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My neck seized up in mid-January. It was the same week federal agents started murdering people on the streets of Minneapolis. I couldn’t turn my head much more than an inch in either direction. I couldn’t turn away. I could only stare straight ahead, fully present to the ongoing brutality.

The neck symbolizes communication. It’s the bridge between thought and action. It’s a junction that I routinely neglect because communicating my inner world and opening myself up to public scrutiny often feels terrifying. These fears immobilize me as I open the Substack app and shy away from hitting publish week after week, unsure of what to say amidst the horror of this moment (though the horrors are certainly not new in the context of US empire). It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that my neck froze as the terror escalated, my body forcing me to stay present and attuned even as I wavered in how to respond.1

That same week, the dog had pieces of rope coming out of her anus.

A few weeks prior to that, I spent fourteen hours in a vet ER in Agoura Hills for another anus-adjacent emergency on a friend’s cat I was caring for. And now this wily German shorthaired pointer, in her owner’s absence and with me laid up, decides to swallow her dog toy. Inconvenient.

And just this morning, at my third pet-sit in less than two months, the dog honked down a rodent, bones and all, and has been hurling up its remains ever since. I keep getting drawn into these highly inconvenient digestive crises, reckoning daily with the symbolism of the anus, which offers a lesson in releasing our grip. These animals and their anal issues keep nudging me towards surrender, reminding me that inconvenience is often beyond my control.

When the sheep escape onto the local highway.

When a ewe lags behind the herd on a miles-long move from valley to valley, and a few of us stay back to tend to her wounds in the heat.

When the horse wedges his hoof in the fence while craning his neck toward greener grass.

These are some of the inconveniences I signed up for when I chose to work with animals. They are the ones that most reliably pull me out of my own head and into something larger and more meaningful. When the sheep escape in the middle of the night, I am temporarily freed of the tendency to wallow in my individual anxieties–I must rise to meet the inconvenience head-on, because the herd’s safety depends on it. I often wonder if I continue to choose this work precisely because I too often opt for convenience everywhere else, and this is the universe’s not-so-subtle way of edging me towards the discomfort of presence and surrender.

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In my state of reduced mobility, I finally quit Spotify. I’d been putting it off for months because the timing wasn’t ever right, because learning a new platform and transferring playlists felt like a big lift (took all of 15 minutes). I am disturbed by how intolerant I’ve become of inconvenience, by how often efficiency wins out over my values. But unlike the inevitable catastrophes that arise when working with animals, these are the types of inconveniences that I can actually control.

Increasing inconvenience, or friction-maxxing (🤮) has gone viral recently as a method for boosting happiness in our daily lives. It’s the latest life hack: even inconvenience can be optimized for self-improvement. Tell that to your pet sitter as they ever-so patiently wipe up puke all morning. I cringe at the branding and mainstreaming of inconvenience, a concept that is so fundamental to life on earth. But despite the insufferable repackaging, I want more inconvenience in my life, not as a lifestyle hack, but as a practice of presence and a tool for change.

I want to go to the library and get lost in the stacks without a roadmap instead of having everything delivered via algorithm to my e-reader. I want to stop by my neighbor’s house for coffee even though it’s out of my way. I want to choose the less user-friendly platform even if the learning curve is high. I want to channel the energy of people who organize against ICE, who stand in their way, who reserve hotel rooms so they have nowhere to sleep, who blast ear-piercing music outside their windows at night. I want to channel the vast history of union workers who choose temporary hardship in order to demand more dignified conditions that benefit all workers in the long-run. Inconvenience as disruption. Inconvenience as resistance. Inconvenience as strategy.

Has human life ever been convenient? Why do we expect it to be now?

Convenience is sold to us as an individual right. It was once the purview of the wealthy, but the erosion of our communal and local structures has forced folks of all economic backgrounds to opt in. What full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford to spend an hour driving to the hardware store for a pack of screws when amazon delivers them cheaper and faster? Convenience promises more time, more energy, more freedom. But freedom for what? To work more? To consume more? To scroll through an endless feed of curated lives while our connection to real-life community dissolves? We are overworked, underpaid, under-resourced and now totally dependent on these systems that reinforce this gnarly hyper-individualism. Convenience offers empty efficiency while distracting us from the day-to-day care and responsibility we owe each other.

As Janaya Future Khan says on Dark Woke, “community matters more than convenience.” The more we orient our lives around convenience, the less we invest in the small, often annoying, acts that sustain thriving communities. And the less connected we are, the more easily we become divided, brittle and breakable. Inconvenience builds resilience. Inconvenience requires us to be present to each other’s needs and emergencies, to the realities of this moment. When I stop to aid that lagging sheep, when I am up at 3AM helping a ewe give birth, when my friend brings me food and offers to drive me and my obstinate neck to urgent care–this is us engaging in all of the inconvenient activities that sustain a herd, a community. All of these cumulative, seemingly small actions are the infrastructure of collective power. They are also what resistance is actually made of: not necessarily grand gestures, but the daily willingness to show up even when it feels irritating.

With my neck immobile, I’ve had no choice but to be present. My head won’t turn towards what has already happened or what might happen next. All that exists is what falls directly within my narrow field of vision. So I learn to live moment by moment. Like last year at this time, when I was recovering from top surgery, I rewatch Schitt’s Creek, a show I first binged in 2020 with a pinched nerve I got from slipping on some infamous Vermont ice, a few days into a new farm job and a few weeks into lockdown. I learn the same lessons about forced presence in the face of inconvenience as I prop myself up with pillows and braces to support the weight of my head. I meditate in the sun, I read where I can, I take the dog on slow and deliberate walks, I scrounge through the pantry for snacks that require little effort. I gently move my neck in small circles, small actions that amount to meaningful change each day.

Inconvenience is a shared condition and it looks different for each of us depending on our contexts. So how are you willing to generate a bit more inconvenience in your own life? How can you leverage inconvenience as a tool to disrupt business-as-usual, and to stay present to the needs of this moment and to the people around you?

OTHER UPDATES

• The second issue of The Hitching Post (formerly The Roundup) is out now! It’s a 16-page newspaper all about queer country dance across the US and beyond. Order here!

• I am on a bit of a line dance sabbatical these days but have a few classes and events cooking for March (stay tuned) AND Dancing in the Valley: A Queer Country Dance Retreat returns to Ojai on April 18! Save the date!! A day of workshops and an evening of social dancing for queer folks and allies at the Simoore Grange :)

• I now have an analog newsletter! More info to come, but paid subscribers of this newsletter now get all the digital stuff plus 4 analog newsletters delivered to your door each year (one each quarter, around the equinoxes and solstices). First one ships out in a month! Upgrade before then to get the first installment.

• VC Defensa has been holding trainings around ICE preparedness protocols in Ojai and Ventura. Save their number in your phone to report any ICE activity in your area and if you are in another part of California, find your local rapid response network here.

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It’s been six months since I last wrote a newsletter! I’m known for always being busy, for always having a few too many irons in the fire, but these past several months have been a bit much, even for me. After top surgery in February, I reluctantly surrendered to stillness. My days blurred into a rhythm of rest – I read books, I drank broth, I fell asleep to the hypnotizing vocal fry of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on The Simple Life. Sometimes I could let go and stretch into this luxurious leisure time, letting my body soften into the couch cushions, my mind drifting nowhere in particular. And sometimes the quiet was excruciating, as piercing as the physical pain radiating from my chest.

I was so uncomfortable. Not just in my physical body as it worked so hard to heal, but in my mind, as I navigated my sudden abundance of free time. I thought about the sheep, how they grazed and ruminated across a lifetime, unbothered by a bubbling drive to produce. Their days were generally calm and uneventful, and while I tried to channel their ability to be okay with doing nothing, I couldn’t untether my worth from my body’s output. So I turned my own healing into its own form of labor. Did I walk around the block? Did I massage the lymph? Did I sip the broth, swallow the supplements, sleep through the night? Check, check, check.

Jenny Odell’s claim that “nothing is harder to do than nothing” resonated in these moments of tension.1 Capitalism, my German upbringing and my own relentless drive to multitask all conspired to transform my rest into failure. Without my typical buzz of motion, I drifted into a staggering depression. The spaciousness of rest unveiled a pulsing loneliness that I often mask with work and busyness.2 Work has always been my shield, a fortress against intimacy and a way to distract myself from feeling alone on this spiraling rock. Work meant belonging, and it formed the scaffolding of my identity - who even was I in the absence of labor, in the absence of a constant grind?

