We try and live simply but the world is complex. It has always been this way. It is early autumn and I am standing in the sheep shed of our farm.
Before me stand twelve sheep. They are, to be precise, twelve hoggets, the name we give to maiden females. These twelve ladies are mine.
I have bought them from my parents with the money I earned from my words, from my books. I am a shepherd for the first time in my life. I am in the twilight of my youth and the budding of my middle age.
I am older than Christ when he died and the same age as Buddha when he attained enlightenment. Both figures have walked beside me for so many years now. They have been part of my continuance in ways I think that count for some good, though I’m no sage.
I’ve known sheep for seven years now. Seven years as a farmhand, seven years as a midwife and seven years, at times, as an undertaker. It has been a long apprenticeship.
I came home to Ireland from Australia to try my hand at being a writer, but in the process, I became a farmer. It happened naturally: it began with the sheep. It has been a sojourn into the earth and its creatures, albeit one in which I have never been an owner, never before as a farmer in my own right.
I have bought the twelve animals for many reasons but perhaps one, the most important, is that they are a stake in the future but sheep also challenge you to live in the now. I like this mission. I must be ready for both situations, and as I look at the girls in front of me, I come.
