a few weeks ago, we decided we weren’t getting enough demolition in our lives, so instead of going to the Sky Island party that everybody was talking about, Jenny, Rev and I, with assistance from Kay, Amber and Alan (who all took on child-care and fetch-quests in support of the project), took apart the cottage bathroom, and put it together again.

here are the results of my 10pm tile-laying activity:

and Jenny’s committment to turning the bathtub tiles Actually White, and the walls a nice mild blue:

(here’s a midway-through photo on that front):

(including the mysterious grout otter, center of the top row)

and Rev’s shelf-building activities over the previous weeks:

and Gawain’s persistent desire to be in the middle of things:

we are all very pleased with the new look, and the nice cleanable tile floor, and the massively improved storage situation. there’s one more shelf to install, and a few small paint touch-ups to take care of, and then the project is well and truly finished.

i still intend to write a photo post about our spiffy new bathroom remodel, and also to write up the continuing progress of the Mahazda house demolition project. but first things first.

kitties!

meet Tybalt:

and Anactoria:

Tybalt is a 7 year old male orange tabby. He’s gregarious, soft and sweet, and has a very firm sense of entitlement about things like going outside at night, and sleeping on top of my closet.

(note the cat.)

he found himself at the abq East Side animal shelter because he came from a home with “too many cats.” he is a little bit of a brat, but a lot more of a lover, and is taking very well to the farm. he’s been inside every building (except the dog-guarded barn, that I know of). he tells me, he’s a house cat; he belongs in houses. and sheds, greenhouses, trailers, and yurts. also gardens. he’s right at home.

Anactoria is considerably more shy, and i think probably was not allowed outside in her previous life. she is a one year old brown tabby, a tiny long-haired cat. she chose me, at the shelter, staring avidly at me while i interacted with other cats, and then flirting with me when i petted her. she’s cuddly, lively and bouncy, unless she doesn’t know you, in which case she is under the bed. i think enough time will probably gentle that habit out of her.

she and Tybalt are getting along well with one another. and i love waking up in the morning covered in cats. though it does make it pretty hard to want to get out of bed.

As most of you know, we bought the house next door earlier this year. We’ve been talking our way through the project, waiting to start on the work until we had finished wall-building season for the year, because there are really only so many work days in a year, and we had to focus. That has paid off; the wall is in much better shape, and we all feel good about tackling Mahazda now.

“Mahazda” is Lojban for Hill House. Lojban is one of Alan’s interests, and the house formerly belonged to Mr Hill, so it was a good place to pull a name from. Now we have houses in three languages; the primary dwelling on the farm is the sunflower Cottage, Tristan’s other place is Caer Aisling (which is Gaelic), and now Mahazda. (our cars are multilingual, too: Simon, Orlando, Lily, and Dietrich. we name things, around here.)

Mahazda is as much project as it is house. it is not presently fit for human occupation. we are going to gut it and start over, working from the existing footprint to create an interior that delights and satisfies us all, and serves many uses. it’s a large space; the livingroom and kitchen are both generously proportioned, and as things currently stand, there are two mid-size and one small bedrooms (we might make the small room into an office, possibly), a garage, a decent-size bathroom, and a back room of more or less laundry-room size. the final designation of any of these spaces is still an open conversation; we are going to gut the house, and then re-imagine it from its empty echo, place of all potential.

so we started on the demolition! a few weeks ago, we went in and ripped out the super-toxic scary carpets, and removed the doors to get them out of the way. then last weekend, we tackled demolition in earnest. ceilings and wall plaster, here we come!

standing in the kitchen, looking through the hall into the livingroom:

livingroom detail, mid-demo. that fake arch is totally coming out. it creates the appearance of divided space, which is the opposite of what we want.

the day’s big discovery: the exterior walls of the two main bedrooms and the bathroom are adobe.

we found out that the house was originally one largish adobe room, with no interior divisions. we found where the windows used to be, on what are now interior east walls in both rooms. plumbing and electricity were pretty clearly added at a later date. this accounts for why those two rooms only have one outlet each, and that outlet is located in the center of the east wall — where the window used to be.

the wall between the south bedroom and the bathroom is made of layers of boards sandwiched together with plaster.