By March, I had thrown myself back into the rhythm of work with a puritanical zeal – restaurant shifts, grazing school programming, writing projects, film shoots, line dance events, a freaking entire newspaper. If I wasn’t back to staring at a screen and furiously tippity-tapping away on a keyboard, I was out filming pickup shots for Herd Dances or practicing new line dances in the kitchen. I hustled extra hard, as if to make up for the month I lost, led by guilt and shame as I ran from the ache of stillness, desperately trying to hang onto some semblance of my identity.

It should come as no surprise that someone who works with livestock would be addicted to work. In agriculture, overwork is mythologized and exhaustion is sanctified. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes how bureaucratic systems flatten the complexity of rural life into numbers and quotas: fields are productive units, animals are assets, labor is a line item in the ledger. Our worth (and that of our pastures) is measured in yields and outputs. If we raise food or fiber, we are producers, not just human beings. And we wear the pride of never stopping like armor.

But the actual work of feeding an orphaned lamb at 2am, bottle warm against my palm, depletion throbbing dully behind my eyes, cannot be quantified. Nor can the work of walking fence lines in torrential rains, checking for breaks and the thousand other metaphorical fissures that can unravel a day. This work of tending is relational. It exists outside the metrics of productivity. It is care work.

Like many industries, agriculture necessitates a deep self-less dedication that doesn’t know the boundaries of the clock. In her book, Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe notes that in sectors where the labor is considered a “calling” – teaching, caregiving, art, (farming) – the expectation is that workers should be motivated by passion alone, and therefore willing to accept less pay, less security and fewer rights. The passion for the work justifies the exploitation. I have loved the animals and land in my care, but that love has been weaponized to guilt me into pushing past exhaustion, to working through injury, to sacrificing my creative practice, my relationships, and rest.

Silvia Federici, too, reminds us in Re-enchanting the World that care work, whether in the home or the field, is often feminized, and is thus rendered invisible. It is labor made illegitimate by a world that only honors extraction. Agriculture, especially livestock work, falls into this shadow. It is essential and yet undervalued. So we hustle to prove ourselves, to make our work legible to systems that don’t value slowness, softness, or a more gentle form of stewardship.

And like domestic work, farming has lost its collectivity. What was once shared work – fields tilled together, flocks tended in community – has fractured into the lonely labor of individuals or couples. Most graziers I know never stop working. We stumble through it alone, medicating our exhaustion, tricked by a hyper-individualistic system into believing that this is the only way. Our identities as shepherds, ranchers and farmers are so intimately bound together with this back-breaking labor.

So when I’m plunging into burnout while racing from one project to the next, chastising myself for not getting enough done, I try to remember that burnout is not a personal failure. It is, instead, the logical endpoint of living in a system that worships productivity. In agriculture, burnout shows up in quiet ways: when the sunrise no longer feels like a gift, when sheep bleats transform into a dull drone, when the body keeps moving but the spirit has withered. And still, we work.

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But sheep, as always, offer another possibility.

Sheep can’t be rushed. They teach us to slow down and to observe. Shepherding demands a kind of presence that resists urgency: spotting the subtleties of body language, dreaming about the integrity of the fence, learning to read the herd’s whims in the angles of its ears. Some days, I walk the fence line slowly and deliberately, feeling the tension in the wire, breathing deep in the cool air. Other days, I sit in the pasture and just watch. The sky bends, the grass leans into the wind, tails bat away flies. This watching matters. To sit and observe is to let the days expand, to let my body rest against the rhythm of the herd. In a world that demands endless productivity, there is quiet rebellion in doing nothing but witnessing. The sheep remind me that this sort of care is not always measured in output or metrics and that pausing is also a form of tending.

So what are the solutions to work addiction? What are the lessons to be learned in letting a pasture rest? What would it mean to choose slowness, to bake it into my daily life instead of waiting until I have no choice? Making more time for community building and friendship? Reading for pleasure without feeling guilt around my piles of unread emails? Lying in the grass from time to time? Bobbing in the ocean waves once a week to feel a novel weightlessness?

What if I measured my worth not in what I produce but in how deeply I can listen to the land, to others, and to myself? What if stillness could become its own form of devotion, not a failure of productivity but a return to what matters? The sheep slowly teach me this. They don’t care about my output. They care that I show up and that I notice. And I am slowly learning that this is enough.

~ SOME ANNOUNCEMENTS ~

• If you are in need of food in the Ojai area, check out the Ojai Crop Swap table at the Meiners Oaks Community Garden. Perishable goods for the taking. And if you have food to offer, leave some there!

• Line dancing with the Spinning Spurs in Ventura, CA is moving night and location! New home is Bombay Bar & Grill on Thursdays 6:30-9 (except the 2nd thurs of the month). BUT Nov, Dec and Jan are weird because of holidays so I am just doing 11/20, 12/4 and 12/18. Regular schedule resumes 1/15. Come dance!

• I’m teaching at this very fun queer line dance camp at the Woman’s Club in Ojai on 11/22. An all-day affair! There is a big beginner block in the morning for folks who have been curious about line dancing, so sign up!

  Thanks for reading Draw Boy! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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It’s a dusty Saturday morning in the canyons of LA county with daytime temperatures climbing into the 110s. My fellow shepherds and I gather together to move a herd of 600 sheep and goats through thick chaparral to their new grazing area. We herd sheep across these rolling hills for a living, the brittle landscape crackling beneath our feet as we trample mustard and brush in preparation for fire season. The sheep travel in a mob, led ever forward by the scent of fresh feed, by the hope and promise of grasses not yet touched by their teeth and soil not yet grooved by their hooves. They move like a wave across the landscape, undulating in smooth currents, flowing together as one body like water over rocks, through dense vegetation, and amidst boulders that tower to the sky.

As prey animals, sheep seek the refuge of the herd, the intrinsic protection of a vast networked community. A single sheep is vulnerable, prickling at seemingly negligible changes in their immediate environment, ears always alert to predator activity nearby. But when enveloped in the herd, sheep are shielded from potential danger. I often hear the refrain that sheep lack intelligence, but really, they are just collectivists who operate within a shared methodology of the herd that prioritizes community care, safety and support for its members.

Moving the sheep just one mile occupies the entire morning. We move slowly and deliberately, observing the patterns of their body language, movements and curiosities. As shepherds, we sink into this corporeal language with the placement of our bodies in order to gently guide the herd across the landscape. Being in and with a herd requires a deep awareness of movement: how we move individually and in a group, how we impact each other when we move, how we shape a space and change the way it feels as we move. Moving like a herd is a form of communication that extends beyond the verbal, drawing messages from deep in our bones.

As I scan the shape of the herd cascading through these canyons, I reflect on our own capacity for community-building and mutual group entanglement. I teach country line dancing in Ventura and am a constant witness to the power that surfaces through collective movement, through moving like a herd. Line dancing requires us to adhere to specific patterns of steps in order to move together as one body in unison. Our understanding of a common movement language fosters a sense of safety while generating an unbridled euphoria made manifest in high kicks, sultry hips and hitches to the heavens. The dynamics of the sheep herd are so intimately present in the ways in which we line dancers follow each other, learn from each others’ bootsteps when choreography eludes us, in how we shape space as we flow like water across the landscape of the hardwood floor. Dancing as a herd provides direction and a sense that we are heading towards an elsewhere of our own making, and on the dancefloor, that elsewhere is founded in a deep and abiding care for each other.

Why is moving together in synchronicity so alluring, so incredibly potent and entrancing? Because, counter to dominant American narratives that insist on the primacy of individualism under capitalism, we are herd animals. Because we, too, can be prey animals in certain contexts and we have survived as a species by trusting our companions and by seeking the shelter of the human herd. Collective dance drops us both into our bodies and into these ancient rhythms of physical collaboration. Line dancing helps us remember through group movement that we, like sheep, have an ancient connection to alliance, reciprocity, and to the cooperative nature of the herd.

So, when I hear chatter about the idiocy of sheep, I have to ask, what if the lessons we learn from our ancient relationship to these animals and to the way they move in a herd is actually a tangible model for our collective futures? What if being a sheep, rather than being a derogatory insult, instead signified a deep care for others? What if being a sheep were a point of pride and a recognition that we are all entitled to our common inheritance of a transcendent collectivity? I am certainly ready to be like a sheep and to become part of an assemblage that channels the methodology of the herd onto the dance floor, unfolding together a more collaborative, caring and exuberant future.

My lungs betrayed me as I climbed a slope in Santa Clarita, chasing 600 sheep and goats back into their paddock after they staged a valiant escape. The sun beat down, the sand slipped beneath my feet, and my body rebelled - quads shaking and breathing labored. In an ideal world, shepherds don’t run this much. In an ideal world, we rely on the boundless energy of herding dogs to corral wayward animals on steep inclines. But this world is far from ideal, and sometimes dogs are not available, leaving us to summon the strength ourselves, dragging our aching bodies upwards, lungs ablaze, until even the simple act of breathing becomes a certain torment.

“Do you ever breathe?” Veronique asked as I lay face down on her massage table, prone and vulnerable. Veronique is a petite woman with a face freighted with concern and a mouth that delivers blunt truths in a thick French accent. She has the posture of a balletic swan until you get on her massage table, at which point, she transforms into an unyielding and gruff boxer, pummeling your muscles with precision with her tiny fists. I seek her somatic counsel every five or six months, usually when my body is on the verge of collapse, when the soft animal tissue holding it ~ me ~ together, has frayed its final threads from the physical labor I demand of it.

I told her that the last breath I remembered consciously inhaling was in high school, where I was often doubled over by the track after running a lap, gasping like a fish flung from water. She knew from the armor of my muscles and ribs that I hadn’t really breathed in decades. “Your body will give out,” she warned. “You must relearn how to breathe.” She suggested I plaster post-it note reminders everywhere: mirrors, dashboards, kitchen sinks, fridge shelves. “Do everything you can to start breathing,” she urged. “Once you get back into the habit, it will come naturally.”

Breathing should be effortless. It’s the first thing we do when we enter this world, tethering us to life. Without it, we crumple like flowers without rain. But breathing has been a challenge for me since childhood, each breath laden with emotional weight. At some point, I stopped breathing. I abandoned full inhales and exhales and I kept my breaths short, shallow and clipped. I stopped taking up space with a rising and falling chest and belly. I stopped engaging air with my voice, stopped showing myself to the world, folding ever inward. I confined my breath to the surface of my lungs to keep myself small and to minimize the rounded shape of my chest. To feel the rising and falling of my chest against my shirt as my lungs expanded with air was unbearable, so I avoided it altogether, surrendering vitality and visibility for a sense of safety.

In traditional Chinese medicine and other healing modalities, the lungs are the seat of grief. They reflect how we process sorrow. When we ignore our pain, our lungs ache and protest in the form of shortness of breath or illness. As a teenager, I endured frequent bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis, particularly during puberty, just as my body was changing. My flat chest of childhood grew into a set of annoying globes that were supposed to usher me into womanhood, a space I never wanted to occupy, but that instead offered only anxiety and unease. When I visited a surgeon for a top surgery consultation last year, I learned that I had a “tubular breast defect,” which is essentially an “issue of stunted development.” While my friends were offended by this diagnosis, I felt validated - perhaps my tubular boobs stalled their own development because they never wanted to be there in the first place. All of the coughing and asthma of my youth felt like my lungs’ attempt at expressing the grief around a changing body that I couldn’t yet verbalize.

As my breathing vanished, my shoulders sloped forward and my back curled, concealing the contours of my chest. This contracted posture allowed me to control my body, to flatten myself into a form that was emotionally bearable. Posture is about how we hold ourselves and about how this holding relates to our self-perception within our immediate environments. It’s a declaration about presence, entitlement to space and expression of the self within that space. Posture is about attitude, whose original definition is "a posture of the body supposed to imply some mental state." My physical posture - caved in, cowering, shrinking and constricted - so aptly reflected my internal attitude and a retreat from both internal and external space.

Two years ago, I chased those sheep up that hillside, lungs searing. Around the same time, I received Veronique’s warning to breathe. I took her advice to heart—perhaps unintentionally—by beginning the process of getting top surgery, which I had considered for several years beforehand but had never felt quite worthy of. I didn’t yet understand the interrelatedness of these three events and couldn’t see the thread connecting the shape of my chest to my breathing habits. I didn’t know that the absence of breath was, in fact, grief made visible.

Now, nearly three months out from top surgery, my lungs expand in new ways with every breath, into parts of my torso they had long ago abandoned. I still don’t breathe as deeply as Veronique would likely advise - this is a skill that requires practice and dedication. But I can, at least, breathe with more ease and more lightness, a high from the oxygen pulsing through me. My posture, too, has broadened, shoulders unfurling, chest popping outwards as a reflection of an enhanced internal confidence. I finally feel ready to adopt this posture - this attitude - to make it my own, to soften into a version of myself that feels freer, lighter and more whole.

I spent the past few days like a pack mule, hauling electric fences up and over the steep terrain of Mount Washington in LA, and while I can’t say that I am eager to chase sheep at full speed up these sandy inclines again, I now feel better equipped to collaborate with my lungs if the occasion should ever arise. I trust my lungs to fill with oxygen and to carry me where I need to go, as they trust me to provide the space they need to thrive.

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~ some announcements ~

WOOL PROCESSING WORKSHOP on May 10 in Ojai, CA — If you are fiber-curious and/or if you just want some hands-on sheep time at a working ranch, check out this all-day workshop, From Forage to Fiber. Learn about shearing, skirting, carding spinning, and more. Sliding scale tickets still available. It’s gonna be a good time!

OJAI PRIDE is June 29 —Learn more about volunteering, vending and donating at queersinthevalley.com

THE ROUNDUP: Dispatches from the Queer Country Dance Community hits newsstands in June. We still have space for your personal ad AND we offer ad space for queer businesses for very cheap! Learn more at theroundup.news and subscribe to the mailing list for updates :)

Cole and I recently drove to Agoura Hills to catch two feral rams on a backyard hillside. The rest of the herd had been evacuated in the middle of the night by the Ojai Herd and Horse Network as the LA fires began to bloom north of the 101 back in January, but these two evaded capture during the initial rescue operation. I understand that gathering two sheep seems like it should be a simple task - lure them with hay across the hills and down through a lane fortified with planks of wood and electric fencing, maintain proper body positioning in respect of their flight zones (1), patiently convince them that the trailer is the place to be, etc. But these sheep were unaccustomed to human interaction and had horrifyingly overgrown wool, tugging at their skin and creating barriers to their sight, intensifying the challenge of this task. These massive rams were among the most skittish animals I’ve ever encountered, exhibiting zero trust in the two of us, a ragtag team of human interlopers. We spent an hour trying to charm them with outstretched armfuls of crunchy alfalfa, enticing them closer and closer to the trailer. But one stray sound - the sudden flapping of a bird’s wings, the rustle of leaves under a squirrel’s foot, the squeal of truck brakes on the road - and they would flee back up the hill, sufficiently afraid and less willing to participate in our scheme than ever.

We were running out of time as the afternoon sun crept in. I had to be at my other job in Ojai later that afternoon, so we were on a time crunch to get these animals into the trailer. This extended rescue mission perfectly exhibits the concept of sheep time - how shepherds and their herds operate according to alternative clocks set by the rhythms of the herd rather than to an arbitrary capitalist clock that revolves around the 9-5 workday. These plucky rams, while maddening in their refusal to cooperate, offered us the unique opportunity to hone our patience and to momentarily step outside the bounds of a racing capitalist time framework.

After four grueling hours of chasing, tackling, wrestling, cornering and ambushing across creek beds, canyons and bridges, we finally wrangled both sheep into the trailer, and not without a litany of battle wounds, reminders of this comical event embedded into our nearly 40-year-old skin and muscles. At one point, all of our human limbs were entangled around the torso and legs of the second sheep, whose horned head thrashed, knocking Cole’s glasses to the ground and painting a bruise into her right eye socket. As the ram realized he had finally been caught, the three of us laid there together, immobile, as we regathered strength and formulated a plan amidst our relentless laughing to safely move him into the trailer, where he and his companion would munch on masses of alfalfa until arriving in Ojai.

Cole and I recently spoke to a group of new agrarians through SoilCentric. One of the attendees asked, “How do you make it through the lowest lows, the hardest times of shepherding?” We both recalled the antics of this rescue mission and how laughing through the chaos was the balm we needed. Sometimes we end up in impossible and absurd situations that cannot be rationalized and that can only be met with a sense of humor. When we are covered in bruises and scratches and sheep shit and mud and probably amniotic fluid and maybe we’re limping because of an interaction with a horn and our quads are on fire from sprinting up cliff sides and our heads hurt because we banged them on low-hanging branches and our mouths are dry and covered in dust because we haven’t had water in hours, all we can do is laugh. And more importantly, prepare better next time.

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The rams are now shorn thanks to Little Tujunga Shearing and they are living less encumbered lives at the main ranch in Ojai. They were carrying upwards of 20 pounds of matted, shitty wool each, having not been shorn in years. While we were technically rescuing these animals from the path of wildfire, it felt like more of a mission to rescue them from their owners. Many people believe that allowing animals to roam free from human intervention is best for the animal, and that we should interfere in their lives as little as possible, stopping by their pens just twice a day to refresh water and provide hay. There is a common belief that the more hands-off we are with livestock, the more caring we are, and that livestock, which have been domesticated by humans for thousands of years, should be treated like wildlife - deer or bears - for whom human contact can be deadly.

I am not interested in shaming anyone who understands this to be our relationship with livestock, but I do hope to offer another perspective. I see us as mutual caretakers. We take care of their physical needs, strengthening our 10,000-year bond, and they take care of our emotional needs and our spirits. Like I wrote about last week, we owe these animals health, wellbeing and safety. And when domesticated animals are not accustomed to humans, their safety can be compromised. Sheep can panic when they are scared, getting into trouble by ramming through fences, jumping over railings leading to injury, or ramming or kicking us, all of which happened during our rescue adventure. But this can often be avoided with regular contact and by acclimating them to our presence using their body language as a framework. It may be a lot of work to foster trust with other animals, but don’t all healthy relationships require patience and dedication (and a bale or two of fresh alfalfa)?

1. Flight zones refer to the space around an animal - their boundary. When humans or potential threats enter this space, the animal moves away. Flight zones for more tame animals who are accustomed to humans are very small - if you can pet a sheep, it has no flight zone with you. The more skittish an animal, the larger the flight zone.

I was confined to bedrest in my partner’s LA apartment for the first few weeks of February as my body healed from top surgery. Remaining mostly stationary, surrounded on all sides by pillows of all structural integrities, I spent a lot of time considering the concept of care as it occurs within the restricted spaces of bedrooms, hospital beds, care centers and, somewhat unrelated, corrals. In general, I am not a huge fan of containment. I prefer animals roaming in movable fenced pastures to animals in small permanent fenced paddocks. I don’t believe that prisons should exist. I am intrigued by alternative modes of education that do not limit students to a rigid indoor space and timeline. But I am interested in how containment in certain contexts can act as an expanse of care - the space of the corral, the space of recovery from a surgery, and the space that emerges while being held by a devoted community for a relatively short amount of time in order to maintain health in the longer term.

I spent the morning working lambs in the corral at an eco-high school whose campus abounds with towering stalks of mustard and yellow star thistle, two opportunistic plant species that popped up after the Thomas Fire ravaged Upper Ojai in 2017. These hearty invasives, with their plentiful leaves and robust growth rates, extinguished any possibility of native perennials thriving on these rolling hillsides, so the herd of 500 sheep and goats had been recruited to temper their progress. The mountains in the distance blazed pink through slivers of passing clouds and the sky beamed a brilliant blue. The ewes were a month into lambing season and nearly 100 tiny lambs frolicked across the pastures of colossal feed, using their mothers’ bodies as springboards to reach uncertain heights in their play.

We gathered the herd from their electric fence paddock around 7:30, thermoses in hand, and calmly drove them into a portable corral system where we would spend the bulk of the morning vaccinating and ear tagging lambs and castrating rams. Working the corral is one of my favorite elements of working with livestock. The corral exists as a safeguard. Because the animals spend most of their lives traversing pasture, guided by the borderlands of electric netting, we can’t easily observe every health issue that arises. So we periodically round everyone up and send them through a maze of corrals, evaluating each animal’s health as they pass through, and determining any next steps towards keeping them healthy. Some goats need their hooves trimmed. Some sheep appear lacklustre and need a vitamin B boost. And occasionally, some animals round the corner looking sallow and ill and in need of some dewormer. For the contract grazier, the corral is the best tool for overseeing herd health because it is contained and finite, unlike the open landscapes that the herd normally calls home.

From the Spanish word corro for ring, corrals form a protective circle around that which they contain. Corrals of the old west were made with found materials - railroad ties, sticks and barbed wire scrapped and tied together haphazardly into makeshift rings used to pen herds at night as defense against predators during long journeys. These temporary corrals represented safety and security, mimicking the custodial warmth of a blanket on a cold winter evening.

Every livestock operation has a different relationship to the ecosystem of the corral. Some maintain the corral as a space of calm, practicing low-stress stockmanship with care and intention. Others reinforce more mainstream images of the corral as a site of rugged, domineering and violent masculinity (I’m thinking of Yellowstone, where hooting and hollering and physical force reign). American culture is bonded to the narrative of the corral as a space of dominance, a space that encourages us to exert power over others, as if we cannot stretch our imaginations towards the possibilities for mutual care that the corral can and has always held.

Temple Grandin counters this dominance in her design of more humane corral systems. In considering animal experience and perception, she has revolutionized livestock handling facilities, creating curved chutes and solid walls, both of which help encourage more peaceful and calm environments for the animals. Grandin’s reimagining of the corral was an act of care. Her visions transformed traditional corrals from places of disturbance and groundswell to places of relative calm and flow, places where animals could find a more stable bearing, more stable ground.

As I work the animals, shuttling them forward and quickly manipulating the head gate, I consider the corral as a site of community care and responsibility. It’s a space that has evolved around the act of humans caring for animals, allowing us to observe and determine the needs of each animal in order to foster a healthy collective. Its circular shape represents wholeness and belonging, a never-ending cycle of exchange that blooms when we gather together. These animals are our neighbors, our coworkers and our kin, and in choosing to live alongside them, we enter into a pact of reciprocity - to provide them with beautiful lives and to ensure that they are healthy and safe.

The mild warmth of winter creeps in by 10:00. Some of the animals start ruminating, settling in the dirt to await their turn in the chute. Lambs cuddle up next to their mothers, bellies full of rich, orange milk. Some of the lambs learn early on from their mothers’ dispositions that humans are not predators but beings to live beside in neutrality. These lambs are somewhat docile, legs pliant, bodies resting backwards into my arms, remaining unperturbed through the process and generally going with the flow. Others are fierce fighters, kicking, squirming and exercising every ounce of strength to fend us off, battling us with legs that cut through the air like swords and wielding their hard skulls as shields of protection against incoming rubber bands and syringes.

I gently wrap my hands around a lamb’s torso, pulling him toward me, turning him over and hugging him close to my body. Legs catapult through the air. There are always those sheep in the herd who refuse our help, who are too wise to accept help from predators with static ears and eyes. I have spent most of my life as one of these sheep, unwilling to allow care in from outside, and have been tied so strongly to that American individualist sense that I can do it myself, I can handle it on my own. But over the past few months, amidst the outpouring of support and care from my community as I prepared for and underwent surgery, I’ve been learning to soften and accept the care that flows so generously when we understand ourselves as part of a larger, collective network of beings. We need each other, we rely on each other and sustain each other, and we keep each other safe inside and outside the bounds of the corral.

While swaddled in blankets, propped on pillows and sipping water through straws, while encased in soft wool sweaters and while visited by friends with shepherd’s pie in hand, I thought through my painkiller haze about the sheep and lambs that have sustained me and who have on a more spiritual level encouraged me to make the decision to accept care from others and to better care for myself, setting me up to better care for my community in the future. When sheep feel safe in their environment, they let down their guards, give their nervous systems a break and accept the care that shepherds offer. And it’s no different for us. It just sometimes takes a herd and the nurturing space of the corral to encourage us to let our guards down and to help us understand that we are loved and valued and that we can find belonging in the circular network of caregivers, neighbors, friends and family that surrounds us.

Etcetera:

• Books relevant to the above: Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, What It Takes To Heal by Prentis Hemphill, Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin, and How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

• Currently accepting submissions for a queer country dance newspaper: The Roundup. Essays, art, ephemera, interviews, photos - the sky’s the limit! Due April 15, 2025.

• As always, see you every Tuesday, except the 2nd Tuesday of the month, for line dancing at Topa Topa Thompson in Ventura, 6:30-9

  

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I was a professional shit shoveler (aka farm assistant) on an Italian pig and sheep farm in Vermont during the first year and half of the pandemic. The winters there were long and monotonous, clocking in at around six months - six months of layering our clothing through subzero temperatures, catching ourselves as we lost balance on icy pathways, and huddling together around the fireplace, the only source of heat for the entire farmhouse. And yet, we welcomed the beginning of winter wholeheartedly. Winter’s arrival signaled the end of pasture season and the relentless work of building electric fence paddocks for the sheep, pigs and chickens. It was a desirable recess from our daily work of navigating knee-high mud, thick New England forest, and tick-laden grasses as tall as our shoulders.

