Fecals

William Shakespeare wrote All's Well That Ends Well sometime between 1601 and 1608.  The play is considered a problem play because it cannot be neatly classified as tragedy or comedy.  For generations the so called Bard of Avon has kept, and continues to keep, academics guessing with their theories about who wrote his plays if he did not pen them himself; and now they don't know whether to laugh or to cry upon reading his work; and this, they consider a problem.  Well, bravo Will, bravo! Ambiguity always gets the pig, and a fine shiny pig it is.

It is a rare time of life when you don't know whether to laugh or cry—as sweet as a lost kiss, this moment is—in a Texas vernacular you could say you don't know whether to shit or go blind.  

Speaking of  the inability to see mircoscopically, the blindness of the small as it makes large if you let it, let me tell you what I do when I'm walking where the sheep have been, and why.  In a paddock, the flock camps in the same spot to rest or to spend the night; sheep are creatures of habit like us.  They  may camp on a rise where breezes cool them or they may camp under shady trees in Summer.  Their camps smell of them, of their moist wool, of the herbs they won't eat and of  the soil they warm laying around dreamily chewing cud.  When a ewe stands up, she always stretches then squats slightly and pees; the odor of  urine and earth is  perfect, alive and sweet and close. 

Poem and I walk a quarter  mile north from the barn; she jumps over the electric fences when we come to them and I step over trying not to shock myself there  We arrive at the camp; it is deserted, the ewes have gone off to graze; yet there, a sense of presence lingers, of company, of community. When you smell sheep, you feel fresh, you feel well, you feel you belong to something unnamable and large, and you shouldn't be afraid and you needn't pray for guidance when you walk through a sheep camp; you are privileged there and welcome, odd there and foreign in this realm of others; in other words, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

To be continued...