Farm Meditation: All Tangled Up

If you have goats, you likely have been in this situation:

You are busy doing something important, like maybe working on a job that pays the bills. Suddenly, you realize the goats are out—they could see better food on the other side of the fence, and made a break for it. Using their stealth-mode setting, they turned into water and got out of a perfectly fine fence, locating the weakest part of it and quietly slipping under or over. The whole group followed the leader (in our case Billy the Goat, aka Billy the Kid), and now they are unfenced, wandering around, looking at you with slight smirks on their little goat faces. Your morning has been derailed.

Goats smirking

“Fence” is a word to describe a thing called “electronetting,” a set of thin cords woven together into a long ‘net,' dotted with posts so you can put the whole contraption into the ground and stand it up. If and when you remember to turn the dang thing on and it is working as it should, the netting carries an electrical charge keeping animals in and predators out. On our farm, we put up and take down fencing (we own maybe 20 of them) multiple times a week, moving the goats around the farm so they can devour plants we don’t want and allowing the ones we do want to flourish.

But like a wedding dress train or king-sized sheets, it is almost impossible to gently take down a fence while in the forest and fold it as you go without another person picking it up and helping you, especially if you are a shorter human, as I am. The netting is also just long enough so that you can’t hold the whole thing in your smaller lady hands, requiring another level of ingenuity and adaptability (but what else is new, ladies).

Electronet fencing

Instead, you get stuck on every single branch and multiflora rose thorn, and pull the fence harder and harder as you go. Your back tells you to quit twisting and turning in unnatural ways, but you know there is no other way to untangle yourself from such a situation but to yank it free.

Sweat and swears and 12 panels of fence later, you somehow pile the whole thing up neatly-ish, roll it up, and haul it to a new location. There you then unroll the fence and have to put it out much in the same manner, with the fence kicking and screaming every part of the way as you force your way through thick brush.

You have a few choices during this dance. You could laugh a lot and think about how utterly ridiculous you look while trying to do this. Or, as is more often the case, you get utterly frustrated and pissed off at the fence and yourself for taking the wrong turn through the thickest brush. And when you are in a rush because the goats got out, you curse the stupid beings for their wild goat ways and for making you do this thing you didn’t want to do at a time you didn’t want to do it. 

But such is life no?

Me trying to put out the fence by myself. Note my lack of smile.

Often we are stuck doing things alone that no human should be expected to do. Things—bad or hard or unexpected things—happen at just the perfectly wrong time, right at that moment when you thought you were going to write a blog post or pick those tomatoes rotting on the vine. Whether the goats get out or your kid gets sick or the shower leaks into the basement—shit always seems to happen.

And yet, the fact that none of us are prepared for the unexpected—the “unexpected” that we should expect since it happens constantly—is amusing. If the unforeseen seems to happen almost every day—why not plan on it? Why all the fuss when nothing goes according to plan?

Quite a thing to meditate on.

Ultimately, it’s the frustration over our own entanglements that creates the problem. What if I just kept laughing the whole time while picking up the fence instead of cursing it and my husband for putting it in such a stupid place? Even just the act of smiling or laughing actually changes one’s chemistry. (Try it now—smile and notice how different it feels).

But it’s not likely that I will actually laugh while feeling frustrated or not curse my husband. At least not yet. Perhaps Step One for me is to simply be cognizant of it in the moment, to realize that I am not laughing when maybe someday I could at least force a chuckle (Step Two). I can at least strive to laugh, can’t I?

How about you? What are your goats and fence? And what step are you on? Can you Really Laugh Out Loud (RLOL) when you get derailed? Tell us about it!

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