Summer was the high season, a time for building cardio strength while chasing errant pigs (deeply not herd animals) who had found escape routes through sags in the polywire fence, and wild Icelandic sheep (barely herd animals) with minds and desires of their own. Summer was about using every second of daylight, from 4:45am to 9:30pm, to complete the work that would prepare us for a successful winter. We cut, baled and stored hay with rusting farm equipment, whose engines sputtered and sometimes ruptured from overuse. We rotated animals on pasture around the sixty acres - sheep first, pigs second, chickens last, in order to munch any remaining bugs taking up residence in the piles of fecal pellets. We sheared sheep and witnessed spring lambs leap with joyous curiosity upon first leaving the barn for fresh spring grass. We stored food from the garden as long as the rabbits hadn’t devoured it first. Summer was about flexibility and adaptability, about a variety of work, and a variety of uses for the body. 

Winter officially began when the final assemblages of manure had been spread on the fields, when the ticks had found their overwintering hibernation spots with the dropping of the temperature, and when snow started to dust the ground. In November, we herded the animals inside the barn for winter and then seeded the fields and raked any uneven mounds created by pig snouts. With everyone safely tucked inside, we could finally bellow a sigh of relief. The next half year would be repetitive and gruelingly long, but it would be simple and straightforward compared to the nuance of summer.

As the animals settled into their pens for the frigid winter months, I settled into the tedium of the daily work of caring for them. Work started around 8am, just a half hour after sunrise. After mindlessly donning muck boots, winter gear and a full waterproof farm jumpsuit, I trickled out to the barn, careful to maintain balance on the icy path, a narrow canyon amidst towering snow drifts. I turned the Skidsteer key a few times, always met with the violent whir of the engine struggling to start in the 0-degree morning temperatures (which I miss, much to the disbelief of my California friends). I threw open the giant, rotting wood barn doors, wafts of warm and sweet lanolin and acrid pig manure assaulting my senses. I glanced down the center aisle of the barn and absorbed the sights and sounds of animals still deep in slumber, clouds of steam surging from the congregations of pigs wrapped together for warmth and from the mouths of ruminating sheep. The 50 or so feral chickens still roosted in the rafters, capturing as much heat for the day as possible.

And then to work, shovel in hand, scooping, heaving, pushing and pulling mounds of manure from each pen into the bucket of the Skidsteer. The same motions over and over for the next two hours, no relief and no variety. Just a continual scuffing of the shovel, bending at the knees, lifting and twisting of the handle and flinging of shit into its receptacle. The trancelike rhythms that my shovel birthed as it scraped the craggy concrete floors sunk deep into my bones, a meditation. Mindless, mundane and repetitive, the work forced my muscles to engage so that my mind could rest (rare for this over-thinker and oh, so glorious). The way that these repetitive movements embedded the work into my body, similar to the imprinting of a line dance’s choreography into muscle memory, felt like the purest embodiment of fulfillment. I felt like I could shovel shit for a lifetime, over and over, with no complaints. I loved the work.

In Dark Days, Roger Reeves names repetition as a form of devotion. Repetition is an act of service, both to the self and to something larger than us. Repetition is sacred - think of how the repetition of words and phrases scaffolds our spiritual and religious practices. During my time in Vermont, shoveling shit became my spiritual practice, a daily two-hour mass that provided solace amidst the backdrop of the grief of the pandemic. It was a time for constructing my own meditative catechism as I turned my shovel over in my hands like a rosary. My shoveling routine was like a pledge and a contract with the animals in my care, a way of proving my devotion to them. Anointing their vestibules with shit removal and clean bedding was my way of showing that I cared for their health and wellbeing. Shoveling shit was a benediction, a blessing of their space made new each day. 

But repetition of the work taught me as much about devotion to others as it did about devotion to myself. The romanticism of shoveling shit aside, the repetitive work, despite its spiritual properties, posed challenges to my physical body. I had sustained injuries due to repetitive stress many times before (thank u, restaurant work) but generally took my body for granted until living in Vermont, where an encounter with Lyme disease forced me to really pay attention. My symptoms surfaced as arthritis in my fingers, and the repeated gripping of a shovel handle with such fiery intensity exacerbated the pain. I woke up every morning with fingers stiff as planks, unable to close my hands or wiggle my limbs. I learned to work small rituals into my days to alleviate the ache, like running my hands under warm water to slowly encourage them to feel into the pulses of the day, to regain a memory of curvature and ease, to revive them and to prepare them for the work ahead.

Repetition - repetitive use of a body in pain - forced me to consider care of the self, to care for a vessel, to practice awareness of a body that I rarely had to think about before (SUCH an immense privilege). Repetition, like a spiritual salve, taught me how to be devoted to my physical body and its health and wellbeing. There were days when I couldn’t physically do the work and there were days when I needed the work - as a form of grounding, centering and tuning in - and I had to stay mentally flexible to accommodate my body’s changing needs. The sheep barn became my space of study, my landscape for noticing how my body felt and if it was time to ask for help. It was where I learned to both care for myself and to create a culture of support within my immediate community.

Repetition is personal and complicated. It’s tiresome and invigorating and grounding and disruptive all at once. But I know from my time in Vermont that I cannot live without the meditative spiritual practice that comes along with it, and I am forever grateful for the finer attunement to my body that repetition has provided. 

Here are some things I am currently repeating that have taken the place of my morning shit shoveling practice, all in service to my hands:

• stretching on my sheep hide first thing

• some form of morning pages

• a foggy morning walk on the trails by my house sans phone

• a peasant’s breakfast of sourdough and broth (truly a balm for this delicate digestive system)

• line dancing in community every tuesday evening at topa topa in ventura (104 e thompson ave), 6:30-9

*This post is dedicated to my sweet Aunt Lea, who also struggles with chronic pain and illness and who very repeatedly asks if I am still Catholic (haven’t been pretty much since birth despite being raised as such) and if not, what god / a higher power means to me. I don’t have an answer to the latter, but I am certain that the prayer and devotion that surfaced for me in shoveling shit provided connection to something larger than myself, namely inter-species relationship-building and lifelong purpose. 

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I’m writing this while watching a herd of 93 sheep bed down against the backdrop of a hazy Malibu sunset. Their hair and wool form a kaleidoscope of earth tones and tarnished whites, puddles arranged on a hillside in preparation for sleep under a full moon. It’s hard to channel my thoughts and feelings about line dancing with this perfect view - if perfection exists, this has to be it. But I can’t really think about line dancing without thinking about sheep. And I can’t see sheep without seeing a unified pack of line dancers moving across a hardwood floor landscape. Sheep and line dancing are so intertwined for - such integral parts of my life and both surprisingly similar in the themes they encourage us to ponder. Both require a deep connection to and awareness of movement: how we move individually and in groups, how we impact each other when we move, how we impact a space and change the way it feels as we move. Both feature tight lines of bodies in transit - sheep love walking single file along already-trodden paths. And both highlight the importance of care for a community of beings larger than our individual selves.

I have been teaching and hosting line dancing in Ventura for ten months, always on Tuesdays. In myth and astrology, Tuesday is ruled by Mars, the Roman god of war and agriculture, counterpart to the Greek Ares. Tuesday is a 24-hour period guided by Martian themes of body and movement, impulsive energy and swift action. Tuesday is about embodying courage and confidence. It’s about brazen self-expression and a bold and brash willingness to release inhibitions. Line dancing on Tuesdays is about folding strangers and potential opponents into our worlds and coming together across difference, transforming Mars’ frictive energy into positive alliance. Mars encourages us to be fearless in trying new things and to sink deep into the body to access our deepest instincts. And so Tuesday becomes a time to honor innate response, to get out of our heads and to live fully in our bones and muscles - lessons I learn everyday from observing sheep and their proclivities towards presence.

While Mars encompasses some less benign martial motivations, we Tuesday line dancers call on Mars’ passion to ignite a flame deep within our feet, to incite us to act and to catapult us out of Monday’s monotony. We channel the conflict of Mars into a more joyous and community-centered energetic output. Because while Mars represents martial themes, it also represents the capacity to prevent or rewrite them, and this is where the muscle-driven, corporeal movement of line dance comes in. Line dance is how we appease the red planet on his day, as we travel with inflamed exuberance in a pack across the dance floor, enthusiasm and energy palpable, brewery walls dripping with the sweat of urge and excitement. We feel the unique thrill of being individuals within a group of dancers moving like a flame, jumping forward and back, executing each dance’s specific choreography as one. We invite Mars’ fiery energy as we implement our own flare while staying attuned to the spatial dynamics of the room. Like a herd.

