by our regular guest columnist Walking With Goats
It’s due to be minus five tonight. The moon’s full pound has reigned over the entrance of winter with all the windows in the valley peeking out their yellow hopes. Christmas is almost here: that festival of creation, mysterious to me in terms of its doctrinal roots, but wrapped in unnamed joy and magic all the same.
I was not raised in a religious family. Our universe was a secular space of gravitational intensity; a set of orbits quite Newtonian in force. Indeed my brother’s middle name is Isaac, just as our father’s own was ‘Newton.’ The family history shows him as our great great great great (great?) Uncle on that side.
The tract of land shared by us over the most recent generations resides beneath a freshly categorized Dark Sky Zone. The Plough arcs over the slate roof of the house that belonged to my grandparents in the same infinitesimal symphony as when I was a child.
Now is the time of year when the weight of memories seems to be strung between the stars. No moments in my childhood mattered more than those surrounding Christmas. And for Fran also. She loves this season even more fervently than I do. For the sake of this adoration in fact, I think I want to leave her a space for the festive feelings of her present moment to take centre stage:
Thank you Fran.
There’s a lot involved in Christmastime, for both of us.
Though perhaps somewhat more profane than Christian in nature, nonetheless creation’s very much of the moment here. November was insemination month on the farm; both Nettle and Obi met ‘Jupiter-Burtie’ in the last two weeks. (All male goats are a Burtie to my Darlings). And Jupiter-Burtie was an exquisite specimen – registered no less, and rightly so – with a copper undercoat bearing snow-white tassles, the requisite Alien Smelling-Lip and no deficit of caprine masculinity of any kind, but for the magnificent fullness of a male goat’s horns.
In their stable, the mothers-to-be nest side by side now amidst the hay we harvested in the uncanny sun of a lost September. A Mummy (all Darlings love being Mummies), a daughter once unexpected herself, and within them both the ambiguous miracle of beginnings accruing. I can’t open the door without Away in a Manger ringing in my head.
As we approach the season of the Nativity therefore, I thought it timely to consider the content of creation – and then of course, in harmony with this, the creation of content – which fills the void for so many of us immaculately conceived beings now.
Indeed, the soul-smoothed ITBoys selected by DARPA to be cover models for the military’s marketing arm would have us believe we’re nothing more than a bunch of wet computers, living in a program only machines can help us understand. Yet nonetheless, each one of us cups somewhere inside us an undisclosed incandescence that, regardless of its efforts, ChatGPT can’t even yearn to understand.
As the Christmas nights offer and withdraw their minuscule ice flowers then, and we curl up with the Darlings to ruminate on the wonder of life, this episode of Walking With Goats is offered as a present wrapped in many layers: a tribute to the essence that each of us lives to realise.
This is Obi.
Or more precisely, this was Obi in early February of 2021 when she made her surprise appearance on planet earth. Original Burtie, it turned out, not only couldn’t be trusted around his daughter Nettle – he couldn’t actually be trusted on the same farm as his daughter Nettle, kept in separate paddocks, on opposing sides of tall locked gates. I have no idea of the circumstances of creation which gave rise to the universe of cells forming Obi, but she took her place in the role call of goat souls around me: a double-Burtie offering to the world.
Regardless of any sneaking suspicions which that world might have had about her prospects, Obi grew to be not only healthy but predominant; out before the four boys who were also birthed that springtime, her tiny white frame could be seen leaping and careering in pole position. Far from the family’s shameful secret, Obi had chutzpah. Obi was one go-getting sassy gal.
Sometimes the most unexpected gifts can be treasures.
When Nettle moved away from us however, Obi went along with her mother, leaving the boys behind her for the last time. Tender and dedicated to her daughter despite her own youth, Nettle deserved to keep Obi by her side. And so it was that I didn’t see Obi for another two years, while she grew up, from feisty fluff-ball to developed doe.
And Obi was a doe – despite the uncanny resemblance to her father/grandfather that had manifested by the time we met again, Obi was female. She was female… whatever the other does seemed to think. For without a resident Burtie this year – heats coming and going throughout October – there was only one object of lust on the farm. One by one each nanny goat slowly came to the conclusion that Obi was the closest thing to a Burtie they were going to get.
Thorne is a domineering queen even on passive days and heat periods for goats are not passive. Poor Obi spent Thorne’s heat galloping around the field, never more than three feet ahead, while Thorne’s affections brought up the rear.
