The Elixir and the Consequence

Goat Chronicle 1

When you hold a glass or goblet of elixir, of the healing kind, as colostrum is, there is a price. It seems to go along with the principle, any principle, when it is grounded in truth and carries the capacity to heal. “Your medicine is where you are,” for instance, sounds good in the abstract, something to nod at. Easily dismissed as hyperbole.

But in practice, this principle carries a price, or, more accurately, a consequence. For all in the world is built on a lie, and any truth that leaks in, rises from the earth or emerges into one’s consciousness, demands something. It requires first listening. Then a choice: the choice to trust, the choice to act. And then, the capacity to understand, through appreciation, just how deeply these principles go.

Almost as if a path always exists beneath our feet, only waiting to be remembered. To be revealed. Emergent like fungus after rain, or moss swelling green along stone, soft, persistent, inviting as a fairy tale. (The OG four):

The Goat Chronicles is such a fairy tale. Small truths emerge through my smallholding, through my family of goats. Until recently, we were 15 in number, now 20, and soon a few more.

Over the last 18 years, the herd has been a field of learning. Foremost, family relationships evolve as the seasons do, in alignment with ‘right relationship’, stewardship, ‘right livelihood’, love, power, and yes, wisdom. Wisdom, a path walked barefoot. Trusting the process. Trusting the herd to do what the herd will always do, move in succession toward health, toward herd-happiness, toward relating to me, their shepherd, as I learn. Truth as medicine.

Here, in the morning light slanting through the wet, glossy needles of the Ponderosa Pine in the Jemez Mountains, Hemish, “the people” in Towa, the name the Jemez Pueblo have carried and given to this land long before any colonial mapmakers arrived. I hold the glass in my hand. The thick golden elixir. A gift from doe to kid, a signal to health for its entire sojourn. A gift now shared with me, post-cancer and traditional treatment, which left me perpetually ragged and sore. I drink it open-throated, hungry.

My body knows what it needs before I do. If I’m ravenous for something, I trust that hunger. When I trick my system with sugars and fats, I feel the difference, a hunger of habit, of guilt.

In recovery, I’ve tended to both the habits and the deep concerns. Healing has come staggered and nuanced, like a tide that advances and recedes in equal measure.

Lately, it felt like I’d hit a plateau. So many small complexities working in tandem: My lack of sleep from worry over the goats and myself. The weight of prolonged scarcity, a seven-year drought. The ache of need, the fear around funding.

It will rain. I am preparing for rain.

My nervous system, it seems, was left dialed to “on”, the highest setting. Even as my thoughts settle, my attention softens, my body remains electric. Attuned to every disturbance: a stay turned unwelcome, unmet expectations, both given and received. The old giving way to the emergent new.

I wasn’t getting better.

Then I landed home. The mountains of my youth, and the youth of my father and grandparents.
My body knew before I did.

That first post-rain walk along the canyon’s edge, tiny shards of quartz glistening from soft volcanic ash, this ground glass of a landscape, magnetic, waking something childlike in me. Wonder stirring again. Memory reawakened.

I see now how this place holds me, how place is us, and we are the places that have held our footsteps, our stories, our silence.

And the colostrum, when I drink it? It’s like eggnog in texture, but thicker, warmer. Slightly sweet, slightly herbal, as if an ancient herb called ambrosia were steeped in cream. It bathes my lips and mouth in a micro-layer of fat. Like butter. Like memory. Like something I’d forgotten I knew.

Tonight, I will sleep all night soundly for the first time in five years. I will dream. I will be pain-free. Inflammation reduced to a whisper. I will wake tired, and yet renewed. My energy will return. So will the flexibility I thought I’d lost. My hunger will shift from craving to nourishment.
My digestion will ease. All this from one tall glass of the freshest raw colostrum, from a new mother goat.

My medicine is truly where I am.
My medicine is my goats.

It was always part of the plan. The first four goats to teach me their ways, followed by bucks, were selected and traveled for in California. A younger doe was chosen to carry the fertility that the elders might not have. A small beginning, but it held weight. The decision to name my bus after them. LaLa and The Go-Goats. To venture. To stake a claim in this journey as a natural farmer.

“You’re going to be famous,” one of them said. A member of the LaLa Gardens Cooperative artists’ residence, I was leaving behind. I was leaving that, and a garden I had stewarded for over 20 years. My home.

At LaLa, I taught natural farming. I planned to take that work on the road, to stop in places, to teach as a mobile farmer, goats in tow. I had a plan: To make soil in the trailer, drawing on what I knew of inoculants and layering, of slow-heat composting.

But I hadn’t accounted for the weight of soil. The weight of goats. The full bay of equipment and electric fencing. The bus itself, a schoolie diesel, 450 engine, the little engine that could, and did… scale mountain passes at five miles per hour, only needing tow assistance back out of the sharp descent into the What Festival in Saratoga, Wyoming, my first destination for LaLa and the Go Go Goats.

I was leaving the realm of ownership and entering one of mobility, of moving without a home base. My garden would be wherever I was. And I would be in constant negotiation with others, with landholders, hosts, and communities. Agreements were unspoken, half-formed, often revealed only in the tension of unmet expectations and clashing conditions, on both sides.

I would come to learn about power dynamics I hadn’t seen. Dynamics I’d been blind to as a landowner in relation to guests, interns, residents, and neighbors. As I tried to be a community asset through re-visioning and restructuring, I encountered fault lines I didn’t know existed, in me, around me. I learned that those fractures cannot be erased. They must emerge to be faced, rectified, and slowly rebalanced.

And remediation? It takes time. It takes failure. It takes feedback, redundancy, and many eyes, ears, and voices. I came to see that my view of the world, and of myself in it, was not what I thought. It was not immune to vagaries, projections, judgments, shadow, or deep subconscious promptings and eruptions.

Once again, my body knew before I did. That I had cancer. That I was going to fail.
That I would have to return to the ruins of my life, to face the fault lines I had helped shape through misaligned action and force.

I would have to fall apart before I could begin the slow work of integration. This time on a simpler foundation. One earned through listening. One built through healing. One not past or future dreaming but of very personal and present conditions. Pain was a good reminder of the present and what it contained, reflected.

I stepped into lessons born of the animals, of husbandry, of the conflicts that rise in nested relationships: land, spirit, community, and physical limitations and deep loss. This is a lived experiment. One that continues. An arc that bears. An arc that reveals.

Lesson after lesson after lesson.

Welcome to the Chronicles.