Things can change so quickly. One moment you think it's just a single lamb and the next you are holding a twin. Or, a healthy little lamb can become ill overnight - sometimes with treatable but gross maggots and sometimes with things too complicated to fix. Sheep escape and destroy a garden. These are the unexpected realities of life. At times, they are relatively minimal and easily absorbed. Other times, I find myself reeling from things over which I have no control and grappling to find some peace and understanding, with the hope of getting to acceptance.
 |
| love thy brother |
I have never struggled with letting cats outdoors, probably because of the way I was raised - which was with cats always being outdoors. Killers. The better the killer, the better the cat (bar birds of course). So, when I hesitated to let Loki and Odin out last spring, it was interesting to think about why I had reservations this time around. Yes, there were the usual road and predator concerns. But, I think what was really going on was my desire to prevent death (for the cats more than for their potential prey). In the end, the cats went out; they have been out now for six months and earning their keep in the rodent population department. Loki is far more productive than Odin, and neither one seems too interested in the feathered friends (which I have stopped feeding...felt too twisted to keep it up when they went outside). They are happy and proud little animals now that they are out in the world exploring. They have attitude and a sense of worth, I think. If I had kept them in, who knows what kind of neurotic beasts I would have created.
Learning to let go, as I wrote in an earlier post, is something that the sheep have helped me to learn to do...and the cats, too.
Somedays, I am pushed to apply these learnings to life outside the Salty Ewe, and in those moments I find myself especially grateful for everyone and everything in my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment