On the dusty, bumpy half-mile-long ride from the end of the pavement to the funky old adobe, we always pass a rambling, ramshackle homestead sort of place on the north side of the road. A couple of the corrals are close to the road, so we often see animals. Today’s sighting featured a couple of horses, about two dozen sheep, and several goats all in the big corral together. Quite the sight. Occasionally we encounter a fellow on a horse herding the sheep and goats up the mesa with the help of a couple of little dogs. Some of the animals wear bells, and you can hear the clinking and clonking as they go by.
It’s good to see these things (there aren’t too many places in town where you have to wait while a herd of sheep go by, either). Just gazing on the critters makes me feel a little more complete. It resonates with thousands of years of humankind looking after the animals — no, of conscious relationship with animals, nature, and the whole damn thing.
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Amen, brother Farr, amen. There’s a reason why Shepherds tending flocks figure as the original uncorrupted humans in the pastoral tradition of poetry. Come to think of it, this is more than just a classical tradition. Our Lord and Saviour himself chose to enter the human world in a barn attended by shepherds (no accountants, lawyers or revenue agents were invited). What possible relation this old mythology bears to anything in the real world is hard to say except, as you just said, it somehow feels right for human beings to tend animals. Could it be that it helps us, the original two-legged beasts, to keep in perspective our pretensions of being kin to gods and heroes? Get down off our hind-legs, so to speak.