something so beautiful and so treasured filled my chest with tightness. i would never have another like her. and the fear in her brown bulging eyes bothered me. i had chased her right into the wild wilderness that would take her life & i would never see her again.

once i made it back to our neighbours house, now lit up like a fortress, i realized how close she had come to home. what a dark tragedy, i thought to myself. to come so close to home and paralysed with fear, turn the other way, walking straight into the mouth of her real enemy.

i couldn't give up on her. my heart just had to have hope that she would come back to us by some miraculous circumstance. i couldn't bare surrender to the alternative. with the teenage boys still ripping around on their machines, their parents assured us that they were having so much fun, although their skill & technique in goat herding was questionable, we said goodnight and with our head hanging low went home to bed.

'Father, is there any way to get her back?,' i prayed as i closed my eyes. i know she's just a goat but He reminded me of a song i used to sing to our kids. it goes a little something like this...

Say you had a hundred sheep 
and one little lamb got lost 
in the dark, in the cold, far away from the fold 
What would you do? 
What would you do? 

You’d say go get the lost one 
And leave the ninety-nine 
That little lamb is lost 
And that little lamb is mine 
Bring it home on your shoulders 
And call up all your friends 

Rejoice with me, I’ve got my little lamb again. 
Rejoice with me, I’ve got my little lamb again. 

Say you had ten silver coins 
And one silver coin got lost 
Your treasure, your wealth 
In the cracks, in the filth 
What would you do? 
What would you do? 

You’d say go get the lost one 
Turn the house upside down 
That silver coin was lost 
And that silver coin is found 
Light the lamp, sweep the ground 
Then call up all your friends 
Rejoice with me, I’ve got my silver coin again. 
Rejoice with me, I’ve got my silver coin again. 

If God had a child 
Who wandered far astray 
Who was sad, broken hearted, whose guilt kept him away 
What would He do? 
What would He do? 

He’d say, go get the lost one 
He’s who I came to see. 
He thought he was an orphan 
But he’s coming home with me. 
The angels are rejoicing. 
The sinner is my friend. 
Rejoice with me, my child is coming home again. 
The angels are rejoicing. 
The sinner is my friend. 
Rejoice with me, my child is coming home again.

how beautiful a picture of God's love for us. that He would give it all up to find His treasure, His beloved, you and me. to come and find us in the cold, in the cracks, in the filth. to save us from the jaws of death that we so eagerly toddle towards. He snatched us out of a life full of frightened frailty, wandering through the wilderness, belonging to no one and nothing & He washes our shame & guilt far away, soothes our wounds from the wild and embraces us with arms open wide as His very own child. that, my friends, is Love. that an orphan would be called a beloved daughter.

soon after i fell asleep, with the grips of hope still clutched tight in my hand, we were awoken my a late night phone call that the boys had safely captured her and had carried her back to their barn on their shoulders. they had bedded her down and other than exhaustion, she was absolutely fine & we could come and get her in the morning.

and i leapt out of a dead sleep, in those last few minutes before midnight, and danced in delirious delight on our bed! my body torn and tired, i slipped into a deep sleep that night with my hand on my heart in gratitude.

the lost is finally found.

portrait of a farmer.

sower & reaper. stewarder of the land. husbandry has existed for centuries.
from the moment adam & eve sinned to now, the land has needed to be worked.  farmed.

in this new life of ours, i got to thinking. thinking about how even though ancient in its predisposition & although it has gradually evolved into a technological science, farming is still very much the same as it's always has been.

it is the love of the land. a pluming of nature. a rich & fertile inheritance if learned.

i am genuinely shocked at the range of skills needed to operate our own small & limited homestead. in the recent months, i have become a google-aholic & have pictures of leaky goat behinds in my facebook newsfeed, & researched some of the most bizarre things to ever be typed into a search box. the learning curve has been steep & even more than the physical exhaustion of working the land, is the mental exhaustion of figuring it all out.

a farmer isn't just a care taker of livestock but a mathematician, a veterinary science expert, a diverse landscaper & botanist, a nutritionist & health science guru, an almanac reader, groom & stable muck, market retailer, masonry, carpentry & lumberjack, welder & electrician, jack of many trades, a great many things that i am not yet but have been attempting to grasp.

perhaps most of all, a farmer is a problem solver. there is no end to the problems & challenges to farm life.  and it takes a mcgyver type character to meet the function of an adept farm. it takes much confidence to back the risk of your own independent - non-google backed- solutions. it takes courage & it takes intuition not easily learned. there are lots of colossal fails & big mistakes but someone has to make the decisions & someone has to try & that is what makes a farmer. the constant trying & waiting & trying again in the face of great risk.

farmers are geniuses. they are creative, out of the box thinkers. they are undervalued, underpaid but never under worked. but they do what they do because they love it.

