Goat Song

I have the opportunity to read a good number of books while I am away doing field work. Each week I bring a tall stack of books with me from the library and blast through them at a pace of one every day or two. So, I figured I would mention some of the ones I have enjoyed the most. The first is Goat Song.

Goat Song, by Brad Kessler, was just what I expected it to be, a romanticized snippet of goat farming.

 I thought it was super.

 A mixture of prose about nature, etymology (that’s right, words, not insects), animal companionship, milking, mating (enough to make you giggle), and cheesemaking. Even if you’re not interested in becoming a goat farmer, it is a pleasurably restful book to read. Bits of knowledge just waft off the page like steam from a warm cup of tea. I read it between batches of paperwork, I read it in a recliner, I read it by the pool, and in all of those places I felt neither a hurry to finish it, nor any boredom, just gladness that there was still more of it to read.

One of my favorite sections of the book was the author’s discussion of the word Pastoral and how it used to refer to the poetry and songs written by herders--songs often sang only for the livestock. I also learned about the different varieties of “singing” used in different cultures to get the attention of goat herds. Yodeling and kulning being two examples of high vocalizations to which all kinds of animals are more attentive. (This is where you go look kulning up on YouTube for a while...I'll be here when you get back).

Another of my favorite of Kessler's discussions is best summed up by this quote he used from the naturalist Henry Beston,

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time."  

 I think I appreciated it so much because I have been thinking about all of the things we don't know about the world around us. Just as when we meet a new person we can’t know their story just by looking at them, we really will never know how birds perceive the world, or whether the cows think we’re silly, or whether elephants pass down history. And I can’t help but wondering whenever I hear people looking for intelligent life in outer space (wondering why they are, that is). Not because I don’t think there is any, but because there is so much mystery right here, and just because the goats and raccoons aren’t communicating to us with radio signals doesn’t mean we have figured out what makes them tick. God has breathed life into all that breathe...I just wonder what it is like to be a goat or bird or zebra.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;  

or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,    

or let the fish in the sea inform you. 

Which of all these does not know    

that the hand of the LORD has done this? 

In his hand is the life of every creature    

and the breath of all mankind.

Job 12:7-10

From my field work
(nothing to do with the field work, or with goats, just a fascinating little creature).

Oatcake Fiction

 
    Nathanael and I enjoy reading to each other in the evening while dishes are being washed or pecans being cracked. Most of the time the book captivates us enough that we find other times to read, like having one person brush their teeth at a time, which is one of the current methods as we read Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald. It is best if there is some activity going on, because if we choose to read while just sitting, especially before bed, Nathanael needs to watch me carefully to make sure I am legitimately awake...actually even if I am the one reading, I may in fact be sleeping. During graduate school I read an entire chapter of Harry Potter to my roommate Lucy while she knitted, and despite the pages having been full of excitement I could not recall a single thing that had happened once I stood up to get ready for bed.
     Most of the books we read together are classic literature, and we especially enjoy the unabridged works of George MacDonald. His novels are the epitome of fiction which does not leave your brain to sit idly by, but engages it to play with philosophy, expand vocabulary, and envision situations and scenes rich with detail and feeling. I know some people who only read non-fiction, but I think they would appreciate a book such as Sir Gibbie, The Castle Warlock or Malcolm as evidence that edifying truth can often be more poignantly delivered through substantial fiction than through biography or historical reflection (though no author conveys the whole truth of course; some are much closer than others).

A friend gave us a neat little notebook where we record the books
we've read and movies we've watched...with ratings of course.

 
     Since George MacDonald was Scottish, his books are mostly set in Scotland with characters who enjoy Scottish fare, and quite often oatcakes. Nathanael would probably have made a good Scotsman back in the day. Of the 30% of Nathanael that is not water, about 60% is oats. We enjoy our oats in many forms around here. We nearly always have hot cereal, often have granola around for a snack, and sometimes we sprinkle oats into the crackers or sour dough bread. And whenever Nathanael needs to pack a lunch and we have no bread or convenient eaten-cold foods, he packs oatcakes and goes merrily on his way. Oatcakes are a plain food, and very healthy tasting, which I enjoy and Nathanael could eat every day. They're not junk food. I think they are an excellent medium for butter and jams, or savory spreads, but Nathanael delights in them just as they are with their roasted oat essence as the main attraction.

