Bodies and burning

by sophie. Posted on September 5, 2014

Mythri

05 Sep

Our lovely neighbour, Pat, rang a few weeks ago to say that there was a dead Jersey cow in the river by the electric fence which attempts to keep her cows on her property and ours here.

Of course I had to go and see which one of my beautiful girls had left us. It was our lovely Heidi, Mother to the gorgeous Patch. She must have slipped down the steep bank (what was she doing there?) and broken her back or neck and drowned in only 8 inches of water.

I didn’t really cry. Do we become immured to death eventually, seeing as much as we do? Or is it that once the spark of life – the soul, spirit, call it what you will – has left the body, that person, animal, being that we knew and loved is gone. All that is left is the flesh. Flesh and skin we have loved, for sure, but without the animus or force of life, it is just a body to be dealt with.

Ged pulled her out of the river with the tractor and a chain and then pushed her into a big old pile of logs several owners before us left behind. She forced us to light it up and feed it day after day, creating a beautiful clearing next to the bees, opening up the landscape near the spring fed dam. I asked Ged to remove her horns for future biodynamic preparations, and they’re sitting on a tin roof over the calf shed, hollowing out.

On my walks on the other side of the farm I had a few whiffs of something dead as I turned down the track for home, but hadn’t thought to investigate. Then Ged asked ‘have you seen Bonnie?’ I hadn’t and went looking. I found her lying so peacefully with legs straight out under a giant tallowwood tree. As beautiful in death as in life despite the maggots in her eye sockets. Golden all over and with creamy hair like eyeliner round her beautiful brown eyes. She was gone. Another Jersey cow that we had bought and bottle fed and loved and nurtured. Another body to be moved and burnt.

Ged pushed her into another old pile but with the fire bans everywhere we didn’t dare light it up. I forgot to ask about the horns and he didn’t think to get them.

Two cows gone out of our small herd – that is a huge loss. But more than that, these girls were our friends. We knew them so well, loved them so deeply and now they are gone from us for ever more. Poof! Snuffed out, gone in an instant, with no chance for goodbyes. Life is so fragile, nature so cruel sometimes. We have no idea what happened to Bonny. We will never know.

And then there was Gypsy, who I had renamed Mythri (Friend & Comforter) when Ged brought her onto the farm 6 years ago. She was a huge (17hh) grey thoroughbred mare who he found starving in the last big drought on a friend of his father’s farm and rescued. She was a wild child. Terrifying. She double barrelled the side of the red Pajero when it was still my road car and Ben was just a tiny baby. She scared my two horses witless when she first arrived and they swam the river to get away and finally went missing and ‘bush’ for days. She was a two faced bitch. When she finally calmed down and I wasn’t so scared of her, she would be that friend and comforter to me when I was upset, but meanwhile she was vicious in thought and word and deed to my horses. We had to keep them apart for years. Two on 200 acres, and two on the other 200!

But eventually, on some very bad advice from a so called animal communicator, we put them together. She killed Baby. She was so foul to her and Baby couldn’t bear her life with Mythri in it so she got cancer and died. She couldn’t help it. She was lovely in her heart but she had been so damaged in her early life and she was so jealous and bitter and she couldn’t bear that I loved Baby so much. Baby had everything she ever dreamed of and she thought by getting her out of the way, she could have me and my love. But it didn’t work like that.

She was a bully and the herd dynamic was so different whenever she was in it. She and Brave would swim the river and end up on the Pitt Street Farmer’s place every time they were together on ‘the other side’. And she had cancer. First just protruding growths all around her anus and vulva and then a lump that got ever bigger on her throat gland. It was all through her. Lump after lump appeared. The writing was on the wall. But she looked so well. Ged wanted to shoot her a year ago but I kept saying ‘she looks great, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s well’.

But last week after the hoof trimmer had been I let her out with all the horses on the other side, and sure enough, within a day she had led Brave on a merry expedition to the mad, bad neighbour’s place.

We retrieved Brave easily but Mythri resisted all attempts at capture. Ged went out alone on Sunday morning and caught her. He said that when she did a poo she groaned with pain. It was time to do the dastardly deed. When he came home it was done and he was devastated. He shot her in the same pile where Bonny was. In the drizzle and dark that night we did our best to pile up a good pyre around her big grey body and get a fire going.

It has been my job this week to feed that fire which was neither big nor hot enough to get rid of such a big body. I have seen sights this week that firemen, police officers and paramedics have all seen many times before. Charred flesh. That sweet sickly smell. Bones in the ashes.

I have done my best by her, talking to her all the time, sending her spirit to the light, sorrowing over her body, together with my beautiful Bonny girl.

It has been horrible. But somehow we just deal with death and the gritty reality of disposing of bodies. Can’t let grief get in the way. And what I have learned this week is that once the soul is gone, and just the body remains, it is just flesh and organs and bones. And the spirit who inhabited it, looking on from the starry realms, would rather that it was made use of rather than just disposed of. That the body had purpose in some way rather than being left in the ground to rot or using up valuable finite resources to be burnt in a building that will always have connotations of the holocaust for me.

