Each morning I start my day with a Native American prayer. The word beauty in this prayer means stillness, peacefulness, harmony and beauty.
Thank you for the beauty before me.
Thank you for the beauty beside me.
Thank you for the beauty above me.
Thank you for the beauty below me.
Thank you for the beauty within me.
May I walk in beauty.
How I start my day, affects how I react to what happens during the day. Most of my days as a sheep farmer are routine, but there are days when I have to deal with situations I am not sure I know how to fix.
I go out to feed the sheep and goats and make sure they are alive and doing well, only to find the goat, George, has his head stuck in the hay manger and I can not get it out.
To free George from the hay manger, I had to get a hand saw to cut the metal bars. This had to be done before chores.
Or the ewes are lambing and I have two ewes who have lambed three babies, another ewe is in labor, but this ewe is stealing the babies from the other two ewes. That morning I spent a couple of hours separating and matching. Once the ewe in labor had delivered her own two lambs, she left the others alone.
Or the day was rainy and still raining when I went to bed. The next morning I wake up to ice every where. I go to the ewe and lamb pen to find a lamb outside the shelter laying in the frozen ground. I thought the lamb was dead until an ear flickered. NO TIME TO WASTE, rush the frozen lamb to the house, put him in a warm water bath in my bathtub, and rub, rub, rub to get the circulation going. When the lamb started moving, I dried him off with towels, put him on a heating pad in front of a heater and went to prepare warm lamb replacement milk. I spent three to four hours saving this lamb. The lamb lived in the house for a few days until the ice storms had pasted, then in the barn as a bottle baby. I was thrilled I had brought this lamb back to living.
But not all experiences end well. There are times the freezing lamb dies. Or I go out in the night or morning during lambing to find a ewe had given birth to a dead lamb. Then there was the day I was bringing in the sheep and goats and was missing a goat, the pet goat for the grandkids. The dog and I searched, and I finally found the goat, dead on the other side of the fence. The person leasing the land had sprayed it with an herbicide, my goat got onto the field and ate the weeds with the herbicide and died.
At all times I have to focus on the beauty, the stillness, peaceful, harmony and beautiful things around me. I can not get in a panic and not think of how to take care of a situation. I have spent years working on walking in this beauty. Each day I strive to walk in more beauty than I did the day before.
I encourage you to look for the beauty around you. The is peace, stillness and harmony even in a city. Look for the beauty where you are and try to walk in beauty each day. After some time you will see and feel the beauty around you regardless of where you are located.
Have a beautiful day,
Granny
Granny's Homestead 