DIY house, anyone?

Jenny and Kat, midway through the livingroom ceiling. we also discovered that the electrical wiring is one giant old-school fire-hazard, and somebody was very lucky this place never burnt down.

same moment, view from the other side of the room:

meanwhile Tristan single-handedly tackled the back bedroom ceiling, and some of the wall plaster.

Alan, looking a little like a horror movie character, in the light from the south bedroom window.

discovering that the back of the house is adobe also helped clarify why this is happening in the south bedroom:

floor joists in old adobe houses are rarely actually attached to the walls of the foundation, but instead rest on pilings of some kind (a friend of ours just found out that some of her floor joists had been resting on old coffee cans. really increases your faith in the floor, doesn’t it?) that appears to be the case in this instance, too. well, we don’t know about the coffee can yet. though i wouldn’t be shocked. i’ll let you know what we discover when we rip the floors out!

coffee-can floor patch in the hallway (for instance)

livingroom progress

the ceiling in the north bedroom, which is part of the original adobe house, showed substantial evidence of remodelling. it is unlike any other ceiling construction in the house.

Alan and Kat swing on the chicken wire to pull the ceiling down on our own heads. this was actually pretty fun.

Alan and Kat in motion, cleaning up.

old-school fuse box:

the view in the livingroom window

the invasion of the wheelbarrows:

Quote of the Day:
“i’ll just get that other wheelbarrow out of the bathroom.”

the escalating evidence of process:

we’ll get a dumpster by the January work party, and evict all this trash at once.

the full photo set is here.

I wrote the following article in 2009, for an anthology relating to sacrifice in modern paganism, which I now think will probably never be published. Anthology notwithstanding, I still find it a strong piece of writing, and it goes some ways towards articulating what we do here, and why, with regard to raising our own meat animals. As this has come up recently in conversation, I thought it might be useful and informative to reprint the article here.

Sacrificing our Innocence
Fall 2009

Kat Heatherington
Sunflower River Farm

I spent the morning killing poultry. I have blood on my jeans and my skin, and haven’t eaten yet today because I still have the smell of wet feathers in the back of my mouth. This is the fourth animal slaughter I’ve participated in since we bought our land and settled into organic farming a bit over two years ago. It doesn’t get any less significant with repetition, but it does get easier, both physically—I am getting better at doing it—and emotionally—I no longer spend as many days processing how I feel about it. I am not deeply distressed to discover blood speckling my work jeans, and the feel of a dead bird jerking in my hands while his warm blood flows over my fingertips does not haunt me the way I once thought it might. I’ve achieved acceptance, movement into balance with my choices and the necessities of raising livestock on a small farm.

The act of harvesting our own animals is a weighty one, profoundly significant to our spirits. We balance ourselves between the need for this, and the doing of it, and sacrifice a small part of ourselves each time we take the lives of animals we have raised and cared for. Yet with each doing of it, the importance of it, for ourselves as spiritual beings and for the earth in whose harmony we strive to walk, is reified and magnified. This work is hard. It is very, very real. And it is deeply important.

I live this way because I feel very strongly that I must act with the greatest possible responsibility for the earth around me. I must act in accordance with my ecosystem, or I am damaging the land I live with, the land that made me, the land I am made from. If we are all Her children, it behooves us to respect our Mother and treat Her as best we possibly can. Even those of us raised in the post-industrial consumer wasteland of contemporary America, as I was. Perhaps particularly us, given that we consume 80% of the world’s resources.¹ And that includes acknowledging myself (and all humans) as one node in a web of life—not the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, but one strand in a very complex network, whose actions impact the lives and well-being of many others in that network.

So, being a child of the Earth, and being a person to whom it is clear that our culture needs to change direction, it is imperative that I act upon that conjunction of belief and reality, and do my level best to change the world we live in, to create, every day, with every step, a world that is better than the one I grew up in, to create a world that could possibly survive what our culture is doing to it right now, and still be someplace future generations will want to inherit.