Abu Ma’shar, a 9th century Arabic writer and philosopher, claimed that “the management of riding animals, veterinary science, the protection of sheep, the treatment of wounds, the craft of iron and working with it, the circumcision of boys, the desecration of tombs, and the robbing of the dead” were all firmly within the realm of Mars’ rule.1 I work with sheep as part of a framework to help mitigate the risk of wildfires (they chomp on the grasses and brush that can escalate wildfires). I like the idea that under the guidance of Mars, I protect these sheep while they simultaneously temper Mars’ flame and protect us all from devastating fire. It’s a form of interspecies cooperation that taps into the more generative and less destructive qualities of Mars. Care for the herd, care for the collective.

I remind myself continually why I line dance, why I show up on Tuesdays to teach and lead a group of wonderful humans as they glide across the brewery floor; why we all show up week after week, why we are devoted to this beautiful practice. Tuesdays are a chance for me to reject my own nurtured perfectionism, to remember that line dancing has never been about being perfect, and in fact, that perfection doesn’t exist (or exists only in the serenity of a sunset view with the herd). Tuesday at Topa Topa - and line dance more broadly, I would argue - is less about being “good” and more about showing up for ourselves and for each other and having fun. It’s about accessibility and about rewriting what being a good dancer means for ourselves, of scribbling our own versions of beauty and grace into our bodies. It’s about taking cues from unpolished Mars and making space for mistakes and for trying new things despite the inevitability of error. Tuesday is for going for it, for throwing energy into new spins, new flare, new ways of expressing ourselves. It’s about being ambitious with what our bodies are capable of when we dance together.

When I first started teaching on Tuesdays, the perfectionist in me assumed that attendees would practice for hours every week at home, making line dancing their entire lives and personalities as if nothing else exists (yes, I am a recovering Type A east coaster with an immigrant parent smh). I extended utterly unrealistic standards and absurd expectations to a group of people who just wanted to arrive in a space together and move. To have fun. I quickly realized that my expectations would have to change and that I would have to adapt to the flows of the crowd. I’ve learned so much about myself and my relationship to self-critique through teaching. I’ve been hard on myself in ways that should be illegal when attendees don’t get the dances or when my muscles forget which steps come next. But these moments of misstep are where we grow the most, and while line dance is about structure, it’s also about flexibility and about adapting to the environments we create with each other. It’s about moving like a herd, as bodies always in conversation.

~ see you on the dance floor ~

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If you are already a Tuesday Topa Topa dancer, thank you! I appreciate you! If you live in the Ventura area and are curious, come for line dancing 6:30-9PM every Tuesday (except the 2nd Tuesday of the month) at Topa Topa Brewing Co, 104 E. Thompson Ave, Ventura, Calif.

The Ventucky Stompers host 2nd Tuesdays at the Colt St location.

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A paddock is an enclosed area in a field that holds livestock. Paddocks can feature permanent hard fencing or, as is the case in my context, can be temporary with the use of solar-powered electric netting.

I am typically against enclosure.1 But when I think of the electric fence borderlines that we shepherds erect to manage the rate of grazing of our sheep and goats, I think less of enclosure and more of the potential that lies in the concept of boundary. While digging electric fence into the dirt of southern California, I think of the planet Saturn’s relationship to boundary, which advocates for limit and structure as a means to achieve longer-term positive impacts elsewhere. Saturn is the planet in astrology and myth that helps us incorporate healthy boundaries into our lives so that we may have the capacity to be expansive and to grow in other areas, to grow other spaces. This is how I feel about the 2-acre enclosures I create on the vast ocean hillsides of Topanga Canyon - these paddock enclosures limit the movement of the herd so that the land can have time and space to grow and expand. To take a breath.

We use temporary electric net fences to create paddocks in order to mimic the migration patterns of wild ungulates (hooved mammals) who consistently move across the landscape due to pressure from predators like wolves, mountain lions and coyotes. Though context-dependent, wild herds do not typically stay in one place for very long, granting grasslands moments of rest and rejuvenation after periods of grazing. Grasses and ruminant animals evolved in tandem and need each other in order to thrive, but without proper boundaries in place, grasslands can suffer. The temporary enclosure with electric fence is thus the boundary that supports a more holistic, longer-term growth and renewal.

It's 7:20 Monday morning in mid-July. The herd has settled into their first rumination period of the day after waking to graze around 5:40. The sunlight is still faint as it breaches the swaths of ocean clouds emerging from the vast Pacific towards Santa Monica. I gazed upon this exact scene just twelve hours ago, city lights twinkling like sentient eyes in the fog of sunset as the sheep and goats positioned themselves in a tight, shaggy mass in their chosen bedding area. The sheep are stationed loosely this morning at the top of the paddock, all 93 of them in various stages of rest and digest. Sheep are ruminants, carrying four chambers with four separate duties in their bulging stomachs. One of those duties is rumination, the process of regurgitating vegetation, or chewing cud, so that it may be fermented and further broken down into digestible protein for their hearty bodies to use. 

The serenity of sheep deep in rumination, angular snouts cocked towards the warmth of the rising sun, is perhaps the greatest force that compels me to continue this work of herding animals across the landscape. They chew with machine-like jaws moving in a circular motion, some with gently closed eyes, meditatively soaking up the sea breeze. Their muscles vibrate in response to the landing of an occasional fly, the hordes of irritants not quite fully enlivened until the heat of the day sets in.

The air smells woody and vegetal with a slight floral cadence that penetrates deep into my frayed nervous system. The sages lend a spicy, pungent quality to the breeze while a mystery shrub imparts the aroma of citronella candle and lemon verbena. Hummingbirds twist and turn and dip and dive in and among the woolly bluecurls and purple sage blossoms, stopping to imbibe the nectar of the gods. Have you ever put your nose to a woolly bluecurl at the height of its summer season? I heard a child recently exclaim that its fragrance is “just like honey,” reminiscent of the sweetest, brightest blue Kool-Aid. And indeed, the surreal blue of this furry flower is phantasmagoric in sight and scent, truly Willy Wonkan in the felicitous delight it embodies.

Woolly bluecurls, like these tenacious sheep, thrive in arid landscapes with very little moisture. They have developed over millennia to prefer a crackled and parched life in the harshest of climates, awe-inducing in their penchant for germinating dazzling and lush blossoms despite a lack of the vital water element. Their flowering parts stand in for the wool that our hair sheep, who molt their wool every summer, lack, a delicious fuzz that if woven into yarn would satisfy any fiber enthusiast.

The livestock guardian dog, Nala, naps languidly as the sun crests the western ridge, her evening job of protecting the herd from predators complete. Her butterscotch fur heaves peacefully up and down in a rhythm deeply calming and reassuring. Though counterintuitive, Nala’s slumber is a signal that the sheep are safe, that no predators lurk on the edges. In winter, she curls herself into a perfect ball, sometimes invisible in the brush and high grass, but today, with mild temperatures and a sunlight healing rather than oppressive, she splays herself long and horizontal, imperceptibly canine amongst her ovine community.

Some sheep lie in this formation, too, heads and necks flat against a ground worn thin by their nightly bedding. Every evening they roll back another layer of soil sheet in their bedding spot, leaving behind fertilizer for next season’s perennials to flourish. Some have speckled faces, spots sometimes confused for dirt and dust. Others are all white with patches of wool that hasn’t yet molted for the season. Some stay together with other sheep they know well while others prefer to remain slightly separate, allowing the breeze to access every pore of their being. 

Gazing upon the wild blue, I find myself tapping my fingers to a rhythm in my head on the plastic arms of my lawn chair. It’s been over a decade since I’ve listened to “Just Like Honey” from Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, a record that heavily informed my drumming style during some wayward years at the start of the 2010s, and yet somehow the shambolic beats are still embedded in my limbs. That record was like honey in the complex beehive of my ears back then, a sweet salve to soothe the achingly long process of healing a broken foot, bones misshapen from taking a fall on a skateboard coming home from my shift as a counselor at the Berkeley free clinic. I’ve since replaced the four wheels of a skateboard with an ATV and Scottish shoegaze music with the soundscape of sheep grazing, but I’m captivated still by muscle memories that a sweet floral confection in the field can awaken after a decade of dormancy.2

The schuhplattler, a folk dance originating in what is now Bavaria and Tirol, where my mom is from, dates back to 3000 BC by some accounts. Like many traditional dances, it is said to mimic the courtship rituals of regional animals, in this case the grouse. It was supposedly intended to woo village women via a fantastical display of rhythm, melody and costume, and it eventually evolved into its current form, a dance performed by women in vibrant dirndls and men in lederhosen (leather shorts), calves adorned with intricate lace socks. Dancers ferociously but elegantly use the raw sounds of skin on leather and leather on wood to create movements that mimic patterns from the natural world and that communicate how and where we fit into that world. This dance is a living story we tell ourselves about life on earth at a particular place and time.

