The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life with HELEN WHYBROW

Today gives me special pleasure to speak with Helen Wybroe about her book, The Salt

Stones, Seasons of a Shepherd's Life.

Besides being a detailed account the day-to-day season-by-season life on her farm, where she and

her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain null farm, a center for activists,

writers, artists, and others to share ideas about how to promote healthier and more just

ways of living together and in the environment.

The salt stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging.

Not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles

of existence of life and of death.

Wybroe shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and

noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations

of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually dependent

ways.

Speaking out of place is produced in collaboration with the creative process and is made with

support from Stanford University, I alone am responsible for his content.

We hope you enjoy this and other episodes.

Please help support speaking out of place by subscribing via our website, speakingoutofplace.com,

following us on Instagram and following me on Blue Sky.

You can give me your feedback and suggest people to invite and topics to cover.

Also, please check out my book of the same title, published by Hey Market Books.

Kiyanka Yamata Taylor calls the quote, the exact book we need for the troubled historical

moment through which we are living.

Welcome to the podcast I'm delighted to have you on.

The book is just amazing and there are certain key themes that we'll touch upon, but why

I love about it is you purchased these themes from so many different angles.

I'd like to start with two questions actually.

First, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book and what

was the main story you wanted to tell and then talk about this really incredible opening

scene in the book where you're delivering these two views and it struck me as being an incredibly

gripping way to get the reader into the text, but it also introduces two very powerful

and twine themes that of life and that of death and very important that your book talks

about the manners in which we live and die and how important it is to think about and

reflect upon these two things and how your experience as a shepherd helped you to understand

this in a very special way.

So two questions again, generally, who are you?

How did you come to write this book?

What was the main impetus in the main story you wanted to tell them, then let's talk

about the chord?

Thank you.

Thank you so much for those questions a little bit about myself.

I think what's relevant in relation to this book is that I grew up on a farm.

I grew up very connected to a piece of land on the Connecticut River and the Northern

Connecticut watershed in New Hampshire and my two deepest, primal loves, my whole life

have been words and language on the one hand and land on the other.

And I've always been fascinated by how land shapes identity and shapes us in shapes culture

and then vice versa, how we shape land through our own caring for it and our regard or disregard.

And so those have been the studies of my life, both as a reader and a writer and also

as a practitioner.

And when I was in my early 30s, I came to the second piece of land that I've deeply fallen

in love with, which is where I live now and I've been here for 25 years.

It's in Central Vermont, very mountainous piece of land.

And this is where I've been really quite obsessed, I would have to say, with the idea of

pastoralism and how sheep and grazing animals can become actually a tool for land restoration

because we hear a lot about how grazing animals in many parts of the world have degraded

the land and that's certainly true and that can happen quite easily if the carrying capacity

of the land cannot withstand all of those little mouths, eat all the vegetation.

It leads to erosion and desertification and all kinds of other other problems of land degradation.

But there's also this incredible history of pastoralism in human culture, right?

We've been in relationship with grazing animals since before we were farmers.

We've been in relationship with them 13 or 14,000 years and we first domesticated the wild sheep

and goats in area that's probably now turkey that sort of part of the world

by bringing these wild animals out of the mountains into the village

and keeping them there to collect their fiber and to tame them and to birth their young

and to have milk and meat and then to walk with them back to the mountain areas

where the pastures would support their life.

So the pastoral peoples around the world since ancient times to now,

their animals are not just a source of meat or milk.

They are really completely interwoven into their sense of well-being, their sense of identity,

their culture, their language, their mythology, their idea of currency and exchange

and their understanding of the world where they live.

And so this has really fascinated me and captivated me and I read a lot about it

and have experienced parts of it in different places where I've traveled.

So I really wanted to write about that, but I didn't want the book to be abstract

or strictly journalistic.

I wanted it to be very visceral and practical and rooted in my personal experience.

And so many people call it a memoir,

but it's not really a memoir in the sense that it's not really so much about me and my life.

It's more about my practice of being a shepherd and all the things that it has taught me

and all the things I think about as I'm moving around with the sheep.

So that's a perfect description.

And I really liked the way, especially the last few words that you said about it's not being your story,

but your story is intertwined with everything you just mentioned.

And actually one of the passages I was going to read was about

you describing the way sheep move through the land.

And that's just amazing.

But before we get to that, let's talk about the chord.

Okay.

Yeah, so the chord is the chapter that begins the book.

And it's actually one of the earliest pieces that I wrote over the two or three years

that I was putting these stories down on the page.

And it's a story about, and I can read part of it if you like.

I love that.

Please, yeah.

The setting is our farm and I'm there alone.

My husband is traveling and my three year old was to sleep in the house.

And I very intentionally began and ended the book with lambing season

because it's the essence of being a shepherd.

It's the heart of the matter.

It's where it begins.

And it's the most tense period of any shepherd's life.

And out in the barn helping this difficult delivery of a you who's first thing twins.

And I've been out there a long time and it's snowy and cold.

And I can read just a little bit from the center of the story if you want.

I step back from blue, blue is the you who's giving birth.

Stand up and rinse my arms.

Her twins are jammed in the birth canal like tangled tree branches and a narrow stream

during spring flood.

The natural birthing position for a lamb is like a diver.

Head between front limbs, shoulders forward and streamlined for the sprint to air.

When the arms are back, the shoulders are too broad for the opening.

This is the problem with the first lamb, I think.

The second lamb has its feet over the first lamb's head.

And its own head is somewhere farther back in the womb.

Most likely, those were its back legs I felt, a breach or backward birth.

A breach birth can be delivered,

but there's a high chance that the lamb will inhale fluid on the way out

as the umbilical cord is stretched and breaks.

Then it's unlikely to survive.

When our daughter, Ren, was born, our midwife lifted her to my chest

and Peter cut the cord near her belly.

In my exhausted state, where images took on a strangely supernatural intensity,

I remember thinking how thick the cord looked,

like a sinewy tree root you find while digging.

The kind that resists every effort of this fade,

something muscular and undeniable.

A lamb's umbilical is as translucent and soft as a bit of milkweed down.

I've never had to break or cut a cord.

It always happens on its own as the lamb slips out of its watery home and onto the hay,

becoming a creature of the breathing world.

This astonishes me that the cord that sustains life could be so thin.

Perhaps so being of a creature that's closer to the wild.

You would have to lick the birth membranes from the lamb and be on her way

to leave little trace behind for predators to smell.

The lamb's ability to get to its feet and follow its mom

within a few minutes of being born is an evolutionary imperative.

Would blue dye in the wild, I wonder?

Probably yes.

No doubt all these thousands of years are humans have been shepherds

and helped use give birth have tweaked the evolutionary arc

so that not only the easy birthers pass on their genes.

A nomadic shepherd would have helped a birth

so that the whole flock could more quickly move out of the wind,

get away from predators or find the spring grass.

Only in the worst cases would they have abandoned a laboring you

and unborn lambs to the wolves.

On Vermont hill farms like ours,

most of which were self-sufficient by economic necessity

well into the 20th century.

Another live birth would have meant hope for a family

that faced spring with little left but potatoes

and cabbage in the cellar.

The peaks surrounding our farm tell this story,

scrag, stark, mount hunger,

while shepherd's brook drains their slopes to the mad river.

Sheep also meant clothing and blankets

during the long period of history

when wool was the only primary source of cloth

and every farm woman knew how to make home spun.

Those are the practical reasons

but I know there were and are

more important reasons shepherds would do everything

to assist a birth.

This ancient primal thing of caring for a flock

is ultimately about human attachment.

Blue's eyes are weirdly white, her breath shallow.

She rests her horns against the wall and goes still.

Inside her womb, I trace shapes of the up to be born

with my fingertips over and over

guessing their anatomy allowed, front foot, nose, back foot,

a lock picker in the dark.

I have to be absolutely sure before I pull.

A faint noise comes from the doorway

where a dim light spills from the barn into the sheepshed.

Ren, who is three, has navigated the dark snowy path

from house to barn in her dinosaur pajamas to find me.

She comes around the corner tentatively with a worried look

then runs quickly down the steps with arms out

when she sees me crouch there.

I have only glanced her way.

My face, I'm sure, is a mask of concentration.

Ben climbs onto my back and her cold hands

find the warmth of my neck, the teeth by Parker Hood,

her two big boots dangling from sockless feet.

Since her father was away at bedtime, I told her,

if you wake up in the night and I'm not in my bed,

then look outside.

If the barn lights are on, I'm out there

and you can come out.

I'll leave your boots by the door.

I honestly wasn't sure she would figure it out,

but I hadn't come up with any better options.

Are there babies she whispers close to my ear?

