Capacity

some updates

When I started this little blog that first winter in our “shepherd’s hut” on the Hill, I didn’t have the space to do much besides write. Between the two of us and our three big dogs and all our clothes and belongings piled around us, there was barely room for the cat to squeeze in and find a warm spot, never mind a loom or a felting board. I had to put my wool work on hold. I didn’t have the space or the facilities to process raw wool straight off the sheep into handcrafted rugs. And in summer, with no piped water, when the rain stopped and the wind eased just enough that I could have worked outdoors, the streams ran dry and I didn’t have the water. Felting and washing wool requires a lot of water (I only use mild, biodegradable soap so the water I use can safely return to the cycle, but it still requires having the water). All our sheep’s wool piled up in storage and gathered moths and must. But I could write. I could sit in the little lean-to kitchen we built onto our caravan, or out on the heather in summer with the meadow pipits and the bumblebees, and gaze across a landscape so beautiful, so mesmerising, so timeless and so fleeting with every passing sunbeam, that it could pull poetry from a plum. So that’s what I did.

The goats and sheep foraged freely on the Hill. They didn’t need me or my rolls of electric netting showing them where to find the greenest heather or the pockets of sweet vernal grass and fescue or the dips in the landscape where the wind stilled and the willows grew lush. The twice daily rhythm of milking and feeding and bedding, hauling hay in winter and water in summer kept me tethered to the land and flock and herd. For the in-between hours, alone in the wilds on the mountain with only the goats and the swallows and the kestrels for company, I could write.

This farm is not the same place anymore, literally or figuratively. This farm demands more of me now. Now there are fields to be fed and fenced, orchards to be pruned and netted and picked and tended and woods to be coppiced and cleared of ivy and protected from bark-nibbling herbivores. The goats and sheep have to be herded closely through the woods and managed tightly over these tiny, unfenced fields, and so my rolls of electric netting and I have work to do. There is deep, compacted, heavy winter bedding to be mucked out of last year’s makeshift barn and a new, bigger barn to be built before winter comes around again. There is also a home begging to be built from the rubble of the old, stone farmstead. Oh, how I long for some home comfort. We spent two full years in that shepherd’s hut—the little caravan that rattled and leaked and froze and steamed, exposed to the weather on the Hill—and now pushing on two more in a cramped and cold stone shed, with still no running water and only the barest amenities. I am straining at my leash to paint walls and make sheep’s wool rugs for my own home and peruse second-hand furniture stores, but first we must seal the foundations that are letting in water, put down a new floor, wire the electrics, fix the slates on the roof, replace another roof, knock a door through a wall, and fight our way through the heaps of rubble and rubbish left here by the last people. And I have mountains of mountain-grown wool to sort and salvage from the moths and must, to reacquaint these hands with some weaving, spinning and felting practice before this year’s fresh wool crop comes in. I must design a new website to offer my wares and renovate a wool workshop here on the farm (in the shed that we first must move out of, after we’ve renovated a different shed cottage to be our home). And still, through it all, I am tethered to the rhythm of milking and feeding and bedding and the hours I spend every day, armed with a sickle and a pruning saw, working the fields with the goats because our boundaries are still too open to leave them roam loose.

Seamus the Shetland ram's fleece well risen and ready to shear a month ago, but it's still too cold and wet to shear him. The luscious locks of Little Lady. Living sheep rugs on the hoof.

The sheep have not lambed for the second spring running but that doesn’t mean they are not working. They are putting all their energy into growing fabulous fleeces for my wool rugs, transmuting all those strands of cellulose, of heather and grass, soil and sun, into wondrous wool. As much energy and labour goes into producing good wool as producing meat or milk. The sheep must be kept in prime condition. They need the same good nutrition to grow good wool as if they were gestating lambs. They must be kept clean and out of the brambles, and the timing of the shear must be just right—it’s a balancing act between the weather and the sheep’s comfort and saving the fleece in prime condition. The sheep’s fleeces have risen but it isn’t quite warm enough to shear them, yet. I need to be ready to drop everything else and grab my sheep shears the moment temperature rises, and get to them before the blowflies do (if you’ve never seen maggots burrowing beneath a sweaty fleece believe me, you don’t want to). A few of the ewes will be turning some of those strands of cellulose into more sheep, too, after a brief, spur-of-the-moment rendezvous with a new ram late winter, for some late, summer lambs to grow fat on the autumn flush and ultimately become the meat that feeds us.

