I bundled up this morning and set out for a run, only to discover that the incessant wind was funneling snow grit down the valley with a ferocity that made my attempt a fool’s errand. I could run, but only with my eyes shut tight.
On mornings like these, I long for relocation to a tropical paradise, an escape from the torment of a Montana winter. But I’m committed to the domesticated creatures at the Patch, to those species that can’t shelter and sustain themselves without human support. I’ve chosen to live with these beings, and that decision frames our relationship.
In fact, co-habitation is an essential element in having a relationship at all. If I could remove myself to the comforting winter warmth of the Sonoran Desert, my connection to the pigs at the Patch would suffer. I would not be hauling warm water to them during a fall blizzard, dreaming up mid-day snacks of roasted beets, or carefully altering the moisture level of their fermented grain. I couldn’t observe their mannerisms or their evolving alliances; I wouldn’t hear the shift in their vocalizations or scratch the crusty snow off their backs.
Proximity to domesticated species defined much of settler colonial American life, and that history can be seen in the ubiquity of phrases like “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” “two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” and “grab the bull by the horns.” These kinds of linguistic relics demonstrate the familiarity and understanding that come from daily interactions and close observation. They capture complex meanings that arise from the empathetic sharing of space.
To be “happy as a pig in clover” isn’t simply a state of contentment; it speaks of bliss, palpable ecstasy, and the feeling of fortuitous serendipity. “Busy as a bee”? That’s not just working hard. It is a determined focus for a larger goal, exerting on behalf of the collective, the swift communication with other foragers about the pollen flush along the river. “When pigs fly”? Not a chance, served up with a guffaw. Anyone who has spent time with pigs knows that verticality is not possible. Pigs will go in a multitude of directions, but UP is never on the menu.
When I raised dairy goats, getting Dottie onto the milking stand became its own routine. I would lean my head against her side and breathe her in, listen to the rumblings of her gut, and memorize the growth patterns of her hooves as I gazed downward. I recognized her caloric investment in lactation, knew the time needed for her udder to fill, saw how each squeeze of a teat expelled just one thin stream of milk, and savored her muscle-loosening let-down as her rich milk slowly filled the pail. On her ornery days when she kicked at the bucket and sloshed the precious liquid onto the ground, when I overfilled a jar, or when one of the kids knocked a glass over, I did feel like crying. Our physical intimacy, the spaces that Dottie and I shared, made my anguish over spilling her milk a visceral sensation.
Ongoing urbanization and the expansion of digital reality mean that fewer and fewer Americans understand that “crying over spilled milk” isn’t a toss-off comment about moving past a meaningless loss. Instead, the phrase reminds us that intense collaborative efforts – like getting milk into a pail – can lead to significant sadness and regret, that misfortunes are part of everyday life.
The loss of these cross-species bonds and the idioms they generated render contemporary language ever less expressive. I breathe and feel and eat with a panoply of creatures, so it saddens me that the humor and humility that result from being one-amongst-the-animals is experienced by ever few of us.
Such linguistic diminution is worthy of grief, but only within a historical context. This is no call to embrace an agricultural pastorale where we don ill-fitting overalls and cultivate root vegetables. Such a pastorale was peaceful only for the dominant land-grabbing emancipated few, and even then depended on the ceaseless toil of the marginalized. Animal-related idioms carry nuanced meanings derived from shared experience, but their prevalence in the English language also speaks to the cultural power of colonizing white folks. I doubt that the contemporary flattening of yeoman farmer idiomatic phrasing generates weepy nostalgia amongst the hundreds of dispossessed Native Nations, no longer able to live out relational connections with species in their traditional homelands.
My way of life is made possible by the rapacious removal of indigenous peoples from the American West and their subsequent confinement to remnant reservations, so my decision to share space with creatures other-than-human and my joy in such kinship comes at a stomach-turning cost. For me, those farmstead idioms offer evocative callbacks to significant relationships, to the rhythm of my days, to my meaning-making practices. That agricultural reality is a vivid part of my present, and requires a simultaneous recognition that many justifiably hear the settler-speak narrative of domesticated livestock as the embodiment of greed, heartlessness, and inhumanity.
Language carries kaleidoscopic meanings and continues to evolve as we move into ever more human-centric practices. We now “google” and “pull the plug,” we “blow a fuse” and “get our wires crossed.” But at the Patch, plants and creatures count as participants. At least for today, I’ll “put my hand to the plow” and work (yes, in my ill-fitting overalls) in a windy landscape that I share with a profusion of other life forms, committed to the daily-ness of being together in the same place…while simultaneously recognizing the rightful human inhabitants, evicted from these lands that I now call home.
Sourcing:
For anyone interested in issues of space and relationship that transcend settler colonial narratives, Enrique Salmón’s “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship” (Ecological Applications, Vol. 10, No. 5, Oct. 2000) offers both a distillation of indigenous practices – where “indigenous relationships with the natural world” are structured such that “indigenous people view themselves as part of an extended ecological family” – and an exploration of how that positionality is lived out in indigenous lands.
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