The Goat Question or ‘Who Should Wipe Granny’s Bottom?’
Would you, could you…milk a goat? While small is certainly beautiful, it can also be relentless and constraining. The re-embrace of place-bounded community, sensitive to local ecosystems, probably requires re-enchantment and the re-sacralization of every day activities and ways of being. It will be hard for us to become once again rooted, ‘small’ and also happy, unless we can recover what anthropologists call ‘participatory consciousness’ – a cosmic sense of the connectedness of all things.
Like many people in North America, we have moved into a house with lots of grass. We have inherited two small lawn tractors and ended buying an old Ford 8N tractor built in 1947 along with a ‘bush hog’ rotary mower – and all to keep the forces of nature at bay. In the summer, I spend every other weekend trying to keep a few acres of grass open and g…
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