Twelve Sheep

LESSON 1

We must take a stake in the future

We try and live simply but the world is complex. It has always been this way.

It is early autumn and I am standing in the sheep shed of our farm. Before me stand twelve sheep. They are, to be precise, twelve hoggets, the name we give to maiden females. These twelve ladies are mine. I have bought them from my parents with the money I earned from my words, from my books. I am a shepherd for the first time in my life. I am in the twilight of my youth and the budding of my middle age. I am older than Christ when he died and the same age as Buddha when he attained enlightenment. Both figures have walked beside me for so many years now. They have been part of my continuance in ways I think that count for some good, though I'm no sage.

I've known sheep for seven years now. Seven years as a farmhand, seven years as a midwife and seven years, at times, as an undertaker. It has been a long apprenticeship. I came home to Ireland from Australia to try my hand at being a writer, but in the process, I became a farmer. It happened naturally: it began with the sheep. It has been a sojourn into the earth and its creatures, albeit one in which I have never been an owner, never before as a farmer in my own right.

I have bought the twelve animals for many reasons but perhaps the one, the most important, is that they are a stake in the future but sheep also challenge you to live in the now. I like this mission. I must be ready for both situations, and as I look at the girls in front of me, I come to think that this is the right thing for me to do. The right journey to undertake.

Sheep are earthly creatures. They eat, they live, they die: they are wholly of this world. The sheeping business is part of this journey of life. Our work with the animals provides food for the people of the cities and towns of this world; their wool, though not of much monetary value to us, provides the raw material for clothes, for warmth in these cold times.

The girls will live in our fields; they have run with our blue Texel ram and come to be in lamb. It is this journey that interests me. This journey from youth to motherhood. The coming of the lambs will drop life on me and maybe there will be a wisdom in that. A learning in that. I am a man in search of new life: it will be brought from the wombs of these creatures. In the lambs, I set my aims. They will be my goal, and their passage to this world my prize.

I have worked cattle and horses but there is something that is calling me in these sheep. In their quiet nature upon this earth. In their nibbling over grass, their gentle walks upon our soil. The sheep give me calm; they ease a busy mind with their approach to the world. The sheep wants nothing more than to be a sheep and maybe I can learn something in that simple wish.

In working with sheep as I do now, I know that there will be labour. Hard work is not something I will shy away from. There will be feeding and probing. Dipping and shearing. All of this is the way of a shepherd. It is physical, intensive work. Work that demands a strong body or a body that is willing to be put through its paces. To work with animals needs a factor of strength and perseverance. Of course there, too, will be life and death. And perhaps in some queer way, heaven and hell in the days that come.

Though the work is only now beginning, I can say that these sheep have already saved me. They have brought me back from an edge. Before the twelve, I was suffering from what I can only call a fatigue, one that was perhaps soulful as much as physical. For six months before the sheep, I was empty and worn out. I had finished a book and found myself spent. There was, I reasoned, no more to say; perhaps I had said it all already. What do writers do when the words will no longer come? I did not know. It was a new threshold, a dark threshold.

I battled a tiredness such as I had not felt in many long years, and though I slept, I could not rest. My wife called it burnout; I called it a soul tiredness. I tried to write book after book but nothing came and then the stories dwindled down to a trickle and the well, as I had known it to be before, so full and overflowing, was dry and empty. It made me sad for the first time in a long time. It was not a depression, a dog I had danced with before, but there was melancholy and it wore me out all the same. The sadness felt harder than depression, as it bred a loneliness in my body and my mind that I did not want or like. The sadness and tiredness sapped away my creativity and for a writer that was like losing a part of myself, a much needed and valued limb. I did not sleep well. I did not rest well.

I lived for a time in this vast chasm. My wife and I bought a house. I helped a friend through the deaths of his young twin daughters after a tragic accident. And I thought seriously about leaving the land, of returning to a city and becoming an urban person once again. I missed the challenge of the city: in the quietness of the countryside, in which I had heretofore found inspiration, now I found nothing. It was a hard time, my empty time.

After a period, I farmed and walked the earth and gradually slowed down my life and, in many ways, my soul too. I removed myself from unwanted social outings and began to meditate again on the nature of life. I thought of the bards of the land, from the English pastoral poet John Clare to the environmentalist Rachel Carson. I remembered Henry David Thoreau's great line from Walden: 'Live in each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.' There was something in that notion of 'the influence of the earth': maybe with this soul weariness I had not been in contact with her. I wondered if my own land could be a personal Walden, if I could truly claim my natural inheritance again after it seemed to be lost. To find or discover a personal Walden is to find the source of solace in a weary world. Home can be that place, a land of prisms through which we can see better our true inheritance. When we discover our personal Walden, we refract not just light but life itself.

One day, while reading, I came across a line by John Clare which said that he found the poems he was so beloved for in the fields and wrote them down. That struck me deeply and truly. Maybe the fields were the answer I was looking for? Clare knew something of sadness and longing, of belonging and not belonging. He had been hailed once as the great peasant poet and then cast aside when fashions changed in London, and he had ended his days in an asylum.

Clare, Thoreau and Carson; they spoke to me in new ways, and though their words are now old, I found fresh insight in them. I wondered in that time, and in the wondering, questions came. Into the living sea of waking dreams, as Clare put it, I found newness. The bards of the land were all in their quiet unhurried ways teaching me. In this space, I asked myself what I was doing here. It is, I think, a question we must all work out ourselves at some point in our lives. From the company director to the builder's labourer, we all face the question of whether we should maintain or change, if we should evolve or dissolve into something else. It was a time of great thought, a time when sadness went hand in hand with tiredness. Maybe in melancholy we can find new ways of looking at the world? I do not truly know.

After a time in the slowness, something happened. An idea came to me; the notion of the twelve sheep descended upon me. It came, as all great personal revelations do: quietly, without pomp or ceremony. It was not some Shakespearean apparition - there were no ghosts hovering over me, no Banquo moment. Rather it was an internal vision, I suppose, one where I could see myself with twelve sheep, walking upon the earth as a shepherd in the cathedral of nature. It came gently, like the blossom of the yellow winter rose had come to our garden when I was a child. It was a quiet hegemonic thought that refused to go away. Ideas, I think now, do not give, or rather are not given, their full virtue. A new idea is a thing to be treasured; it doesn't matter if it is original or not. A personal idea is new to oneself. That is all that counts. The idea, my idea, was a simple thing: to buy the twelve sheep, to follow their lives and to learn from them; and in that idea, I was reborn. The fatigue, the soul tiredness, lifted to be replaced with a fresh sense of purpose. My existence had an aim and my incompleteness was ended. I let go of my sadness. It was a new-found freedom. As Henri Nouwen, the writer, said: 'Most of us have an address but cannot be found there.'

I break from my story and look at these sheep, my sheep, again. These animals have been stapled to my heart, to the bulletin board of life; they have made the route home for me once more. Already, they have taken me out of myself or, rather, brought me back to myself. In the work of the sheep, I have a new way to work. I am in a new landscape, the tierra of my reunification.

Now, I fill a bucket of nuts and pour it into the small feeder in the shed and the twelve sheep come forward to eat. I rub their heads and feel their shoulders. They are twelve strong girls, twelve true addresses. One can judge a sheep by the meat upon its carcass. We grade them by looking at their straight backs and udders and make a mental picture of their features. I learned this way of seeing from my father, from our neighbours and from my studies. It is a new way of looking at an animal. A learned way that I have perfected in my apprenticeship.

Twelve is, I think,...