Three years ago I set out on a mission. I wanted to farm 12 sheep on our family farm and, in the process, learn about life along the way. It was a sojourn into the spiritus mundi. The sheep were a way for me to gain a foothold in a search that had taken me across the world in recent years. I was looking for the meaning of life.
It started in a different phase. I had completed a book and was suffering from what my wife called burnout. I called it soul tiredness. I was empty and worn, and try as I did to write and start new projects, little came. There were flits of ideas – a book on Aboriginal Australian rock art, a project on awe – but when it came down to it, each idea withered and died, and I found myself facing empty pages and aborted documents.
It was at this time that John Clare, the English pastoral poet, came into my life. Clare, long dead, was someone who had written about farming life, albeit in the 1800s. He had a line that spoke of being in the cathedral of nature, of sleeping in an untroubled land where the grass was below and the vaulted sky was above, where one could abide with one’s creator.
I do not know what it was about that stanza from his poem “I Am!” but it moved me, stirred me and got me thinking about nature again. I threw away my fantasies of books and instead moved into the living sea of the family farm. It was there in that place that I slowed down a once-busy life and settled into nature’s pace.
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When we settle into nature’s pace, great things can happen. We can free our minds and break from the inherited mind pattern, as Eckhart Tolle called it. I bought 12 sheep from my parents, 12 hoggets that we had bred on the farm, and I followed them over a season. There are different jobs to be done with sheep from sheering to dosing and hoof care. They are a gentle creature and need our hands at times to care for them. A sick sheep can be a dead sheep before too long if one is not a watchful shepherd.
When the first lamb arrived, and I pulled him from his mother, I remarked that the quest into wonder didn’t need to be in some far-flung land or some ancient site
In the autumn we put the ram to them and soon they were pregnant, or in lamb as we say, and then I knew that my work had a purpose. I would follow them through a lambing season and with the birth of each of the lambs from the 12 sheep I would gain a new lesson in this thing we call life.
We can, I see now, all gain lessons in our everyday lives but we must be open, we must have the antenna up and the frequency transmitting to imbibe them into our bodies.
To farm is to build a relationship with a beast, with a patch of earth and with the produce of the land. I had been a farmer for a number of years since returning from Australia but this business of being a shepherd in my own right was an important thing. It put my name on the line and made me question the way of things.
For a winter, I dwelt between the sheep shed and my bed, and I began to observe things. I began to think on things. John McGahern was a writer and a man my father used to meet in the livestock marts of Leitrim. Though we never met, he spoke of the local being the universal. That was something that struck me in the sheepshed. This lambing season I was on was connecting me to the business of life all around the country and, as I later came to realise, all around the world.
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In being with the sheep and thinking of their lives and purpose, I went on a great journey. Though I rarely left the shed, I was transported to different places and different times in my life. Many of the journeys that had seemed to be non-sequiturs began to connect. As I gave my labour to the sheep and this job of farming, I thought of the migrant farm workers I worked alongside in the US before the pandemic hit; at other times I was brought back to a spoken-word community that had emerged in Dublin when I was a student and how poetry can follow us and enrich us all our days. Indeed, even walking in the fields was a transportation mode and walking in the fields one day I was reminded of my walks on the Camino in Spain. The connections of the mind meant that though I was in this sheep shed, I was connected to the world. It was a transcendent sort of experience.
When the first lamb arrived, and I pulled him from his mother, I remarked that the quest into wonder didn’t need to be in some far-flung land or some ancient site. Rather, it was here before in the being of a newborn. At our little painting of St Francis in the shed I began to think that beauty was as much as a calling as any great religious quest.
During one of the quiet periods on the farm that winter, I set out to plant trees on the land. Those trees were important to me
When I went to a vet to get medicines or to the local shop to grab a coffee or a sausage roll, I began to realise that the value of a local community in rural Ireland was part of a much larger conversation about the survival of rural communities around the world. We were, I realised, the people of the land, and we all needed each other to form a coherent ecosystem that spoke of renewal and rebirth. That conversation is being played out right now with the survival of rural peoples and what their villages and towns will look like.
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During one of the quiet periods on the farm that winter, I set out to plant trees on the land. Those trees were important to me. They spoke of a promise I was making to the next generation about the environment. The environment was something I thought of then a great deal. That thinking has only grown and matured in the three years since that lambing season. A verdant land is one we all want and one we all need but, as I realised, there was a delicate invisible balance taking place. We could only put so much weight upon a humble beast’s back as my father told me then.
The animals have not changed even though our farming practices have. We would do well to remember that. We would do well to think of not today or tomorrow but, as the Native Americans used to say, six generations into the future.
In farming 12 sheep and their lambs I was no millionaire but I felt a great wealth bestowed upon me. The sheep had put me into a frame of mind where I began to see the richness in everything. Money was important but what I began slowly to realise was it was not everything.
I wanted to learn about life along the way. I wanted I think now to find the meaning of life. I had heard authors and thinkers talk about this quest but perhaps the best answer I came across to this age-old question was the meaning of life is the meaning we give to it.
In being with the sheep and thinking of their lives and purpose, I went on a great journey. Though I rarely left the shed, I was transported to different places and different times in my life
The meaning I gave to myself was to be a shepherd and forget being a writer for a season. I think in ways too a clear meaning that came to me was to slow down. In slowing down, great things can be achieved. When I go on my rounds on the farm this summer and look at the animals in our care I see that the slow wisdom of the land has lifted me. Slow wisdom is I think a great term for this sort of insight. In slowing down, we can see the connection of everything to something. We are all in this together.
And what of the burnout? The soul tiredness did pass and, in its wake, I emerged a new person, a new sort of writer. I thought and felt more. I spoke less. I listened again. If we can listen to the land speak, great things can be accomplished.
Weeks turned to months and then years, and the lambs of that first year are long gone, but the memory of all they taught me is with me each day. Under that vaulted sky, I found a missing part of life; I found myself.
It is, I think, all our job to find ourselves at different times in life. Sometimes, we need 12 sheep to do that but it is my hope that, having taken this journey, others can follow me and find their own 12 sheep, be they real or imagined. We all need teachers; we all need to be shepherds from time to time.
And what of the meaning of life? Well, I think I have found it, or part of it at least, and what it means to me.
As I write this piece I look at pictures in my office window of sheep. When I look at them I feel happy and that counts for so much. The great pachamama or earth mother has much to teach us and I see now that the journey with the sheep was only the beginning of a road to learning about life.
Farming and writing have a place that fits together for me now. Art is not something reserved just for the city, I can see that now. Everything has a sense of belonging. Maybe that is the great teaching, the great meaning that we all belong.
This morning, I went to see the sheep in the rain. They stood serene and calm and I thought not of all the jobs I had to do this day but rather about how I was happy in this moment. That seizing of moments has made all the difference. All things are equal I see that now and am happy in my work.
John Connell is a multi-award-winning author, journalist and film producer. He farms on his organic family farm Birchview in Co Longford. His latest book is 12 Sheep, published by Atlantic books
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