Life is a rich tapestry, no less complex than the interplay of bodies within the cosmos. There are lines that run between the generations of which we live unaware. All goats’ bleats are individual and distinguishable from the others’ in their flock, and yet Obi, a doe – indeed a Mummy Soon – possesses a voice of remarkable conveyance, peculiar enough that it took me some days to place after her return, and I stopped to laugh in the field, looking back at her as I realised that it was Burtie’s, speaking to me as if from beyond the grave.
I have told you the story of Burtie’s life – and of his death – before. In front of our Christmas tree now, his skin lays covering the threadbare patches of our carpet. Close by, across the kitchen’s only armchair – itself patched and repatched many times – Obsidian’s dark coat lies. And beside the kitchen’s other door, Nettle’s brother, Neptune’s, much smaller copper skin.
I live with their memories every day. There isn’t an occasion when I sit in that chair or cross those thresholds without each presence coming to mind, their unique personalities and the moments that their lives were taken. I loved them all.
The consumption of meat, or of the dairy that leads inevitably to male children who cannot be kept when they become violent – to us, each other or their female flock members – is a decision I make over and over. I try to understand and hold the cost of my own existence. I cannot live on cabbage, though I grew over 70 this year, or potatoes which are blighted every August by the heavy rains of Wales despite all my previous months of effort. I would never cause an animal to suffer the fear and confusion of live transport, going to market or to an abattoir, but primarily I perform the killing and butchery myself because it is my responsibility to live with the deaths I cause.
Skewered by the past, my present seems translucent. Shot through with the rays of others’ lives.
In the information torrent of the present age, it’s a luxury, I suppose, to spend time seeking meaning. But I can’t help thinking that once, before, we didn’t need to look.
We’ve lost the stories of the stars now of course and their significance is mapped in laws of motion only. Here we stand in our endless rotation, governed by theirs, without narrative or purpose we’re told – and though we know the names of the celestial bodies and of their arrangements, such naming exists for the sake of our great indices alone.
Assisted by machine, the capacity for our species’ knowledge is becoming boundless, and yet our lives have ceased to be penetrated by its weight.
What then is knowledge for?
Let me tell you about another constellation within my home:
At Christmastime, homemade presents were the emblems of our family’s love. I have still, against my wall, the long tray my father made and laid a mosaic of many hundreds of tiny tiles across. Opposite stands the oak seat he fashioned to exactly match a desk I’d purchased. The ceramics my mother makes for us fill the house, bear our names, serve the functions most looked-for by each of us: a giant breakfast mug, a serving dish of 20-person-banquet size, a money box or bedside candle stand.
The thought-that-counts still resonates from each object, even now that, in my father’s case, the thinker’s gone.
Like an impact on water, our consciousness radiates beyond us.
Fran’s memories of Christmas are imbued with even deeper waves. A refugee who flew Hungary with her brother as a child, Fran’s mother left a memoir of her life under Russian occupation that offers insight into the bright, still heart of what Christmas means to their family.
With their permission, I reproduce a section of the text here, which tells a story of great pain. Fran says that her mother would have wanted as many people as possible to hear it. She was determined that such things should never be forgotten – so that they would never take place again.
The whole family was together because in Hungary it is usual to celebrate Christmas Eve with the family whereas Christmas Day was reserved for friends and acquaintances. We were just settling down to a delicious looking dinner of stuffed goose, (given as a present from our relatives in the country), when the doorbell rang. Everyone went silent, the whole family was there and as it was highly unusual to have visitors, we knew something bad was about to happen. Some Party Big Wigs came into the room, they wanted a Christmas dinner too, so my father kindly offered them some wine and some goose and everything carried on much as it would have if they had not been there, albeit noticeably quieter. It was a lovely Dinner, after which we opened our presents. I remember my brother and I were given a doll each, and some nice books. Now these large bakelite creations were far from beautiful, it would not be an overstatement to say they were frighteningly hideous. They did however have one interesting feature, a soft tummy. I was just about to perform a detailed operation to examine the internal organs of this pink faced monster when one of our unwelcome guests, fuelled on a bottle of wine and half a bottle of palinka, asked “Who bought you all these presents?” I looked up from my operating table that I had fashioned from my brand new copy of Mischy and the Elephant. I knew the answer to this, it would not be like the mathematics class last week when I got stuck on my eight times tables. I smiled and proudly said “the Baby Jesus of course.” As soon as I said it I knew it was a wrong answer. The smile on my face froze and I looked around the room for help. No-one would give it to me. Father just stared into space looking as if he were about to cry. Fear filled the room, I could feel a trickle of urine running down my leg and I kept mouthing “Baby Jesus” silently choking on the words.