So, what does acting in harmony with my ecosystem mean? For me, it means not driving unless I absolutely can’t do what I need to get done any other way. It means using the most ecologically friendly materials available for every project I undertake. It means going light on my electrical use, natural gas use, and use of every other natural resource that I consume. In particular, that means using as little water as possible—recycling greywater, saving and using rainwater in the garden, and installing a composting toilet in the house, to avoid the appliance that wastes the most water of any device in the average household.²

And it means eating within my foodshed. Eating organic, locally produced foods whenever possible—which turns out to be pretty much all the time, except at restaurants. It means eating sustainably-raised meat, meat that was raised with consideration for the life of the animal it came from. Of course, vegetarianism is another ethical way to approach the question of factory farming atrocities, but it’s not nutritionally appropriate for everyone. Sustainable organic farming is another solution. And our community’s ability to eat well is significantly increased by the food we grow and raise, that others around us can participate in growing, raising, harvesting and eating.

On my small farm, we raise chickens for meat and eggs, turkeys and rabbits for meat. All our poultry is cage-free, raised without hormones or antibiotics, as healthy and as well in-balance with the natural rhythms of the animals’ lives as we can manage. We make sure our animals aren’t too crowded, have plenty of room to run around and do whatever they enjoy doing—that the turkeys have room to fly, that all the poultry get regular “play days” out of the barnyard where they can scratch and peck around on our full acreage, that they have access to natural foods and their pens are clean and well cared for.

We are responsible for each of our animals having a healthy, strong life with us, and also over generations. Neither they nor we choose our relationship; it is constrained by the shared history of our two species. We as individuals choose to raise chickens, yes—but we humans domesticated chickens thousands of years ago, and in doing so, we entered into a kind of compact with them. They give us what we need: eggs and meat, and sometimes feathers—and we give them what they need: enough room to run around and fly, good natural feed, others of their kind to socialize with, protection from other predators besides ourselves, continuance as a species. The best life that we are capable of providing for them, both within their lifetimes, and over many generations for them. And within that constraint, we can make both of us better, on our own individual terms.

Industrial animal production has focused on making an animal better suited to the needs of that production system, without giving anything back to the animal. They are bred to be of uniform size, for faster processing, quickly growing, for a quicker profit. But they are not given healthy conditions, or bred to be healthy and strong, and they are therefore that much less healthy for us to eat. We damage the animals as individuals, the compact our species implicitly made with them by domesticating them for our own use, and ourselves as predators of those animals, by allowing industrial agriculture to grow them for us under the conditions that they choose. It also creates an unbalanced relationship between humans and the animals we eat. In the industrial system, we use animals, but don’t give them anything back. Not the respect due another living creature, not whatever dignity they are capable of experiencing as creatures, not happiness, not freedom. As small organic farmers, we do our best to give our animals all of those things. Respect for their needs, protection for their weaknesses, the dignity due to other living beings, wild or domestic, with whom we share this Earth, and the freedom to live the best lives they and we can co-create for them.

Our species’ compact with the species we raise, comes also from the reality that we are predators, and they are among our prey. So long as we choose to eat meat, we are predators, and the act of raising meat animals and processing them ourselves puts us in a position to examine and embrace that animal reality of our own human psyches. Because we can examine it, we are in a position to take responsibility for that relationship, and for us, on our particular small farm, one of the things that means is recognizing the sacrifice that we have raised our animals to make.

We try to give them the best death we know how to, as well. Fast, and as painless as possible. Like raising animals has been, this is a learning process for us, and we have had to learn how to forgive ourselves, for doing it wrong, and causing pain to an animal when we were unable to swiftly and decisively slit the throat as we had planned. Our first experience killing livestock was deeply traumatic for all of us, partially because it was traumatic for the animals. Over the course of that day, we learned a lot. The second one was not half so bad as the first, and the third was better still, in terms of the amount of pain the animal went through before brain-death. It took a lot to recover from, to forgive ourselves for not doing it right the first time. But we managed, not least because we have found as swift and painless a way to do it as possible, where brain-death occurs within seconds. That matters. And our spirituality helps us move forward, into forgiveness and then into the next steps, understanding ourselves as children of the Divine, even when our actions are very imperfect. We have not let those imperfections deter us from our path, but taken them as painful learning experiences, so that we can do better next time. And we have. And then, it turns out, we still have to forgive ourselves for doing it right. For killing an animal. For the blood running down our fingers. The act is one of self-sacrifice, and forgiveness of the part of ourselves that is capable of this action, even as we understand its necessity, even as the animal gives up a much greater sacrifice.

