When a Bleat Becomes a Drone

On being sick of the grind

photo by liam pickhardt

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.

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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.

quiet moments of rumination

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.

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~ 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!

1. From How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

2. My definition of work includes all of my laboring for money AND my entire creative ecosystem: writing, researching, creative planning, line dancing, working on films and events, etc – all of the stuff that people with one career or one job might consider to be hobbies but that actually form the backbone of my creative life. Anyone who ended up as a freelancer thanks to the lure of flexibility knows the drill.