Scottish Oatcakes
from A Feast of Scotland by Janet Warren
1 1/3 cups Old Fashioned Rolled Oats
1/4 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt
1 Tablespoon of Butter or Lard (Oil would probably work out alright)
6 Tbs hot water (approximately)
A bit of flour to dust the rolling surface; any variety will do.

1. Mix the oats, soda, and salt together.
2. Melt butter and pour into the center, then add enough water to make a stiff dough. Stir briefly with a wooden spoon.
3. Turn the dough onto a flour dusted surface and knead well. Divide in half, and roll each into an 8-inch circle about a quarter of an inch thick.
4. Cook the oatcakes in a dry, heavy based frying pan. They should take about 3 minutes on each side and be golden brown and slightly crisp. Alternatively they can be baked at 325F (160C) for about 30 minutes.
Serve with butter, honey and marmalade for breakfast or with soup and cheese for lunch.



Do you read to each other in your family (or with your roommates)?
What's on your summer reading list?
I would love some good recommendations! (And yes, we read non-fiction too!)

Humming.

Nathanael and I don't get many pictures together, because we are more often taking pictures than posing for them. It's always good to have friends who also like to take pictures who will solve that problem for you. This picture was taken by a fantastic friend of ours who turns eight today. Nathanael and I were fresh out of the garden.

    I have found myself humming more lately. I told Nathanael I think I'm getting my hum back.

When I was little, I hummed all of the time. Songs I knew, songs I didn't know, songs I was making up, and hums that were just sparks flying from neurons to vocal cords without my taking notice of the song. But school, college, and attempts to not be disruptive to sisters and classmates squished it out of me a bit.

I fathom myself to be musical, but to tell you the truth I don't have any especial skill with instruments. I still occasionally sit at classical concerts (when they are free) and spend most of the performance wondering why I didn't work harder at practicing. But I don't particularly want a degree in music, or a different career path or fame...I think I just want a way to get the music out.

Do you ever wake up in the morning working your fuzzy brain as hard as you can to grasp the bits of your dreams you have not yet forgotten? I do just about every morning, and what I can recall usually has emotional significance with its own logic and reason, which is completely indescribable to anyone else. For example, a few weeks ago I awoke, cuddled up to Nathanael and told him, "You're my favorite standing still cow." And realizing how strange that sounded once I heard my words I attempted to clarify, "And I'm your favorite standing still cow."

I have no explanation.
It was just something my heart was overflowing to tell him.

Music is the like the converse of dreams. Instead of pictures, stories, and emotions trapped in our own beings unable to be tapped into by our loved ones; feelings are melted and softened until they flow into the ears who will hear.

The more I dream, and the more I am struck by music, the more I am convinced that each of these two mysterious aspects of life are laced with elements of the supernatural. That both joyful sleeping visions and ballads that make us cry are evidence of a creative God who has constructed us likewise. With so many thoughts, and so much imagination we cannot even get it all out.

And so I hum.
Because I cannot play the harmonica while I do dishes.
And because I cannot turn my dreams into movies.
Though they would make great ones. They would make you laugh, and cry, and make you wonder so many things.



(I cannot explain the photos accompanying this song....but perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate.)

Happy St. Patrick's Day 2011!

 Happy St. Patrick's Day to you, and Happy Birthday to my dear friend, graduate school roommate, and most faithful blog reader, Lucy.

 

Through a friend connection, who knew both of us had gotten our undergraduate degrees in Biology, Lucy and I became roommates for the last year-plus of graduate school. And despite the fact we probably both wondered, "What am I getting into?" when we agreed to be roommates, we had the time of our lives despite writing those theses (that really is the plural of thesis, even though it looks so wrong).

We made five varieties of cheesecakes in seven months, and ate them entirely ourselves.

We read the entire Harry Potter series to each other out loud. 

We watched little known films from around the world, and had our creativity inspired by Project Runway, America's Top Model, and Pushing Daisies. (Why they end that show!?) 

We survived Lucy's room being flooded/moldy for five months while the two of us crammed into my tiny bedroom; without any fights! 

We discovered loads of items left behind by previous apartment owners, some strange, and some useful...and many of which still stock my current kitchen.