We begin with ceremony, always. We cast a circle, light quarter candles and then perform this small ceremony:

Mother Hecate, Queen of the Night,
accept this offering,
a child of your own for children of your own,
a short life for long ones.
His death is our sustenance.
Take him into your dark embrace
and make his passing an easy one.

We each take turns evoking each deity or spirit, so if one of us evokes Hecate one time, someone else does it the next time. This way our roles continue to expand and grow, as our understanding and feeling for this process does, as well.

We’re sharing the two most important moments in life with most of our animals: birth and death. If we’re not there at the birth of each one (often enough they come to us a bit later in life than that), we are there for their passing, and it is a powerful experience for both the predator and the prey. It’s considerably more than just meat: it’s a relationship. A covenant we have with them: to raise them well, and care for them, and to kill them well, honoring and thanking them for the sacrifice they are making for our livelihood.

Spilling blood is a release of energy no matter what, so by offering it in ceremony as a sacrifice for the abundance and prosperity of our farm, we give that blood energy a focus, an intentional direction in which to flow. This prevents it from doing or becoming something that we don’t want on our land, and it makes use of the energy we are creating anyway, and it honors the spirit of our animals. “A short life for our long ones, a child of Your own for children of Your own.” ³

We also sacrifice of the part of ourselves that is innocent of this contract between farmer and livestock, between human and animal, predator and prey, that honors life without spilling blood (or is removed from such spillage on our behalf). A lot of people these days go through life without having to consider their role as predators in this ecosystem. Yet predators we most assuredly are, whether we hunt our meat, raise it, buy it at the farmer’s market, or buy it in styrofoam at the grocery store, having outsourced the raising and killing of it to another organic farmer, or to a corporation with questionable ethics.

At the end of the day, I have a lot of sympathy for our live poultry. I let the hens out of their yard, to roam the property for the rest of the daylight, scratching up bugs and seeds and generally enjoying themselves. Though they live in a large open enclosure, they love their days out in the garden, which they get whenever we can supervise them. Their yard is protected against predators, but the expanse of our farm is not, and it’s not particularly well fenced yet, either. A lot of predators live in our neighborhood—coyotes, dogs, hawks, owls, skunks, raccoons—and without good fences, our young livestock guardian dog can’t patrol our property unsupervised, so everybody lives in the large, well-fenced barnyard, and enjoys the garden and fields whenever we are home to keep them safe. And they put themselves to bed at night, returning to their coop as the sun drops toward the west, accepting our protection and the life they have with us. We protect them from every predator but ourselves: part of our compact. The irony of the situation is not lost on us.

We take a few days to recover from the slaughter, each time we do this. We’re kinder and more compassionate to each other, ourselves, our other animals–and we do strive for kindness and compassion every day. But a slaughter really highlights it. It makes us gentle. We go easy on each other. We spoil the cats and our barn dog positively rotten, let them walk all over us, pet the rabbits, croon to the chickens. We’re more vulnerable, because we have opened our spirits to this interaction with death, because we have given death to another creature, and allowed ourselves to have a relationship with it.

As a primal force, death touches our lives, deeply and continually; we cannot look away from it. We don’t hold it at a remove. We’d rather walk the path of our ancestors, and do it ourselves, cleanly, with love. Killing animals, blunt survival at its most immediate, pulls our ancestors close to us, reminds us of the parts of them that live inside ourselves. There is a way in which their hands guide us through this, and our hands reach back through the past, through the fabric of our lives, and take the shape of those who have gone before.

