Temperatures are falling. Quickly. It is lambing season on the homestead. That means fully insulated regalia, stuff you wear maybe ten times a year when you have to be in the cold for extended periods. Carhartt bibs and jackets. Insulated gloves. Home made hats and scarves and socks–all from wool, of course. The older I get, the more I need them (and appreciate them). My wife has been up all night with a troubling labor, on shepherd’s vigil for a slow birthing ewe. She handles the evenings and I get the early mornings, but tonight she stayed with the ewe until 3 am. My sleep was fitful. Dogs bark. Their mistress needs protecting. I wake.
I am reading in between visits with this ewe, reading from the “Introduction” to a book being shared online via CLMOOC #AffinityGroups, Affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning. Mimi Ito asserts there, “We orient our questions and methods to problems in practice as much as scholarly debates.” My own question echoes in my head, “Is there anything more pragmatic than what my wife and I have been “practicing” all night long and for more than thirty years?” An affinity network of two and you, dear nature.
I turn to randomly read a few pages from a biography of Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature. It occurs to me that her life as a writer and shepherd and artist is the perfect blend of practice and scholarly action. Her depiction of Peter Rabbit (the real one) is full of love and warmth and, yes, affinity.
Most of our affinity spaces as shepherds have been in the field, but some has been in shared texts. Sheep books. For example, one of these affinity texts is a filthy-thumbed paperback copy of Ron Parker’s The Sheep Book . Parker quit the academic life as a tenured geology professor to live the ultimate affinity space–a farm and its natural systems.
As you can see in the photo at the top of the post, I read my affining spirits: academic & animal & practical & theoretical. In a few minutes I will return to the barn and “orient my questions and methods to problems and practices” arising there where there is nary an online affinity space in sight.
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In this space
of two, of me
and you, and
every lamb
and ewe, we
find our way
forward into
the day, nary
a network in
sight, for night
covers these
strange connections
that hold us
together
— a smallpoem, taken somewhere from the surface of your post
Kevin
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I wonder if the word “affinity” space does not apply as much as “communal space” in this example.
When you are this close to nature, to new life being created, that is as close to communion with an almighty power, and the force that gives life to all of us, as I can think of.
The books you read, people you learn from, that help you on the farm, in the classroom, and in life are a different type of community, or affinity space, at least in my imagination.
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In my annotations I used colored masking tape (washi tape) to ‘survey’ the page into ‘fields’. So…I feel that all of these spaces are of a piece, land viewed from a satellite with no borders but the natural ones. It is confusing. We map onto things that don’t really exist as we think they do. I really do believe in the power of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. And that subsumes all the other spaces. The Buddhists have this thing about “discrimination”. All our sufferings arise from discrimination. I don’t quite buy it, but only because I am such a skeptic/curmudgeon/iconoclast. I really like what Sheri has said about CLMOOC though–a newly born affinity space much like the examples they cite in Mimi Ito’s book only smaller. As always and as ever, your thoughts are a touchstone. Grateful.