Yes, soon I say.

I leave blue and put rent on a hay bale so she can watch.

I drape my huge coat around.

I can't take her back to bed.

We are in this together now.

The first time she saw a birth,

she was two months old,

strapped to my chest under my downcoat

as I worked to clear a lamb's airway.

Her tiny head so close to my hands

that I was afraid of hurting her.

She is old enough now to observe more closely.

I wonder if I should warn her

about how seeing blood can be scary

and how an lamb is born.

It's normal for it to be wet and limp,

sometimes coated with a bright, sticky yellow feces

that looks gross.

And sometimes the lamb is not alive.

So that's the middle section of it.

That's more to come after that.

You chose the passage so well.

It gives the listeners such a good sense of how you write

because it's all about entaglement, entwinement connections

and the amount of information in a short passage

of all sorts of different kinds of your personal relationship,

your daughter,

how you came to understand this,

the history of birthing and all this

and use that process.

It's all seamless.

It creates a kind of hole

and you develop a rhythm and a kind of environment,

to say such that you could pick the book up

and just spend any part and find something of that nature.

So I have so many questions to ask you,

but I'll start with one about literature

because throughout your quote,

as you all know,

and remembering that another part of your life

you were a publisher,

I'd like to talk a little bit about the role of literature

in your work.

And I noted when I got to the acknowledgments

which come at the end,

you just have a ton of writers that you're quoting

and see this person and that person

and they're not of the same generation

of the same nationality.

So I hear all these other voices coming through you

and Jean-Giona wrote very much

in the same kind of pastoral mode that you do.

So tell us about how you are interacting with these voices

of other people who've experienced something

not necessarily exactly what you're doing,

but similar to it in one way or the other.

Thank you so much for that question.

I love that question.

I definitely am a writer

who feels most aligned and alive

when I'm in conversation with other writers.

And so no matter what I'm working on,

I have a big stack of books by my desk

and they might be related to the subject

and they might be not related at all.

And it's just something about that writer's voice

and approach to any subject

that enthralls me and excites me.

And I think, oh, I want to like understand

how they're using language here.

And so Jean-Giona was definitely

one of those great loves of mine

and he's not widely read anymore

but he was a very well-known French novelist

in between the World Wars,

lived in Provence and wrote about peasant life, primarily.

And was very concerned with the disintegration

of peasant life and the way in which the rural life

was becoming marginalized

and more and more difficult to sustain.

He was a pacifist

and he sheltered a lot of people during the occupation

by the Nazis.

He was jailed for being a communist

which was something I'm sure that happened a lot at that time

but he was most of all just a humanist

and was very concerned with how people

and also nature in rural Southern France were surviving.

And so his writings vary alive to me in that way.

It's very eccentric even.

And yet there's almost like physical presence

that I really appreciate.

And so there's a little book called The Serpent of Stars

that I discovered right around the time

when that birthing story was happening

when Ren was a little girl actually a couple years before

that I discovered this little novel

called The Serpent of Stars.

And it's about these shepherds who go into the Alps

and they perform a play

and it's this very sort of elemental, mysterious moment

where they all come together

and somebody represents the mountain

and somebody's the river

and somebody's the cold, somebody's the wind

and they act out their relationship to the place.

And I just loved that idea.

And so The Serpent of Stars in some ways

became a little bit of a muse for me in this book

as I wrote, I've been privileged to be a nonfiction book editor

for most of my adult life.

I do it in a very sort of part time way

because farming takes up most of my life.

But I feel like I've been lucky enough

to really be in conversation with a lot of great writers

over the year.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love the word that you use eccentric

because a lot of your book is about questioning

how we got to be centered in the way that we are.

In other words, how is this centered, which is not natural, right?

But it's the creation of the erosion precisely

of alternate ways of being in the world

such that we've naturalized

this very narrow notion of things

and your book does so much to restore our ability

to sense other things.

I kept on underlying, I think you use the word notice

a lot, which I think is really important

because we just miss so much

because we've been trained not to think about it.

There's so many things that you write about, which seem both

so natural but also miraculous things

that one would never think of at least not somebody

not familiar with farming life.

For example, you write sheep not only eat to nurse themselves,

they magically create the next year's movable feast

as they go.

They're hooves subtly and gently till the ground,

disperse grasses and stimulate dormant clover

and veg to sprout.