Father was ordered to pack a bag and take his coat. The party was over. He disappeared for about a week and I thought it was all my fault. I am sure this is the reason why I hate all dolls and not just because the one I was given was so terrifying.
When Father came back, he was rather quiet and we knew we must not ask him any questions about his adventures, for we were told he had gone on an exciting voyage to Timbuctoo. Everyone knew this was a lie, but a part of me still desperately wanted to believe it was true. Later we found out that he was reprimanded severely, and told to manage his family a little better in the future. I should have said that the presents were from Stalin Papa. And from then on I always thought before I spoke.
As far as the meaning in our own lives is concerned – Fran and I – being able to make this blog and share it with you constitutes large part. We work together, sending halfthoughts back and forth, completing them for one another: this thing is alike to such and such, oh, oh, that’s just like this.
The universe is filled with resonances.
We talked about what Christmas means to us and why. We touched upon her mother’s story. And she remembered then, the bookend to it, which took place much later in that childhood. The thoughts we send to one another are staccato, and that’s what you’ll find here, but I wanted to include Fran’s voice as she tells the second part to me, deep in the middle of our memory exchange: listen here.
Disease is pertinent throughout Fran’s mother’s memoir, used as it was to instil fear and dissuade the populace from attempting to cross the border. The Austrians were filthy, she was told as a child, rife with virus.
I for one, she says, before she and her brother run from Hungary, did not want to catch any nasty Austrian disease.
As we come together this year, without glass screens, far closer than six feet apart, as we kiss under the mistletoe or hug one another in thanks for our gifts, the essence of each of our understandings of Christmas will radiate through generations, over deaths, past lost years.
A practitioner of Chinese medicine whom I am thankful to know spoke of ancestral disease to me as he treated my RA. It’s not ours, life, he said. It’s just like this – and he pulled a curtain back and forth where it hung beside us – We each just get a go on the washing line.
Everyone’s super interested in what consciousness is made of these days so they can design a version with predictive thought completion and price a monthly subscription. The stream of consciousness that mounts its neverending tide of present narrative across the internet is mapped in realtime to unlock the pattern of its truth. The ‘global mind’ will be the rolling sum of every Youtube Short and OkCupid Like and Reddit thread and Fitbit pulse that there has ever been, all intersecting and interreacting and so on and so forth. An ocean without shores.
In this tide – as underneath so many colonial invasions of the past – the voices of our ancestors are erased. With their net-nannies and net-grannies, the children of a new-age, cosmetically-enhanced fascism are fed narratives of ever decreasing weight and depth. The dimension of meaning is being robbed from us.
Birth is meaningless without death. The two are one, forever intertwined. Christ’s significance – as I understand it – was the telic end inherent in the start. The completion of the story begins in the manger.
While we secrete death behind locked gates, ship it off in lorries we don’t see, hide it in residential homes and hospices and monitor it with fluffy robot cats, the life we are left with becomes unlived; immune to meaning.
What is it that penetrates the cosmos of our cells to light us up and make us more than automata? It is a flame that every one of must nurture.
In The Physics of Collective Consciousness (knowledge of which I wish to thank Alison Mcdowell for), physicist – and musician – Atilla Grandpierre writes that “the simple, exclusively neural model of consciousness is… counter indicated by some basic observations… Consciousness is ‘per se’ a collective phenomenon.” The speed of thought necessary for awareness and response, the transmission of emotion between young children or during mass hysteria, the “Reutler-effect” of reciprocal muscle contractions and even the occurrence of the paranormal, “all of these phenomena may be interpreted by an electromagnetic field model of consciousness.” And such a field, he says, is not confined to our small bodies. “The Earth, the Sun, the stars, and the galaxies… also… show fundamental life phenomena and signs of sensitive interconnectedness.” Living cells, research now shows, emit biophoton radiation reaching out from us to ten orders of magnitude in a fractal form.
I can only encourage you to read this paper, which delineates a universe of intricate beauty, imbued with meaning resonating from the tiniest particle to the greatest star.
This is the content of our creation.
I need to go outside to feed The Darlings soon. Day has come and today it rains. There are enough bales left on the stack untouched by the many constant drips that I believe they will eat the hand-turned hay until after Christmas. Perhaps into 2024.
What a number. What a weight of responsibility: to walk forwards into that future.
I’m glad the goats are coming with me. I hope that you’ll come too. I hope that we’ll make stories that are worthwhile retelling for the children who will one day stand tall to replace us.
I hope that the meaning we make will be something that they can hold in their hands.
For now,
Merry Christmas.
And a Happy New Year.
R xxx
winter oak 
More impressive sentences than I can count. And your face is as lovely as your writing. Thank you.
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