The goats and I are clearing land for a neighbour.

This week the goats and I are clearing land for a neighbour. They churn brambles into sweet milk whilst we recover lost pastures for our neighbour’s cows. The same neighbour has given us piped water from his own shallow well to a tap in our yard, so that we can run a washing machine (he thought we needed it (we did)) and water the goats when we run out of rain. And I can felt and wash wool again. This little neighbourhood continually shows me how gratitude has a way of filling you up until it spills over. How it wants to flow like rain from that well.

And this little farm has every minute of my days filled to my working capacity.

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Substack is not the same place it was when I started this little blog, either. It has grown less about the writing and more about appeasing the algorithm, playing the game, competing with all the noise and hustle of any other social media platform. When I started this little blog it was to develop my writing, and to foster a more authentic and meaningful connection with readers and followers of our little farm and wool flock. I write because putting pen to paper is how I best process my thoughts into words and communicate them. Words do not come easily to me. It takes a lot of effort and mental energy and many hours of quiet solitude to build the vague, felt concepts that float around in my head (and my chest and my belly) into coherent sentences and paragraphs. That’s why I won’t use AI, no matter how much time or effort it takes to write from my own capacity. I write to gather my thoughts and stories into words so that I can share them, and to foster something deeper than the superficial chatter of social media. AI wouldn’t help me with that. The way Substack has followed suit with the noise and hustle of every other social media platform doesn’t help me with that, either.

I guess all this is really to say that I will be using this platform a bit differently from now on. I will let myself be a bit looser with my posting. Honestly, I am finding it hard to resist the urge to quietly disappear offline altogether and I believe I’m not alone in that. But then I think of the connections I’ve made on here. I look through my subscriber list and see names that have been with me since that first winter on the Hill, and it really makes my heart swell to know that these stories have reached so far and connected with so many. So I will keep writing, but I will not keep trying to write to the pressure of a schedule or day of the week that no longer works for me, nor force words when I have none because the demands of real life most weeks don’t leave me with enough mental vigour to write anything much worth publishing. I know all your inboxes are full enough without more junk churned out for the sake of engagement or keeping those little graphs they give us growing. And my farm has to come first. I imagine I will use this platform in more of a traditional newsletter sense. I will show up here whenever the weather and my caprine queens and beneficent sheep and this burgeoning farm give me the space to write, and when I have something worthy of finding the words for and sharing. I will pop in to Notes as frequently as I can without losing my mind to the algorithm, but I have to place limits on that, too, and regularly retreat into the woods and the rooted reality of this little farm to restore my sanity.

A few score of you have so far decided something I’m doing here is worthy of sustaining with your dollars, and that truly means the world. I will still send out occasional essays to paying subscribers that are too personal or sensitive to share freely, and you are free to cancel at any time if this no longer aligns with you, with my deepest gratitude for your support thus far.

Honey, aka “Dufus”. An out of season surprise of unknown paternity born to Bee three summers ago, grower of a fine spinning fleece and one of the sweetest, most soul-soothing sheep in the flock.

I still have to remind myself, often, that this is enough. The quiet, unassuming work of growing food and fibre, tending land and livestock and home, is enough. We live in a world that has measured our worth by how much we contribute in financially measurable terms, where success has been defined by the letters after our names, the accolades on our resume and the figures in our bank account. Nowadays, it’s the number of followers on our profiles. I have never quite fitted in that world. I have suspected for quite some time that that world got it all wrong. And I’m beginning to believe the small, localised, cottage-scale work of growing food and fibre and cultivating relationships with the people around us might prove to be some of the most vital work we could be doing for these times.

The goats are calling. I know where I’m needed. I’ll be here, giving my service to my Queens, with dirt under my nails and burrs in my hair, answering my calling to the land.