They make pockets for rain to collect in dry ground

and they open the tatch and cold ground

and they leave perfectly pelted compost

in the way of dung everywhere they go.

So you talk a lot about the movement and the rhythm

and seasons as precisely life giving.

So tell us what kinds of things we miss

when we only look at animals or vegetables

simply as objects and commodities.

And I'm thinking about how Marx talks

about the erasure of human labor,

it takes us form these fetishized objects

and something I think is going on similarly

in terms of the way that we're oblivious

to the work nature does.

You had that wonderful story about how

you were dinged for advertising, lamb that you were,

and I have to tell you the stories,

one of my most embarrassing stories,

but it illustrates what you're talking about

and what I think I'm talking about.

When our son was very small and we're in Palo Alto,

you know, Palo Alto, very much into,

let's find out what the indigenous people were living like.

And so there was this field trip

and then overnight several days,

not maybe two or three days out and some preserve.

And we were going to teach the children,

you know, what was like to forage.

And you will not believe this

or maybe you will, which would be said.

As a parent, we were charged to go to this freezer

trunk that we grew along

and take out these frozen game hints

that were all wrapped in plastic

and there's like Eastern, hide them in places

and so children go out and become Indian and find.

But I think this is exactly what we're talking about,

this idea that we just go to the store and buy it

and everything that goes into the process

of creating that life that we consume or X number of dollars.

So talk about all this things.

Yeah.

Oh, wow, that story is just in so many,

on so many levels, right?

And such a great illustration of modern American life.

Yeah, where everything comes wrapped in plastic, right?

Literally everything comes wrapped in plastic

and we barely ever know its origins.

And I think one of the concepts

that's really at the heart of my life and my writing

is this idea, not just of noticing,

but participating in one's surroundings

and that this act of participation

is what creates intimacy and creates belonging.

And I think that's true in human relationships

and being present for someone

is a radical act of intimacy, actually.

And it's something that we with the internet

and social media and online and now AI,

we are doing less and less of that in person.

Radical act of intimacy, which is literally to just show up

and participate in somebody's life

and their conversation and to make eye contact

and say, what's happening for you?

And I think that the same is true of nature.

Like nature is so infinitely complex.

We will never fully understand this planet that we live on.

And it's very humbling to be out there

in the woods or the pastures with the animals

and to even make any attempt at understanding

the complexity of it.

And yet instead of that feeling discouraging,

my experience is it feels incredibly joyful.

And full of wonder and full of a sense of wholeness.

Like here I am a part of this absolutely intricate intelligence

that I don't understand, but I'm an extension of it.

I'm part of it.

My actions have reactions in nature

and the other way around.

And I really think that regardless of how far

any one person in their personal life gets from nature,

like even if you're an entirely urban person,

you spend a few days sitting beyond a computer

and walking on concrete.

I think if you are put down on a healthy ecosystem

and then you're put down on a very unhealthy degraded

ecosystem, you would still be able to feel the difference.

Don't need any training to feel the difference.

It's in us as biological creatures.

We can tell when something's healthy and when it isn't.

And I think that being participant and being curious

about natural spaces is not only essential

for the future health of the natural world,

but it's essential for our own health as well.

Like they just go hand in hand.

You have this uncanny knack of anticipating everything

I'm going to ask you because you said before

you mentioned about the sheep walking

and the pastoral life.

And I had that quote next to ask you.

So this is what I was going to read to you next.

I'm going to read yourself back to yourself.

There are two ways that I measured

diminishment in the natural world.

A world we all have the ability to see

and sense no matter where we live.

The first is ecological, the lost of vitality,

complexity and stability.

This can be studied and measured,

but it can also be perceived by simply listening

and noticing.

Nature has a voice that sings in different registers.

And in those registers we can hear health

or struggle, presence or absence.

The second way you measure diminishment

is in the human experience, the loss of beauty

of meaning, of pattern language.

These also become more available to us

as we watch and listen and take in what surrounds us.

And there are so many wonderful stories

that open onto exactly these things you said.

But if I had to one to pick, and again, there are many,

but I'm just going to pick one.

Is this story about the mother lamb?

I think Lita or Lita?

And her inability to feed her youth.

And it's a rather elaborate story,

but the way that you unfold your learning pattern

has it worth the way that you begin

to with help another person ultimately.

But try to figure out what's happening here.

And I think this illustrates exactly

one of the main points for your book,

which is we have to understand, as you say,

how complex nature is, and yet we're not clueless.