it's in the many of moments of hesitation i have during the day, before i let that enormous pig out into the barnyard with no real plan as to how i'll get him back or late at night as the coyotes howl too close to our precious livestock locked up tight, that i realize it takes real grit to be a bonafide farmer. it is not for the faint of heart. it is not for the princesses or the wimps. farming is for the determined & the fearless. for those who love the land they live on & the animals that love them so very much.

my mom's a farmer & when i grow up, i want to be a farmer too.

interrupted.

 as you may have already noted, i have been a little interrupted in my blogging pursuit as of late. but it hasn't been just blogging, really it's been a whole ream of things that have been, well, "interrupted", for lack of a better word. my breakfast is interrupted. my sleep is interrupted. my sentences are interrupted. my thoughts are interrupted. most of my daily pursuits are constantly being interrupted. i might even say the word for this season in my life is "interrupted".  i won't say on hold because i usually get back to tinkering with whatever it is, if it was actually important, that was interrupted by either my four young children, a rebellious animal or arduous farm task, the sudden collapse of our home as we know it from long time neglect & other such things. (i kinda feel as though i am constantly in a triage situation. like which things is the most important for me to tackle at the moment when there are a billion things screaming my name. there is no pretty cleaning schedule on my fridge or chore list. just which thing has to get done today or else).  blog posts are always getting spun & evolving in my head but when i sit down to write anything, whether at 4 am or 1pm when everyone should be sleeping or elsewhere, i am inevitably interrupted. so hold on world... there is a whole lot of back logged thoughts yet to be written & caught up on particularly from this very fast paced, steep learning curve we find our family on. so much learning, so much growing, so much grace, so much God.

but as a bonifide "doer" kind of a personality, not being able to finish a task has been a difficult reality to accept. we live in a construction zone, both literally & figuratively. we're not done building character into our kids or cementing Godly values in our home or cultivating the Presence the way we'd like to or keeping that unruly attitude in check. what's worse is that when you live in a construction zone, physically or metaphorically, you are always stepping on nails or trying to come up with solutions for seemingly "no win" situations for that hole in the wall that you don't want anyone else to see because you would never want anyone to assume that this is the way your house always is or will stay. construction is uncomfotable. not seeing anything through to completion is super challenging for me. the Church isn't finished. our home isn't finished. our family isn't finished. my marriage isn't finished. i'm not finished. when all i want so badly is to finally get to hold up a beautiful masterpiece that i've worked so hard for.

but i started to change my attitude about construction zones in my life when i began to see that i am called to change & construction. i am called to the undone things in life. so no use in running the other direction every time i was beyond frustration with a particular task. i realized i was far to preoccupied with the end product & could not embrace the process that would eventually, one day, get me there. embracing the process is challenging for a neat freak because, well, it's sticky & dirty & it smells & it's full of constant interruptions & perceived set backs.

but i found encouragement from the story of the little children running to Jesus with their sticky fingers & dirty faces to interrupt Him... and He let them. He let them interrupt His important kingdom preaching & teaching because they were His kingdom work. they were the whole point. so, if the God of the universe doesn't mind or even encourages the little children to interrupt Him, then how much more willing should i be? the pigs on the other hand should learn to wait their turn. :)

there is also value in "practicing the Presence" even amongst the many interruptions that may occur over a day. it's like working a muscle. and i for one am getting lots of practice keeping my eyes on Him & cultivating the Presence despite goats at my door & emails binging in my inbox & children running through the house covered in swamp muck. i've spent way to long seeing interruptions or a chaotic home as a sin when it is assuredly not. it's just young family life. and here too i can find a sweet spot in the Spirit if i chose to embrace interruptions & all the mess that comes with life construction.

"without oxen a stable stays clean, but you need a strong ox for a large harvest."

 - proverbs 14:4

home on the range.

we're slowly growing our little home on the range in preparation for moving to the farm {at the moment we have moved the animals to my mum's farm until we sell our house}.

this weekend my mom, dav, evie & i got up at 4:30am to make it to the annual 'fur & feather fair'. the kids were champs! even though it was pretty chilly & a ton of walking, my auntie & cousins kept us company as we picked out a few more things to add to their brood.
so meet the new additions!

my mum's pick... silverlace wyandotte pair.
meet beau & belle. we 're hoping they'll brood us a few more chicks to add to the flock.

beau & belle

the chickies... at $2 a chick who could resist! we got plymouth rock, easter eggers (they lay blue & green eggs) & a few more to add our chick count to 11.

seven...six' distant cousin

and my favourite purchase so far... the muskovy trio.
meet humphrey bogard, hepburn & henriette. they are collecting their eggs already to brood our first batch of meat ducks.

and our piglets & stud pig arrive in june.
so far we have churchill (in honour of winston churchill) picked out as our big daddy pig's name. we have two sow piglets to name as well. any suggestions for the girls?

and that's all for now. more additions to come. :)