May 1, 2010

"Happy Uno de Mayo", writes my friend Mike B in Montana.  He likes to celebrate a lot so he names days, most of them so he can have another excuse to go out to lunch and mess with peoples minds.  Here's how I responded and a little bit more.



Holy Crappie (Mike), I almost forgot; mostly because I was learning the lessons of the cattlemen yesterday.  All in all April ended like a lion.  May enters with a bluster.  I had a heifer try to deliver a calf head first yesterday.  I saved the heifer, lost the calf.  I'm trying Lyn's patience and soul with this "Cowboy" stuff.  It's a long story and one for the books for sure.  If I could learn that much about anything in one day I would have only had to live 10 years to know everything knowable.  So, I have a big old tired heifer walking around with a umbilical cord hanging out of her oven door, a plastic bag full of calf, seven curious on lookers waiting their turn at being in the stable with the 'fat guy in a baseball cap' and a wife with the soul of a saint slapping her forehead and trying to make sense out of it all.  In the meantime Tess the hunting dog runs around the yard with her nose in the air scenting like the greatest smell in the universe was dropped in her playground and 'the old man' is real bitchy about her wanting to have some fun with the offal.

Adjusting to reality,

May Day, May Day; we've lost an engine and we're going down....
_______________


 As you can see it was not just another day on the Blue Moon Farm yesterday.  The rains of late have me keeping the cows in so my paddocks aren't pugged to hell, but boy oh girl is the green side up now.  These heifers are biting at the cud to get into them and grab bucket loads at a time to mangle in their muzzles and re-chew when they find an old bale pile to lay on and slobber on themselves for a few hours.  I can tell they are perturbed about the heifer going through the post-partum blues, trying to push out her afterbirth and laying around the shelter where her dead calf lay yesterday.



I never realized how much cows were telling the cowboys I met out west or read about in my 'Gabby Hayes' childhood.  I'm reading Jeremy Rifken's book The Empathic Civilization and I'm in the section on 'mirror neurons' and the role they play in not only humans, but now scientists say, in many kinds of mammals and other animals maybe too.  These neurons are the ones that fire up when you are feeling like telling one of your soulmates in distress, "I know just how you feel".  Apparently these collected cells do the job of mimicking feelings quite well enough that in fact we are having the same 'feelings' as that affected other.  Sure, maybe not exactly the intensity or full force impact of say a friend who has just miscarried or been diagnosed with a cancer, but the feelings are the same they say because we share these little "mirrors" into the souls of a distressed clansman or loved one.  As I mentioned in the past in this blog. "I Am A Strange Loop" by Dr. Douglas Hofstadter tells us this and more using metaphors like ice cream to suck us into his Malt Shoppe of mental dinning on the wonders of how we connect to other souls and keep them with us as long as we're able to recall events with them.

So now we have loops that web our tribes of Facebook and Twitter friends and family into our mind-souls.  And we have hardware in our braincases making sure we can have 'real' empathy for others and in all likelihood these devices are evolved to keep us civil and able to cope with the ever expanding abilities of 'techdom' that widen our tribal connections on a global scale.  As Rifken says, language probably evolved out of hand signals that evolved from mutual grooming, the basis of our empathetic nature.  Goodness, are we getting to know ourselves here or what?  That being so, I'm also seeing that it was right in front of our faces all the time, some smart guys are just writing the history of the obvious if you can let yourself go and watch the workings of small societies like my little herd of cows.

As the heifer lay in the cattle shelter yesterday "mooing" after I took away the dead calf I thought I could hear something in that "mooing" I'd never heard before, a simple form of forlornness or loss.  Not just hear it, but feel it in a way I've never done before.  Outside the corral surrounding the shelter stood seven herdmates looking in with all the curiosity of fellow pregnant teenagers at heifer No. 839. the lamentable post partum almost a mother .  Wondering.  I think I could feel them wondering what was going on with 839.  They had been in and tried to sniff the dead calf, but were only allowed to look as 839 stood guard over the limp carcass grumble-'mooing threats it seemed and keeping them back.

A herd is a herd.  Somehow knowing that our mirror neurons are helping us cope and identify with a fellow member is not necessarily helpful emotionally, but on the other hand it makes it all seem more real than it was the day before.

One never knows what the day will bring.  Some days, like today it is rain.  And some days like yesterday it is  rain that is far more than wetness.

The Blue Moon Farmer