If we have certain values and certain intentions,

we will open ourselves up to different kinds of information,

different kinds of signs as it were in the world.

So tell us about Lita and how you figured out

what seemed to be a very simple thing,

but actually taps into this whole elaborate set

of dependencies.

Yeah, and that's so well said, David, about we're not clueless.

We will, if we observe.

And it's a certain type of observation.

It's an observation that I think is steeped

in humility where, exactly.

In order to solve some of the problems

that you see in nature with animals,

you need to hold the idea that you don't know.

You don't know what's happening.

And that's the only way you get to the answers.

Because things are complex enough

that you need to be looking for things

that you would never think of looking for.

I'm sure this is probably what it feels like

to be a scientist and a certain scientist.

My book covers 20 years, and I did that intentionally

so that people would feel empowered to realize,

I didn't know what I was doing either.

I came to this with a lot of questions.

And I learned through a lot of mistakes

and through simply watching things happen.

And so the story about Lida begins fairly early

in the book.

She's this beautiful, vigorous tall mother

you who has triplets.

And it's hard for for you to produce enough milk

to feed three babies.

They only have two teeth and four.

And so it's a stretch.

But she was doing great.

And the three lamps were growing like wildfire.

And then one day I noticed that she's just getting thinner

and thinner and she's ravenous.

And her lamps are ravenous.

And she's eating everything I'm giving her.

She's devouring food.

And she's still losing weight, I think I say.

And the book's something she's like shedding weight

like someone on survivor.

And so I just started watching her.

And the chapter really becomes a bit of a study

about rumination and this without going

into a whole long digression.

But sheep are ruminant animals.

And so the chew and reach you their food many times.

And that's how they are able to digest it

and turn this very woody plant material into protein

and milk for their young.

And she is swallowing her food, chewing it.

And then her cod, which is that chewed food

that needs to go up and down a few times to become

very digestible and fluid, she's just spitting it out.

She can't chew her cut.

And I've never seen an animal just spit out their cut before.

And so they start investigating like,

why would this be happening?

It's hurting her to chew.

She has like a split tooth in the back of her mouth.

And there's like going through all these things.

It's a story that really helps me tell the importance

of rumination and the relationship

between the mother and the lamb and how,

through their chewing of their cod,

they pass on so much information to their young.

It's on information about what plants to eat,

where to find them.

What's the micro flora of the soil

that becomes the micro flora of their gut,

which becomes the micro flora of their milk,

which builds the lamb's immune system,

which builds our immune system if we drink sheep's milk.

It's like this incredible and intricate connected web

that is all about these fluids and processes

and microbes in the natural world that are in us, too.

And there's nothing gross or clean about it.

It's actually fundamental to life itself.

So that was where I, as a shepherd,

learned a lot more about that whole complex system

that we're all part of.

Now, it was interesting because at various moments

in your book, I was compelled to go to YouTube

because, for example, the sharing of sheep,

do you know, I'm sure you know,

the record for sharing a sheep, Irish, obviously,

37 seconds, it was mind blowing.

It was almost like a dance.

He held the sheep and he stood

and he just knew where every bit was

and the lamb seemed to be okay with it

because he seemed so confident about it.

The other one that I was really taken by,

and I forget the exact word for this is,

I think it's a Norway,

when women sings, bring the sheep in,

tell us about that.

Yeah, so that's called Colt.

It's spelled K-U-L-N-I-N-G

and it's a form of singing

that was developed in pastoral systems

where the women and girls would take cows

and goats and sheep into the mountains

and stay there all summer long,

making butter and cheese in the sheeling system.

It was very widely practiced in Norway and Sweden

up until about the 1950s

and I'm sure it's still practiced today

but just on a less culture-wide scale.

And Colning is, it's a little bit,

I think, yodeling is maybe,

it's like, it's a form of using the voice

that can be projected over distances

in an alpine environment

because the animals are grazing without fences.

Obviously, they're in the calm environment

so they need to be called back for milking time

or they need to be moved from one place to another

or sometimes it would be two shepherds

calling to one another to relay information.

As I understand it, a very complex language

between human and animal,

human and human that would speak of what was happening

in their lives at that moment.

And so I was pretty captivated by that.

I would love it.

Have you tried it yourself?

No.

You're always learning things, Ellen.

I think this is right up your alley.

