Welcome Home Honey May

We brought home our newest member of Journey School way back on June 3rd. It's seems paradoxically impossible to believe that it has been an entire month ago and at the same time, that she has not always been with us.








Our own little MaryLou was only a week old when Honey May was born at the small dairy next door. We'd spoken for the calf (if it would turn out to be a heifer calf) as soon as we knew the cow had been bred. We had been expecting a black calf and were quite excited at the idea of white, red, and black calves on our little farm. Our neighbor gave us a call early Saturday, May 29th -- a beautiful honey colored heifer calf was born that morning to her all black mama. After chores and coffee, we hurried over to meet our new baby. So soft, so sweet, so light colored!

Even earlier Sunday morning, we got another call from our neighbor - a call for help. Honey May's mom was down with Milk Fever. You may have never heard of milk fever, indeed we had not until exactly one week before when our sweet Gjynni was hit with the terrifying malady. I didn't blog about that. It shook me to my core for days afterward - honestly, I was nearly incoherent and still have difficulty finding words real enough to describe the experience.

Let me start slowly and I'll try not to lose my breath again. Milk fever especially effects dairy cows - within a day of calving, their bodies receive the signal "Need Milk!!" and they go into overdrive to produce milk for their baby. Sometimes, for complicated causes, their bodies demand more and more and more milk. Calcium is pulled from every source - blood, bone, organs - and the cow becomes rapidly, fatally chemically imbalanced.

We had been planting potatoes in our little inherited garden when I noticed Gjynni looking....... wrong. I mentioned my concern to everyone and asked that we all keep an eye on her. Within half an hour, we were leading her to a smaller pasture with more shade, offering kelp, salt, mineral block and a bucket of fresh water. Another 15 minutes later and I ran to the house to call our vet. He couldn't make it for an hour. We called our neighbors. By the grace of god, they came immediately bringing experience, knowledge, and calcium. At this time, I could have simply pushed over our gorgeous 1800 pound unflappable curious girl. If we didn't hold onto her halter, she just wandered in circles, becoming more and more unsteady and disoriented.

With increasing desperation, we offered everything in our toolbox of natural medicine - minerals, herbs, homeopathics and Reiki. It was actually in giving the Reiki that I began to lose my grounding. Gjynni simply felt less and less there. I have treated injury and disease under intense circumstances but never have I known that death was quietly waiting to step in the very next moment. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was no bleeding, no fever, no respiratory distress to be mitigated. She was simply dying and I couldn't stop it.

Our vet, however, could. He arrived within what I sincerely believe was minutes of losing Gjynni and immediately administered intravenous calcium. As quickly as she began walking away with death, she returned to us. Within about 45 minutes, she was standing solid if still not quite all better. It took a full day and a half before we let her go unobserved for more than a couple of hours. And believe me, we learned about Milk Fever and gathered all the tools we had no idea we needed just two days prior.

So when Linda called, we mobilized. Within 15 minutes, we had the cow propped upright, administered two tubes of oral calcium, had the liquid calcium warming in a bucket of water, and were loading the two syringes for subcutaneous injection. Our vet still had to come to the farm to administer calcium intravenously but death itself was never paged. The emotional difference in the two events is inconceivable.

I was reminded during that week of when we dehorned our bull calf Quincy. Honestly, if you believe you want and need to hone your first responder crisis skills, get a family cow. We have learned more, and learned more completely, about disease and injury by living closely with our animals than through any training or workshop. I think because these animals mean so much to us both practically and emotionally and yet are not valued in the same way by the rest of our culture (you can't call 911 for a cow), our level of stewardship simply must reach higher levels. I am proud of all that we have learned, proud of my amazing family, and drop-to-my-knees humbled and grateful for the resilience of our animal partners.

On a side note, Quincy grew up just fine. He's now the expectant father of not one but three calves next Spring and likely three more next Summer. While he probably won't be a long-term resident of Journey School, he has done his job beautifully and we are glad to have known him.

This Time Is Different

One more post in response to the Gulf Oil disaster and then we want to introduce you to our second new calf. This article particularly caught my attention because it was published in the New York Times. Not a left wing bleeding heart blog or a radical environmental magazine but the NEW YORK TIMES for pete's sake. Maybe, maybe, we will finally get it. I hope you have time to read the entire article but if not, Mr. Mykleby's letter makes a very clear point.

“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V. Mark Mykleby.”

Who Tortured the Pelicans

Who Tortured the Pelicans?
We did.
I did.
When I drove to the store to buy chips and cheese and maple syrup.
Do you know how much fuel is burned to make syrup from sap?
Do you know the entire path from subterranean oil pockets to plastic wrap?
I do. And still I drive to the store.

I could tell you I have no choice.
What a big fat stinking lie.
I have a hundred options.
Some are hard. Others are even harder.
The easy ones are made easy by surrendering to the tide
of a million feet following a path set down as
The right way, the real world.
This path leads to a slimy red beach covered
with slaughtered pelicans.

But I am just one little ol' gal - I'm just a
Drop in the bucket. I cannot
Save the pelicans. Can I?
I can save maybe one pelican. Just like my
Child is one child. Her life would be worth
Choosing a different path. Or so I've prayed.
Please god, spare this one child.

Is one life worth following the hard choice?
Will I never eat maple syrup again?
I don't know, is it worth a pelican's life?

Stop Protesting, Begin Thinking

I'm going to take a break from our regularly scheduled happiness. It would be wrong not to do so.

The news is full of "protests" - protesters advocating a boycott of BP gas stations, protesters angry at Israel's latest attack and justification, protesters demanding that Arizona behave as if they didn't indeed have unbearable crises they must address, protesters wanting the government to step in use a nuclear bomb to stop the flow of oil into the once rich Gulf, for God's sake. Every protester wants someone else to make things better, better according to their own perspective of how things should be.

Enough.

My heart aches so badly, I rant rather than speak. Fortunately, Fe at planetwaves.net is more than capable of speaking the words we each MUST hear.

There has been an incredible series of risks and innovations that have moved the world from the industrial to the virtual age. We’ve gone from steam engines to 4G networks in little over 100 years. We have invented ourselves to a place where we’ve eliminated distance between people on different continents, changed night into perpetual day and made the leap past our planet’s gravitational field into another part of our solar system. We have been supermen in that we have overcome the known boundaries of the world, exceeding well past them.

Longing for a new horizon has been hard wired in the consciousness of this country since it began, and indeed into the consciousness of humanity. Once we found our way to our furthest western shore, we unfortunately brought that consciousness to other nations, assuming it was our manifest destiny to use others’ resources to feed our material ambitions. We have gotten used to exploring the new boundaries: space, power, energy, chemistry, knowing that miracle cure, that mystic power, that marvelous new thing — regardless the cost to ourselves and others — was just around the corner. Our needs and ambitions have far exceeded our planet’s capacity to cope and right now, there is no horizon but deep water. We haven’t invented anything yet that can save us from ourselves.

I’m not advocating halting our quest to knowledge and innovation. On the contrary, we need to constantly improve the quality of our lives. But that improvement is not going to be from our gadgets, toys and vehicles or for that matter our energy sources. Our improvement needs to be in the quality of our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we live. It begins not with a product but with me. I need to take a look at what I’ve been thinking and reacting to and realize that I must confront my consumerism, my vanity, my insecurity and my desire to isolate myself from people different from me. This is more than just about driving too much. Its about what I spend my time on, what I’m chasing around pointlessly for, and what cost these pursuits have on our world.