We discovered the netipot, and that mouse repellent sacks are good for clearing congestion (turns out they were just bags of dried mint).

We composted, even though we lived in an apartment.

We took in a stray cat...for about a day and a half. (But we had big dreams for him.)

 We went sledding, went to a sheep and wool festival, and Lucy even taught me to drive a manual on her own car (a very brave thing to do).

We collected seaweed in all kinds of weather  and all densities of mosquitoes for Lucy's research, and often went out to a big field at midnight to look at the stars and fill a generator with gasoline for my research.

We ate edible wild plants I identified (another brave thing on Lucy's part).

We made batches and batches of jam, and every other food for which we had a whim.

We became huge fans of contra dancing, and went at every opportunity.

And we survived grocery shopping together, even though I am a consider-every-possible-option person, and Lucy is a take-it-and-go person.

So Lucy, today I salute you. I never would have accomplished so many things, and had so much fun while writing my thesis if you hadn't been my roommate.

 And in case you're wondering, this Striped Button Pouch is what I made Lucy for her birthday, reminiscent of our plant biology and hydrology studies with its green and blue. If you're interested in making one, complete with a bound buttonhole, stop by later for the tutorial.

Have you been up to something out of the ordinary lately? For St. Patrick's Day or otherwise?

Five Years Ago Today....

Five years ago today was a beautiful, and strangely warm February day in PA, which gave me a strange desire to go jogging. 

I don't really jog, but that's how enticing the weather was.

Dancing is more my thing, and as was typical of me while I lived in the dorms, I danced in the bathroom as I got ready, and down the hall (because no one was looking). But somehow I did an axle and never landed it...and broke my ankle in three places. 

I certainly knew I had broken it, by the undeniable sound, and the feeling of course, but strangely enough my first reaction was not "How could I have done that?" or "Why is this happening, God?" but, a strange "Well this is interesting, I wonder how this will turn out."

   Well, first was the emergency room, of course. The doctor from there called my parents, and when they answered the phone apparently said in a telemarketing voice,"What would you do if your daughter broke her ankle?" Upon which they promptly hung up on him.

Luckily he called back saying, "Don't hang up! Don't hang up!" And told them what was going on, and that I would have surgery in a couple of days. That evening I told my Mom not to bother with the 10 hour drive, because I was fine and my amazingly organized roommate had all of my rides to the doctor's lined up with friends. I spent that night attended by three of my dear friends, as a single song replayed on my itunes all night, and I whimpered continually about how I could think of nothing but Calculus, and that my toes were going to pop (I'm really not sure how they did it, but they are truly wonderful ladies).

My Mom arrived two days later...and due to crazy amounts of swelling, fracture blisters, and hospital wait time, she left more than three weeks later when I finally got the surgery on the last day of spring break.

Since I hadn't been able to use Spring Break as recovery time from the surgery, I had used it studying very intensely for the second semester Organic Chemistry, Calculus II and a bit for Microbiology and Environmental Ethics. I was sure the chemistry was firmly in my brain.
So, two days after my surgery (because the professor insisted I couldn't put it off any longer), I took the organic chemistry mid-term, and was completely convinced that I and my Vicodin laden brain had performed magnificently. The day after that I took the Calculus II midterm and was not quite as confident.

Red: Memories of a Mismatched Day

Valentine's Day is such a funny enigma of a holiday. If it were National Write a Love Note Day than perhaps we would all know what to do with ourselves.