Oh, I have to say, my sheep do come to me when I call them

like even if we'd meet far up in the high pasture

if I use my voice in a certain way,

I'll come running, which I think is quite weird.

I never, when I started, I never thought

that sheep could be trained to come like a dog

but they certainly can.

Yeah.

No, it's a beautiful thing to listen to and to watch

because it reminds us of something we talked about

at the beginning of our conversation, which is art

and that we think of art as being a certain thing

highly of such as something that's taught,

but art comes from human rituals and human needs

and not just in terms of material needs

with spiritual needs too.

And the two are not separate at all.

They're often entwined in really remarkable ways.

Oh, yeah.

You dedicate the book to your mother, Mary Ruth Wybrow.

And she appears throughout the book,

but she has a whole chapter devoted to her.

And for me, it really ties together

your thoughts on your relationship with her.

But also very powerfully your thoughts about life

and how we live in the world with others.

And it's both very kind to generous,

but also very frank and honest.

And that's something I really appreciated about it

because it's such an important topic.

Could you tell us about this chapter

in your relationship with your mother

because you mentioned that you were raised on a farm

in theater form.

So tell us about the same but different

in mothers and daughters and life and death.

Yeah, thank you for asking that.

My mother was English, both my parents were English

and they both died in the past.

My mom, two years ago, just as the book was coming out.

The book was in production.

The book's been out not quite a year.

And so my mom never read the book

because she had dementia.

And it really, the story about her

is about the beginning of her losing her memory

and how the things that she was holding onto

were very much the physical rituals and asks

that she had always taken care of on a farm.

And so I write about or attempt to write

about how our bodies are not,

it's not just our minds that hold our memories,

our bodies hold memories too.

And that as the mind's memory starts to go off

and the body's memory is still intact.

And there were many things that she could do

on the farm even when she couldn't remember what day it was

like shelling peas or washing buckets

or feeding a bottle lamp, for instance.

And in those times she seemed completely herself

and intact.

And one of the things that really made me think about

is how in an agrarian society,

we've always had places for the old.

We've always had that they could do,

even if their minds weren't as sharp

or their balance wasn't as good,

they would sit on the porch and skein the wool

or weave the blanket or shell the peas.

And I think that our children now

are learning fewer of those competencies with our hands.

And so it got me thinking like what happens then

when we're old, we don't have those things

that we can do that are where the memory is embodied

in the body.

And so I think that's a loss.

I think that's something that may surprise us in ways

that we haven't anticipated.

It may be one of the many unintended consequences

of this conceptual age that we live in,

this age of electronics.

And I think there are many writers who write about this

that they're really interested in what happens

when the working class life, the life, physical work,

the life of the hands, the life of the body

is being replaced by conceptual work

and by ideas and by things that we can't touch.

And so not only are people losing those tasks

in the way of life,

but they're losing their sense of agency

and identity in the culture in ways that they've always had.

And I think obviously this shift has been happening

since the 1950s really,

but it's ratcheting up big time right now, right?

And we're in the midst of really devaluing physical work.

And I think very soon, if not immediately,

will be in an enormous crisis of just not having people

to do work because we've disregarded

how important that work actually is.

I've digressed a little bit,

but I thought a lot about my mother in that way.

If physical work was always very important to her,

it was a big part of what gave her joy.

Yeah, and I'll advertise this podcast to you

and to listeners today.

I had on scholar named Muslin Kim

and her book was about art collecting

and especially art collecting in the 50s.

And she tied it into developments earlier on

in terms of the beginning of managerial science.

And the way precisely the people with brains,

they were the ones that counted,

the people that bathed things,

obviously they were interchangeable, assembly line, et cetera.

And she said that Duchamp and the developing of conceptual art

took part in that degrading of actually making things,

but rather discovering things and these toilets.

Now there are.

You just have to make the suggestion in your brain.

So you can just think that way.

And we talked about it earlier when I asked you

about the sheep walking through the countryside

and creating these pellets of fertilizer as they go

and telling the soil at something I never thought about.

Obviously, they were doing things

that we don't think of them doing

because we've been taught to only appreciate certain things.

So I really appreciated that.

There was something else I wanted to talk to you about.

And maybe I anticipated you this time

because one of the things that started coming out to me

was how special the farm is as a place and space.

And you do a marvelous job of showing how seemingly mundane

tasks and routine point to ways of life

that happened to entire worlds.

And then when we emailed just prior to this interview,

you said, I want to talk about belonging.