Mostly performed now for tourists in crowded beer halls in Germany, the schuhplattler has for several centuries acted as both an anchor to and a record of everyday culture. Its endless variations demonstrate and interpret the skills and professions that were crucial for survival in each microregion of the Alps during the pre-industrial era. The holzhacker variation flaunts the work of foresters as dancers employ axes to chop wood from giant logs on the beat of the uptempo polka-style music. The mühlradl’s participants dress in kitchen aprons and chef hats, exhibiting the work of the miller, while other variations feature cow bells, scythes and rusting farm equipment to illustrate the daily work of the farmer. As a shepherd in the canyons of southern California, I see my daily work-related motions reflected in these dances, in the flourishes and shifting of weight, and in this ancient connection to life on the land.

Dancing at a transhumance (almabtrieb) festival I attended in Bad Ischl, Austria in Fall 2019

Like folk dances across many cultures, the schuhplattler is traditionally staged around ceremonial agricultural milestones, arising like stalks of golden rye around harvest festivals, dance steps conveying a resonance with the seasons and with a timescale that bows to the creatures in our midst. Through these community celebrations, we create rhythms of movement that reflect a rhythm of the seasons and a connection to time outside of the arbitrary capitalist clock. Agricultural rituals have always been fruitful in the opportunities they offer us around congregation and community, around a collective celebration of the end of work, of a harvest reaped, of grazing completed. Folk dance traditions thus simultaneously signify an honoring of the end of work and of the work itself; a rejoicing in the coming of winter rest after seasons of toil - both a remembering and a will to forget.

Folk dance is about people and their lives. It’s about the mundane, the quotidian, about how we weave our daily work into our daily life. Folk dance is a movement record, a collective memory of passed down gestures that signal how our ancestors moved and which movements mattered enough to be recorded in choreography. We write into dance the chopping of wood, the brushing and scuffing of wood chips off our leather pants and shoes, the bending at the hip and the swaying of arms to cut grass - a miming of the actions central to agricultural jobs, work with land, animals and food. Folk dance folds the mundane into movement as much as it folds movement into the mundane, transmuting daily gesture into an expression of aesthetic beauty and novel delight. 

Though I was enchanted by these folk dances as a kid, I never learned them, opting instead to incorporate the steps of line dance into my adulthood movement practice, waist compressed by men’s Wrangler jeans instead of by a floral dirndl bodice. Contemporary global line dance culture is similar in its action as both an antidote to and a reflection of the mundane we experience under capitalism. Derived from an amalgamation of thousands of years of different cultures' movement rituals, line dance, like any folk dance, beautifully captures mundane movement while also offering a rupture in the monotony of daily work - an escape.

Line dance is a community activity that brings people together to perform specific choreography in unison, offering jubilation after a grueling work week. It has typically been associated with country music and culture, but more recently has shifted to focus more on pop and hip hop music, perhaps engaging a wider audience of practitioners in the process. It is commonly understood as a form of social dance, of utilitarian “low art,” as opposed to more exclusive and elite dances like ballet or ballroom, which accentuate graceful, sinuous and lengthening bodies. Line dance posture instead can be a hunched swagger that encapsulates the challenges of life on the land and centuries of hands and feet deep in soil. 

Line dance, like folk dance, is the people's dance. Folk comes from the Old English folc, or common people. A dance of and for the common people, it’s about access and comradery, about coming together to move in unison as we let out a collective sigh. Why does it feel so good to be aligned, to be in alignment with others, to experience the same expression of emotion together on the dance floor? Perhaps because this is lineage, a direct line to a past ancestry that revolved around moving in alignment, in choreography, for the sake of celebration, connection and ritual. It is the gesture that leaps across generations, landing inexplicably in our boots, mooring us and guiding us across the dance floor centuries later. It’s the gesture that sculpts our muscles, that beckons us to remember how we once lived. I remember feeling immediately at home in my body the first time I line danced, surrendering to the gesticulations that felt so familiar to me on a cellular level, as if I knew those steps already not only because of my work as a shepherd but also because of my lineage of life intertwined with land-based work. 

The last time I witnessed German folk dance in person was in 2016 on a trip to my mom’s sheep-studded hometown in the Alps. She was visiting me while I attended grad school in London for gender studies, a career that I fully planned to pursue then (but quickly abandoned in order to herd sheep across sweltering California canyon terrain - clearly the wiser choice). As I watched brawny men chop wood, ring bells and perform their choreographed patterns of steps, I had no idea that several years later, instead of spending my nights tapping away at my computer, scribbling theories about gender, I would be on the dance floor, slappin’ leather of my own, and that I would also come to work in agriculture, performing the same steps that inspired the dances that so mesmerized me as a kid. I also didn’t realize then that witnessing the tangible dance histories of my ancestors is an immense privilege to which many cultures whose lifeways have been destroyed and erased by colonialism do not have access. I no longer take for granted this access to intact ancestral traditions that haven’t been altered by colonial violence and/or by a drive to assimilate. 

I’ve been working as a shepherd in southern California for two years, and while my coworkers and I herd hundreds of sheep and goats across the canyons and rolling hills just north of Los Angeles for fire mitigation, I think about our collective motions, wavelike and undulating. We practice the principles of low-stress livestock handling, which requires communicating with the herd via highly specific body language and body positioning. If the goal is to herd animals forward, we dance behind them in a zigzag of wizard steps or we walk directly down their sideline in the opposite direction of traffic in a series of lock steps. We waver with rocking chairs, always aware of the shoulder point on an animal’s body that will tip their instinctual movement either forward or back. We are ever aware of their language, their corporeal cues, their signals and movements as they move across the landscape. We work together and we dance together, performing the same steps and movements to complete the work of caring for sheep. We hitch legs over corral railings, we scuff dung from the bottoms of our boots, we slap leather releasing plumes of brittle, earthen dust into the parched air. We shuffle together in a choreographed dance to encourage ovine stragglers to keep up with the herd.

As a line dancer, I cannot help but conceptualize the patchwork of steps I take each day as being part of a larger pattern of ancestral movement celebrating the mundane, the rhythms of the seasons, the rhythms of life. Line dance is the expressive embodiment of centuries of living on and with the land, and the steps I take across rolling hills in my work as a shepherd are a physical monument to this lineage. Dance is a portal to the past and to the future - it’s a living, moving story that roots us in place, and as I’ve become less connected to German folk dance over the years, line dance has become my schuhplattler, my method of staying engaged in the traditions that came long before me while I step always forward into a future founded in a weekly ritual of collective joy.

Come slap leather with me and some fellow shepherds every Tuesday (except the 2nd Tuesday of the month) at Topa Topa Brewing Co, 104 E. Thompson Ave, Ventura, 6:30-9. I teach beginner and improver line dance lessons at 7 & 8.

When I’m out on the floor, scuffing my boots against the wood grain, I think about the connection between the dances we line dancers gravitate towards and our astrological birth charts. I think about the ways in which our planetary placements are reflected in our unique styles of movement, in the ways that we stretch our limbs and twist our bodies across the vast expanse of dance floor. I think about how we sink our bodies into alignment, in sync with our fellow dancers, and how that alignment can echo that of the planets and stars at the time of our birth.

As someone with planetary placements heavily weighted in Taurus and Sagittarius, I relish slow, graceful and sensual dances like Lay Low and Drinkin’ Problem while also enthusiastically losing any sense of myself amidst the chaotic pulsing of the country party ragers like Four on the Floor and Goin’ Hamm. But perhaps my favorite of all, the perfect constellation of Taurean and Sagittarian essence is Cowgirls - stubborn and deliberate and yet ready to shuffle and hitch into the sunset at the drop of a hat. Whether my dance preferences are driven by astrology, I cannot know for sure, but I offer you my thoughts on line dances as zodiac signs so that you can ruminate on your own movement patterns, desires and inclinations and their potential interstellar influences.

ARIES - Walk the Line

It’s fast, it’s hectic, it’s a whirlwind, and the triumphant airborne heel click makes us feel like winged Olympic gods. Onlookers and/or the more dilatory of dancers might find themselves with a swift kick to the shins if they stand in the way of Aries’ swirling path of independence, both in life and on the dance floor. The athleticism required to perform this dance is unmatched, and who better than vigorous Aries to execute an ambitious 3.5 full turns in a row (cause you know Aries is taking any opportunity to turn a shuffle into a turn) and top ‘em off with a catapulting heel click to the heavens. Aries brings a healthy dose of competition to the floor with this dance - you think you can heel click higher than Aries? Not bloody likely, for Aries has that bold and brash Martian energy and a natural confidence firing up their boots for all 26 counts of Walk the Line.