At least Bonny, Heidi and Mythri forced us to get rid of other people’s old rubbish piles and clean up our land. But still the waste of a life is harrowing. Every death is a body blow and heart felt. How and where and why doesn’t matter when faced with the soul-less body to deal with. Just as many of we humans would rather our flesh and blood were used for the greater good when we are gone

A Cleansing Fire

by sophie. Posted on September 30, 2012

Ged watching his fire

30 Sep

Pyromaniac that I am, I love the burning off season. Lines of fire, snaking across country and into the bush, lighting up the late winter nights with their warming glow. I love to light them, putting a lit match to the bladey grass and hearing it snap, crackle and roar. As a general rule, we don’t burn Avalon, because we believe in repeatedly slashing the grass and mulching the land to retain moisture and build up the soil levels to create healthier soil and pasture. 5 years ago when we came here, the land was all bladey grass, bracken fern and fireweed, now we have beautiful native grasses, kikuyu, clover and oatey grass, and the bladey grass is almost gone. Burning bladey grass might give you green pick for the cattle, but all you get is more bladey grass, so it never made much sense to us. However, as a way of seeing what is there in areas that have not been slashed, it is invaluable, and as a way of quickly clearing the land without slashing, it can be useful. But not our preferred way of doing things.

Anyway, the Friday before Ostara, the spring equinox and the real Easter in the southern hemisphere, it was a dull day, with moisture in the air, no beating sun and the hint of rain to come, so Ben and I thought we would just quickly light some fires to burn down into the weeds along a section of the river bank and into the neighbour’s paddock, which she has always invited us to burn. We lit a few fires along the fence line which blazed up briefly and then fizzled so we figured they would be out momentarily and went home for lunch. About 4 hours later we drove over to feed the horses and I saw the wall of smoke . . . ‘I think we have a problem’ I said to Ben. He wasn’t concerned. He’s heard Mummy say that before when she’s inadvertently burnt a paddock!

We drove over the ridge and saw a line of flames licking voraciously at everything in its path. 500 metres from the site of our start up fires and travelling in the opposite direction to our intention! We weren’t going to even try to beat this one back, it was going to have to keep gorging until it was replete. All we could do, was damage limitation. We drove down to the horses and set them free. Then we splashed water all around the water tank above base camp and removed all the water pipes, stand pipe and hoses. Then back burnt around the tank just to make sure. Next we drove through Henry Hollow and up into the Dam Paddock and there we stopped in shock and horror. We were faced with a blackened wasteland and facing us were the bee hives standing sentry like and stark white against the ash. ‘The bees! Daddy is going to go mental’ One hive was already swarming. One was still smouldering. All our lovely workers, all the new frames and comb all ready to be filled with lovely, life giving honey. All my fault . . .

We rang Ged and told him the bad news. But it was to get worse. By the time he came home two hives were burnt to cinders and we will have to start again with nucleus hives. He found a hive of European bees in a fallen tree and bear like tried to extract the comb and honey and then persuade some to take up residence in some of our boxes but they didn’t want to relocate despite their hot home, so that didn’t work out the way we planned it either. The fire continued on its merry way all night and for two days thereafter, clearing, cleaning, exposing.

At least we are rid of the high load of dead grass before the predicted drought gains intensity – although the ground is already so dry, the river lower than it was at the end of the last drought, we are desperately begging for rain. And the fire has cleaned up and rid us of old stumps and piles we inherited from the previous owners. And the exciting news is that what we really wanted to burn, the oasis with the spring in the middle, is now accessible and we can see the tree graveyard in there. This is obviously where they used to go to extract millable timber, cut fence posts and strainers etc. I spent two days in there, black from head to foot, lugging logs and branches and chainsawing wood to make it manouvrable, feeding the existing fires to clear areas of all the fallen timber. There’s another 6 months work in there but it will be beautiful when it is done. A lush green forest, a shady oasis in the middle of the pasture where the stock can retreat to on hot days and Ben and I can wander in awe.

We have to take the long view in farming. And I am learning that stressing achieves nothing. There was no point in trying to fight that fire, she obviously wanted to be burnt. And now she is.

Working in the blackened aftermath over the weekend, I meditated on the cleansing fire, the phoenix arising, and the rebirth and renewal offered both by the fire and the first days of spring. How it was possible to rebuild and restart in the ashes – relationships, friendships, dreams, plans, futures. Here is the cycle of life in all its stark reality – death, decay, rebirth. Every aspect of our lives affected by these never ending circles and rhythms if we could only realise it, and stop demanding the excitement and blossoming of eternal spring. We have to learn to live with the circles and cycles, see them, accept them and even embrace them as essential for our evolving, revolving life on earth.