And so I have your quote on belonging queued up

because I teach a course called belonging and literature.

And of course, I teach this as a first-year course

because students leaving their homes now

in this university didn't need to be able to belong.

And what I do is sort of tweak the idea of belonging

to include, well, what happens when you're placed

into an identity that you don't want, right?

Slot into this, this is where you belong.

This is not a place that you want to belong.

And it gets back to our discussion,

exit, exit, tricity, perhaps.

But this is you again quote, the idea of belonging,

what it is, what it enables, what enables it to happen

or not to happen, where and how it is found

has preoccupied me most of my life.

My practice of being a shepherd is a large part

of my ongoing inquiry into belonging.

Not just my own, but to understand what it means

for all of us in this time of profound loss

of the natural world, could you talk about belonging?

Yeah, yeah, what a brilliant idea for a class

for incoming students, I love that.

Belonging is a word that I am fascinated with.

I think it's very close to well-being,

and I think it's something that's fundamental

to one's mental and spiritual and physical health.

And I'm also really interested in how the word

belonging includes within it the word for longing

because it means that often most of the question

where we belong, and it can be a lifelong search,

not just a physical place, but a person or a job

or a culture, and so many people are displaced

and dispersed, that it's a very real pressing question

for a lot of people and very hard to answer.

And I think it includes this notion of longing

for something that you once knew,

but you can't quite touch again,

that maybe your ancestors knew,

and you have glimpsed it and you understand it,

but the sense of this longing is it's like an absence,

but you understand that it could be filled by something.

And I think that for me, a lot of the feeling

of that longing comes from the natural world.

And I know that's not true for everyone.

And people find there different things.

But for me, there's a fundamental sense

when I'm out in nature of wholeness and feeling.

I can breathe in this sort of constant questioning

of who am I and what am I doing

and this sort of ever-present self-doubt

that most writers have.

It goes well, it seems a bit of a living out there.

And I think that's been true for me ever since I was very young.

I remember really struggling in school

and feeling like I didn't have friends

and I didn't know why I was spending all these hours inside.

And it seemed like it's a piece

and going out in the woods

and just lying under these giant pine trees

and smelling the pine resin and feeling the sun

and just feeling this incredible sense of peace

and feeling like none of that was going on in my head

is important at all.

So I think this is at the heart of my book, really,

is how to design this for one another for ourselves.

Our farm is very much of a gathering place.

It's not just growing food

and doing this ecological experiment

but it's very much of a gathering place.

We talk about it, our farm is a refuge.

We also talk about it as being an anchor

for the people out in the world who are anchoring other people.

So there are a lot of people like that right now

who are on the front lines

of what's happening in this country

who are really either very frightened

and for good reason

or they're allies to people who are in need

and those people need a place to be able to go

and put everything down and take a deep breath

and take stock and talk to one another and feel

just connected to themselves.

And that's what the farm has become

is that place for a lot of people.

And it's remarkable how profound it is for people

to just step away and be in the natural world.

I've seen it over and over again.

So for me, I feel like caring for that natural world

those spaces is very important to me.

And the extension of that is that I'm caring for people

through doing that.

I don't know if you could read this

but it has no farm.

That was my next question here in Canning

because I quoted you before earlier talking about

these are things that it doesn't matter

whether you're in the city or in nature.

So I'm in Palo Alto suburb

and one of the ways that my wife and I

have reconciled to ourselves to being at Stanford

because A, it's close to the ocean,

much closer than Berkeley.

And so the ocean to us is like your farm to you

in some ways, but it also has a great arrest for preserve.

I'm going there right after we finish talking

about I go there three or four times a week at least.

And like you said, when I'm walking there,

I keep on thinking it's a miracle.

It really is a miracle.

You can look at anything and see the interdependency, right?

And when you and I were talking before

when we were setting this up, I said, slugs are amazing.

They seem absolutely inert,

but they're doing all these things with the soil

that you wouldn't think of and you think they're easy prey

but there's haste so bad apparently

they don't have any natural predators.

That's the legend.

And as you said before, it's so humbling

and being humbled is so liberating.

I was going to ask you about the farm

because I was again wondering exactly

how people who are living in New York City or whatever,

how does your farm help create these gatherings

and things that sort of replenish that?

And what kinds of things go on in the farm?

I'm really interested in terms of this,

these workshops that you're having.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the workshops

and the kinds of perhaps transformations

or the types of different conversations people

fall into that could only happen in that space.