The Beauty of Every Brain

     I have been thinking lately (though lately covers a long period of time) about differences in the way individuals function. Not simply about personalities or Myers-Briggs tests, though these aspects also played a part in my pondering, but about brain wiring and communication and thought processes.(Excuse my randomness for a moment, it will come together in the end.)
    I try to keep in contact with my friends around the globe, despite our distance, and I have noticed that some of my friends communicate very well on the phone, while with others much more of a connection is established through instant messaging, or emails, or paper letters. For others I have not deciphered their best mode of communication, but they appreciate my efforts and when I finally see them again they do not feel any less close for never having responded. Interestingly, I have not noticed the extrovertedness of a person to have much to do with their strongest form of communication.
   Most nights I have dreams, usually three or four. Sometimes I wake up and tell my dreams to Nathanael and then they slowly fade away, sometimes I only remember that I drempt, and every so often I have a dream that sticks with me and I can picture it perfectly from then on. There are a few dreams I still remember from when I was three or four years old. Nathanael teases me that I live twice as long as some people. He seldom remembers dreaming, and even less frequently remembers what he drempt. During our honeymoon I awoke one morning, looked at Nathanael and asked,"How was your shop today?" Completely believing that he had opened a small business...until I saw the amused look on his face and woke up a bit more. 
    One day during graduate school I mentioned to some friends over lunch how I often wonder if someone else suddenly finding themselves with my mind would know how to use it. Somehow they took it very philosophically and thought I was saying that humans are merely machines with souls, which could be interchanged because bodies do not influence a person's self. I suppose I was wondering something nearly opposite. How much do the strengths and weaknesses of our bodies and our brain wiring distinguish us and the way we take in the world or lend it input? How has my visual thinking, vivid dreaming, and synesthesia given me a different picture of the world than Nathanael, who does not think in pictures. And why is it that both of us have trouble recalling species names of plants and animals we learned very thoroughly a few months ago, while friends who are self proclaimed "C students" seem to remember such things for years.
     Lately I have been thinking that God has given everyone their thing(s). That perhaps sanity and insanity is just a continuum of millions of characteristics and everyone has their strong points and oddities distributed in slightly different areas. (But perhaps I have just drawn this conclusion from being around too many eccentric, sock-in-sandal wearing professors.)
     My wonderings in mind, I was very glad to have recently come across the book, Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism, by Temple Grandin.

   Temple writes about her childhood and how her mother, certain teachers, and her aunt enabled her to excel despite having been a child who was hard to reach and might have been institutionalized by others at that time. She writes of feeling fulfillment in her work more than in a social life, and feeling attachment to place more than people. How in order to express herself in words she needs to translate her thoughts from pictures, as if she were speaking a foreign language to the world, even after all of these years of being well practiced at it. In a world where academic expectations are increasingly rigid, Temple Grandin was able to find and pursue her niche with the help of mentors who encouraged her to think the way she was built to think. She worked all the way through a PhD in Animal Science and has gone on to design more than 1/3 of the large scale livestock facilities and slaughter houses in the United States. In her book she also discusses why her designs are more humane and efficient than many of the facilities that were in place; and why she is not a vegetarian, despite feeling as though she sometimes relates more to the thought processes of cattle more than of the men and women she encounters.
     The book does not necessarily answer life's tough questions, or my little ones, but it does explore a lot of them and present a perspective I think is really helpful to consider. I would recommend it to any adult interested in having a lot of things to think about, but even more especially to individuals who sometimes have a hard time understanding or connecting with their friends or family members who have autism, learning disabilities or who just see the world differently.

"It's clear that genetic traits that can cause severe disabilities can also provide the giftedness and genius that has produced some of the world's greatest art and scientific discoveries. There is no black-and-white dividing line between normal and abnormal."  --Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures

Other media I highly recommend, which also deals with unique challenges and perspectives that are frequently overlooked:

• Like Stars on Earth/Taare Zameen Par -- Dealing with dyslexia, and also with art, though on screen symptoms also overlap with the autism spectrum. (PG, In Hindi, with subtitles.)

• An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks -- Stories about seven individuals with different injuries or challenges causing them to see the world in distinctly out of the ordinary ways (figuratively or literally). Oliver Sacks features both Temple Grandin and Stephen Wiltshire in the chapter focusing on autism. Many of Oliver Sacks' other books are also intriguing.

• Stephen Wiltshire's website is worth exploring either before or after you have read his profile by Dr. Sacks. Be sure to watch one of the video clips detailing Stephen's amazing artistic process.

• And on the topic of synesthesia, Cassidy Curtis has written a detailed article, which is quite an accurate representation of what I personally experience.  Many articles and fictional books are written (by people who do not have synesthesic experiences), which make this disorder sound disturbing and disabling, but very few people find their own synesthesia anything other than intriguing or helpful. In other words, don't believe those freakish videos you see on YouTube.

Do you have any thoughts on the ways people see or interact with the world? 

Any books or articles to recommend?

Do you remember any crazy dreams from childhood?