How to milk a goat
Recently, I started working on a farm.
It began with one of these moments, into which you stumble. Randomly you enter a place, and you know, you will come back. Before that moment happened to me, I was on a hike with a friend, through a thick forest, with barely any light shining through, the trees forming an archway, when we took a turn, out into the light. There we spotted an old abbey, and then the grounds of the farm with its donkeys, goats and fields. With eyes wide open, I ran into the farmer of these grounds, by accident, and he looked at me rather harshly. With immediacy, I decided that I wanted to work right here.
The farm surrounded by forest is an organic, hands-on type of agricultural place: you will not find any unnecessary machinery, and a lot of voluntary helpers. Because, well, organic farming and its produce is a thing now, and people like to participate in this endeavor. I suppose that is a positive development. You meet people of all age groups in the fields, kneeling, plucking weed. The goats get milked by real people’s hands, cucumbers do not always turn out well, and nettles are used as fertiliser. The farmer himself is -as per what one would expect - a charismatic fellow. Sun-darkened skin, calm, overwhelmed by duty but youthful, sometimes a smirk. He is the kind of farmer that plants vegetables that grow into the soil, when the moon is close to the earth, and vegetables that grow into the sky, when the moon is high.
When I began to work on the farmer’s land, the first task I faced was within the dealings of carrots. Carrots, yes, I will never again look at carrots in an underappreciating way. I used to, though, when shopping for them in the supermarket, merely deciding to put them in my cart, because, well, carrots are good for your health, that is what mum always said. Carrots are hard to handle, when you are on your knees for hours, the sun roasting you alive, or the rain making sure every inch of you is properly soaked. The carrot plant itself is and remains tiny for weeks, but requires space for the actual carrot to grow, so making sure the tiny plant gets its space takes hours of thinning out, making sure other greens do not overthrow the little plant’s space. Bottomline: growing carrots is a much more meticulous endeavour than one would expect from its understated presence in our dear and near supermarkets. The lesson I learned on my knees bowing to the little carrot plants was: It takes patience to grow them, a lot of time and a lot of attending, until you get what you want: the full-grown, properly sized carrot, worth the bite. Patience was never my strength, so this lesson did strike me immediately. How far away from the beds of carrots am I with my habits and expectations about food, how distanced did I actually grow to be from this “real world” out here? When I rode the wave of this insight, I felt wise. Like: I had it all figured out, now. But I proofed myself and everyone around me wrong. My alienation with everything related to the actual fundament of what I put on my daily dinner plate ran embarrassingly deep: I had no clou about the basic gearings of farming, yes, in fact, I had no sense of it at all.
One day, after a couple of weeks of good work, I was sent to one of the grasslands on the edge of the farm to help with a task. I was told to wait there, until the farmer would come over and explain what to do. I did not know exactly where to wait, so, impatiently, I went towards an area that looked like a part of a dirt way. I stood there, waiting, well-behaved like the good girl I thought I was. Little did I know. The farmer came, trying to communicate a message to me already from far away. “Not there! There are seeds. You are standing on seeds!”. In that moment, I saw myself very clear: here I was, the cardboard cut-out of a city-accustomed woman, not being able to spot the difference between grass and a bit of random soil, and actual beds of planted seeds. Shame, it was, I was seeing in front of my eyes. The farmer, in his usual half-joking, short-format sentences, compared me with random hikers, “I know it happens. It is not just you.”, which made me feel even worse, whether his saying this was an attempt to make me feel less like a fool or not. Now I was part of the people that do not belong, the hikers, the random visitors. “It is ok to do it once, don’t worry.” He added. “If it happens a second time, though…”. Again, a smirk accompanying an unfinished sentence. My response was the usual laughing it off of the city-accustomed woman.
After this encounter, I thought I was disqualified from the one skill that I really wanted to acquire: milking the goats. Surprisingly, I was not. Far too easily did the farmer agree to me helping him the next time around. Far too easy, I thought, and so I pressured myself into some preparation for the big moment. I did in preparation, what a person of my calibre usually does: I watched videos on YouTube and googled “how to milk a goat”. If this is not giving away my fundamental substance, then I don’t know. How futile my attempt actually was, came to me only a little later: it seems the lessons on a farm just don’t come easily.
Thelong-awaited moment itself was embedded within a hot pre-summer’s day with thunder on the horizon. The forebodings. As the farmer and one of his long-time helpers arrived, on the vehicle of his choice (i.e., the tractor), I stood up from the agreed-upon meeting point and greeted him with a smile. I had watched the goats some minutes before in anticipation. The goats looking back at me with scepticism. In what followed, all I could do was playing along with the farmer and the female milker, watching them, how they prepared the buckets and cleaned their hands, without being aware of my own role. Together with them I entered the areal beyond the fence. The goats were overwhelmingly amazing. They greeted me first with the already displayed scepticism, but then, when realising that my role was first and foremost some massaging of their heads and backs, they accepted me whole-heartedly. When does that ever happen in other parts of life? One of the goats looked at me with mild, smiling eyes. I fell in love with her, for sure. Milking her, though, I would not. Slowly, while the farmer and his helper made their rounds amongst the udders of the animals, it dawned on me that my role here was the one of the third wheel. It dawned on me that it was never in the cards for me to actually milk one of the goats. I was just not eligible at all. In one desperate attempt I turned to the one person I considered to be my ally, the female milker, looked at her with big eyes, asking about her milking technique. She explained, and asked whether one day, I want to milk as well. In a cry for help, triggered by hurt dreams and boredom, I asked whether I could try the milking. Now. She looked at me with an expression of horror and disbelief, and that was that. She did not say one more word to me and I huddled up in desperate smiles. Soon after, I was allowed to leave, and the show was over. It is hard to describe my disappointment, even more the shame of me building up unrealistic expectations. What was the lesson again that I thought I had learned? It is all patience, isn’t it? It takes time to reach your goal, right? I went home this day with very mixed feelings. And even up to today, I do not know how to milk a goat. I suppose, all I can do is to remain patient and repeat the most important mantra of all, over and over again: “In the real world, things take time and a lot of attending until you get what you want.”. Amen to that.