Runner Up: Country Girl Shake because Aries is most likely to dance on the roof of a tractor

TAURUS - Dirt on My Boots

Dirt on My Boots is a relatively slow, steady and stable dance with heel twists and stomps that reconnect us to the rhythms of the earth. Both the song and dance perfectly encapsulate the dualities of this zodiac sign: earthy, simple, committed and hard-working, while also highly attuned to the Venusian beauty inherent in life’s sensual pleasures. There is a plodding stubbornness to this dance - it is two walls, it features one line of movement forward and back, and the first and third 8-counts both start with the same step, reflecting Taurus’ core desire for consistency and predictability in routine. At the end of the day, Taurus just wants their boots in the dirt and their hands caressing the skin of a lover - what else is there?

[Sidenote: Jon Pardi was born exactly one month after me, on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini. Though I cannot know for sure, judging by the lyrics to this tune, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Sun was nestled fully in the safety and security of the Taurus constellation at the time of his birth.]

Runner Up: Lay Low

GEMINI - Dizzy

Nothing better represents the talkative twins than this mercurial contra dance - it’s interactive, it’s playful, it makes us think, and it leaves us reeling and unsure of which way is up. The wall changes, similar to the communication styles of our most beloved and dizzying Geminis, require our utmost concentration and focus. And the typical contra formation is indicative of the twins, two bodies operating in sublime opposition, while also working together and feeding off of each others’ frantic energies (contra literally means against, opposite, in opposition to). Like the Geminis in my life, Dizzy has the power to keep me on my toes, to help me adapt to the sways and movements of my fellow dancers, and to remain flexible on and off the dance floor.

Runner Up: Asking Questions

CANCER - My Maria

The romance! The bewitching beauty! Maria as representative of the lunar lights, the original muse, eternally guiding us through a tumult of emotional waves! My Maria is a sensual, starry-eyed cha-cha, offering romance and connection on the dance floor as the antidote to despair. It’s a classic dance from 1996 that never goes out of style - proof that love can endure the ages. We are all lonely dreamers on a highway in the sky as we hitch our way into half turns and spin through wrapping vines. The cha-cha rhythm lends a watery quality to this dance, allowing our individual vessels to sail in a unified fleet upon the Cancerian sea. I don’t know about you, but I plan to continue to circle the moon with My Maria well into the latter years of my life, so enduring are its steps.

LEO - Showstopper

The recent total solar eclipse and sun storms are prime examples of the showstopping star quality of Leo’s ruler, the Sun. The Sun is the ultimate stunner, the dazzling deity in the sky around which our lives endlessly revolve. This dance has major main character energy and starts with a dramatic entrance with sweeps and criss crosses that leave any audience transfixed. Showstopper features fiery hip rolls, and let’s be honest, watching people perfectly execute these solar returns in the last four counts of the dance is mesmerizing, as is baring witness to any Leo strutting their way down life’s runway. In the case of Showstopper, flying too close to the sun is a must!

VIRGO - Tush Push 

Tush Push is one of those dances that immaculately balances sexiness, sentimentality and structure. When paired with I’m That Kind of Girl by Patty Loveless, it especially encapsulates saccharine Virgo’s proclivity towards a modest and earthly innocence. Tush Push is a carefully-designed system of shuffles and pivots, foregrounding critical thinking, organization and complex patterns. The heel switches epitomize airy, earthy Virgo: the footwork is quick and flighty while also forcing us to keep one foot on the ground, attuned to the stability of the earth. Mutable Virgo is dedicated to their craft, here for the long haul, here to see things through; and Virgo throws this long-haul energy into Tush Push, a trailblazing 1980 line dance that is here to stay.

LIBRA - Barn Dance

Time to mingle and flaunt those social skills! This is the perfect collaborative dance for gregarious and charming Libra, replete with partner changes and some demure boot knocking. We get to meet a new person every 32 counts with no strings attached? Short snippets of flirty eye contact and a cute handhold? A dream come true…until indecision around who to give your number to at the end of the night sets in.

The Barn Dance represents balance and the Libran scales - it’s a circular formation that cannot hold if the center and edges collapse, if we prioritize ourselves over the movement and flow of the collective. The health of the whole is integral to maintaining the structure of this precious social circle, echoing Libra’s sweet focus on relationality. The Barn Dance is also accessible and egalitarian - no feats of athleticism required. Just an ability to charm your partner and maintain harmony throughout all 32 counts.

Runner Up: Easy on the Eyes

SCORPIO - The Wolf

We all know that Scorpio is associated with sex and sexuality, which are the main themes reflected in the lyrics to The Wolf. But this Martian dance is so much more than raw sexuality. We slap boots, we body roll, we stomp and circle our hips; we go deep in those sultry final four counts, dropping momentarily into the Plutonian netherworld as we dip our hips to the floor. Scorpio is about passion and commitment, about going all in, about connecting and deepening our understanding of ourselves and our communities amidst rebirth and transformation. The Wolf helps us to get in touch with our depth, our shadow and the parts of ourselves that we cannot immediately recognize. There is also something about the fast rocking chair and heel twists that conjure the snapping pincers of the scorpion, always ready to serve a biting wit.

SAGITTARIUS - Goin’ Hamm

Sag loves a party, a wild time, a chaotic moment with drinks held high in the air, a toast to the night and a collective sigh after enduring the banality of the work week. Sag wants everything cranked up to 10 - because life is too short to not delve into the adventure and risk associated with doing body shots of Jäger. The restart in Goin’ Hamm signifies Sagittarius’ 20th career change, and the short 4-count tag of throbbing stomps is representative of that short-lived hobby Sag picked up while trekking through a remote Alpine village. And what better step to embody Sagittarius than the sailor step: the perpetual seeker, traveler and explorer who also knows how to confidently overdo it on the substances. Only an open mind like Sagittarius’ could turn a cornfield to a club to the backdrop of the electric banjo on this track.

Runner Up: Fake ID, Half Past Tipsy, Take It Off, Four on the Floor - honestly so many! Congrats to Sagittarius for embodying more line dances than any other sign.

CAPRICORN - Cowboy Hustle

I can’t lie - I had a hard time finding dances that reflect the earthy stability of the sea goat with lyrical themes that center working hard while also achieving greatness. So we’re going with Cowboy Hustle because it represents Capricorn’s steady determination. Cowboy Hustle is practical and grounded, featuring the foundational steps that one must learn before building on their line dance repertoire. Capricorn, as the ultimate symbol of stability, helps us understand how we can better build our house after first laying the foundation, and Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler, figures heavily in Cowboy Hustle with its focus on precision, tight lines and boundary. And, of course, Capricorn, in their work and achievement goals, is the paragon of hustle - who among us doesn’t know a Capricorn running at least three highly successful small businesses?

AQUARIUS - Burn It To The Ground

Aquarius is the outsider and the iconoclast, here to shake things up, to sow transformative and liberatory chaos, and to make us think differently, outside the box. Aquarius really destabilizes the country line dance paradigm by helping us realize that we actually love line dancing to alt-metal darlings, Nickelback - who knew this could be possible? Only eccentric Aquarius. This visionary sign encourages us to challenge the power structures that guide our lives, and to burn them all to the ground when they are not serving the interests of the collective. This dance, with high kicks and aggressive stomps compels us to feel anger and to act on that anger in order to build a better future. But there is also a straight-legged rigidity to this dance that captures the stubborn and fixed energy of this sign, reminding us that we must implement some degree of Saturnian structure to define the world we want in order to burn down the old.

PISCES - Midnight Waltz

Pisces, the slightly off-kilter mystical beauty that we know and love, has big waltz energy - there is no way these dreamy watery weirdos are operating on 4/4 time like the rest of us. They are here to bring up the rear in a twirling Neptunian fantasy world, the final hurrah, the closure of the night, the last dance. Pisces flows effortlessly across the dance floor, like an effluvium of grace pouring forth from the watery depths of the Danube. Midnight Waltz embodies a compassionate sentimentality and a vague nostalgia reminiscent of Pisces as they sway and twinkle step their way through life, and it asks us to trust our intuition and muscle memory with every spin, and to dance as one body of water undulating across the floor.

Runner Up: Wave on Wave

Leave a comment below with your astrology and favorite line dances!