Touching death, we walk hand in hand with our farming and pioneering forebears. And, living this way, we don’t allow the atrocities of factory farming to be committed in our names. We’d rather have a hard day, that wounds our spirit a little bit, that we have to recover from, doing difficult, dirty work with our own hands, with knives that we have consecrated for this purpose, than participate in a system that fails to honor our relationship with these animals, and fails to take seriously the needs of the animals themselves. Corporate agriculture commits their atrocities at a remove, distant from our backyards. But they do it, and they do it with our permission, every time we buy a chicken from them. I can’t do that. I can’t buy that chicken, I can’t participate, even economically, in the system that allows that. I would rather get blood on my own hands. I would rather spend seven hours on a cold November morning, swiftly thrusting a boning knife through the jugular arteries of turkeys and chickens that I have raised with my own hands, fed and talked to every day, walked in my garden with, enjoyed the whimsy and silliness and quirky personalities of every day for many months or even years. Birds I know personally, have a relationship with. Birds to whom I have given the best life I am able to give—birds whose lives I honor and respect, both during their daily lives, and in death, in their sacrifice for our well-being.

This, then, is our animal sacrifice: the sacrifice of the part of ourselves that holds itself apart from the predatorial animal being that we are. And the blood sacrifice of creatures we love, to sustain ourselves, our friends, and our community, and transform the world, one day at a time, into the best place we can make it.

Notes:

1. http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/236

2. The Humanure Handbook, Joseph Jenkins. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2005. Pages 16-17

3. Some language in this ceremony came originally from our friend Gaelan, at Frijolito Farm. Many thanks to him for the inspiration his words provided, upon which we based our ceremony.

i hope once a month works out for y’all as a good interval for reading this blog, because that appears to be all i can manage by way of updating it.

October went by in a blur of activity and travel. We were fortunate to have an excellent intern, Chris, with us through the fall, to help us keep caught up with the daily farm tasks. suddenly, the garden is down for the winter, we are finally almost out of the fresh tomatoes in which we’ve been more or less drowning since July, and for the third year in a row, bugs ate all my fall-crop seedlings before we could. we did get some peas, but the greens didn’t make it up. i have got to figure out some new strategy for winter greens gardens.

this artichoke, which we grew from seed this year, flowered:

and we harvested the last of the corn and beans.

we also harvested the turkeys. here they are on their last day, browsing the garden and enjoying themselves:

one handsome Spanish Black tom, showing off:

turkey processing went exceptionally smoothly this year. we had great help from the community of people who come together to participate in our animal harvests, and to help with the processing of their own thanksgiving turkey.

we also had fewer turkeys than the last couple years, because of some barnyard calamities related to rats in the spring. we will be cautious not to create an opportunity for a repeat experience next spring. last weekend, we ended up so far ahead of the schedule, that the last batch of volunteers helped out, instead of processing, by cleaning and mending the coop, activities that don’t usually get done until a week or two after thanksgiving.

we’re looking forward to celebrating the holiday with our usual full house potluck tomorrow. more photos will follow!

this year has been on fast-forward.

autumn is late and warm so far. and very busy. the trees are only just beginning to turn, though we are more than halfway through the month, and we have not had a freeze yet. that in and of itself is not hugely unusual, but it is normally cooler at night by now. i’m worried that we’ll have another warm, dry winter, and the bugs will proliferate instead of dying off, and we won’t get the snowpack in the high country that we need to survive next summer.

but what more can we do about it? we keep on living, day by day.

cornstalks dry in the garden (note the green of the cottonwoods in the background):

echinacea in the garden — this one was a volunteer.

here’s that lovely white flower that fluffs itself up in the back fields each autumn:

and this artichoke, which i grew from seed this year, is about to flower! we’ll let this one flower and go to seed, so that the plant is stronger for next year, and can produce multiple flowers, which we will then harvest to eat. i can’t wait! fresh artichokes!

we’re still harvesting tomatoes, green beans, dry beans, peppers, and chard. we also put in a fall crop of sugar snap peas this year, which are now setting up:

pretty, aren’t they?

a view of my yurt from the bridge toward the back. this is looking toward the front of the property & Isleta Blvd. note that gorgeous woodpile that two visiting wwoofers put up early this month!

the lovely woodpile close up:

they also put in this border on the path into our pasture, which was sort of falling off the edge of the ditch.

early October is Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta. it attracts people from all over the world, and hundreds of hot air balloons float over the city for a week or so. even this far down in the Valley, we can see them:

and because i know you all love him as much as I do, here is Tattersall, chillin’ in the pirate fort of an autumn afternoon.