But they will take back to where they live.

Yeah, thank you.

So for almost 25 years now,

we've created a gathering space for people

who are working in loosely speaking areas

of social and land justice in farm justice.

And the programs have always been tuition free.

So their fellowship-based programs

were raised money for people to come.

So there's no barrier for entry

and people come sometimes as a group

where they know each other

and maybe they're affiliated with a particular nonprofit.

But the ones that we gather,

we have an extensive network of alumni

probably over at least two or 3,000 alumni now

who recommend other people to come through the programs

and they are invited to come.

There's no agenda really.

It's bring your project, your idea.

Some people come and simply rest or walk

or sit in the field.

Some people come with a curriculum they're designing

or a book they're writing

or some very distinct project that they're working on.

Some people come and they end up networking

other people who are here

and building some new organizing,

some new initiative or something.

And we really are just creating the container.

So we're eating them beautiful food from the farm.

We have places for them to stay.

We practice what we call radical hospitality,

which is whatever you need while you're here,

we will do everything we can to provide it for you.

And in some pretty rustic space,

a lot of our meetings happen in this huge old Timberframe barn.

So where we eat, people have full access to the gardens

and the orchards and the forestry.

We put very next to no restrictions on their movement

or their time here.

It's really for them.

I think this idea of allowing people

to follow their intuition and seek what they need for themselves

is pretty profound and pretty radical.

And a lot of people completely unplug when they're here.

We do have cell service, we do a Wi-Fi,

but most people choose to unplug from the world

and that in itself.

I don't need to tell you how transformative that can be.

Yeah, yeah.

How can our listeners support the work there?

Is there a website we can go to and donate?

Yes, there's a website nullfarm.org

and that shares a lot of information

about our programs as well as the farming side of things.

Wonderful.

I invited you also to read anything you wanted from your book.

I don't know if you have another passage you wanted to read, but...

Sure, since we spoke about belonging,

maybe I'll just end with that seems like a really nice way

to end the passage that comes toward the end of the book.

A little bit more by thoughts on that.

I never thought after leaving my childhood farm

that I would ever find another place

where I felt so at home, so connected to myself.

I feared that the power and wholeness I felt in girlhood

and lost as a teen was something I would always mourn.

In shapeshifting from that deeply rooted girl,

I tested my strength as a wanderer

while always longing for the place

that I credited for my wholeness.

Then I came here.

Over the years living and moving with sheep over this hillside,

tending and attending to this place,

I thought I had simply replaced one attachment

to place with another.

But in writing my love song to this hillside,

I have begun to trace how belonging happens

and I have begun to understand how it's not attached to particulars.

Not about finding any one place,

one person, one thing that holds us.

It is not outside of us at all.

Belonging is more about the ritual

and dedicated attention within us

to something beloved that matters.

The world belonging encompasses longing.

In nature, I feel a belonging with

and a belonging to a kinship, a reciprocity,

as well as a longing for greater intimacy and knowledge

to be radically present and to be loved,

a bee longing in and for the greater world.

But this feeling can happen anywhere, I know this now.

We are participants in our own sense of belonging.

It doesn't happen automatically

and has less to do with the place itself

than our energy to receive it.

We make it happen with a mother, a daughter, a hillside,

a life work, a way of being,

through a deep commitment over time,

through our curiosity, through our merging.

Belonging is a two-way embrace.

It begins the moment some place or someone says to you,

welcome, and you receive the gift.

You set your bags down inside a door, inside a heart.

Then belonging requires more than anything participation.

It requires unpacking your bags

and discarding everything you were carrying

that you no longer need to fully embrace where you are.

Finding belonging requires a softening

of the boundaries of self.

A quest to find you are enough

becomes all at once, you are infinite.

To practice belonging is an act of resistance

against diminishment of ourselves

and of the more than human world

that offers all of us a home.

Oh, thank you so much for reading that particular passage

to close us out because it opens up, again,

to a whole universe as does your book, which is just marvelous.

We booked this program now,

but I actually used it for my Christmas reading,

and it was perfect.

So thank you so much for being on

and sharing your time with us and your thoughts

and reading, and it's so lovely to hear you read

because you write beautifully

and you read your writing beautifully.

Thank you so much for being on, Helen.

Thank you so much, David, it's been really wonderful.

Yeah.

Take care, bye-bye.