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To Be Of Use by Judy Seicho Fleischman It was harvest time at Coyote Creek, hippie farm, and we were all gathered. From the very start the day had an eerie feeling to it. The clouds moved in and out and patches of alternately blue and grey skies drifted over the terrain. I had come to this land, open land, to open my heart to the wind. Wide open. It was the impression you'd get your first time stepping onto the place, like the sky had given itself over to the land and the two would meet each day with the rising sun and the morning rain. Wide open, like the land itself - golden grassy fields, lush and fertile soil spread out in all directions towered over in spots by billowing Oak trees and surrounded by the second growth Doug Fir, Vine Maple, and Western Red Cedar forests so typical of this part of Oregon. Wide open, like one's heart could burst just taking it all in. I had arrived late on the scene so I drove quickly past the main house, past the pumpkins and squash ripening in the field beyond, past him, wondering why he had not joined the gathering crowd. He waved and I drove on towards the gathering place. As I stepped out of my car, I watched them, observing the scene from a distance. They were moving about and there was this heightened, awkward feeling of confusion as if everything were happening in slow motion. And then I heard the cry. And I hadn't expected it because it was supposed to have been over by now. A couple of weeks earlier, everyone was all excited because there was going to be this great opportunity to witness something amazing. To witness something harsh. To witness something that we don't normally see - which was the killing time. See, Coyote Creek raised goats. That's what they'd call it. They'd raise them up only to. . . It was a dairy farm and to get milk from a goat, the goat had to have been pregnant. It was one of those obvious things, a detail taken for granted and yet never fully considered; something that slips the mind and yet exists frozen in it - an underlying certainty, inescapable, solid, grounding. Part of an unbroken chain. Conception. Birth. Milk. Life. Death. Earlier that summer we had gone out to visit the farm; to see all these goats with their great horns gathered in the vast, expansive field and to witness the interaction of the goats with the beautiful white llama that watched over them. And here we were, just a few months later, and it was totally different. I flashed back to when I was a kid and we lived on kibbutz. I remember the turkeys, dozens of them, and people pulling them up by their necks and doing the deed. Blood and feathers and loud squawking, all those turkeys running around like. . . well, you know. And now I felt myself walking, pulled towards, haunted by that sound. Images blurred as I sensed the confusion in the eyes and movements of the young men and women moving like those turkeys. Frenetic, yet happening in slow motion, like someone had turned down the volume so you could take it all in. Josh had been excited for weeks because he was going to do the killing. "Yeah, man, you know, we're all hippies and we're back to the land, man. I'm gonna do this thing. Let me at it. I wanna do it." But see, something went wrong because, well, he wasn't trained in it. He didn't know what he was doing. I walked over. People were coming up to me. I remember it all whizzing by, like shadows. Entranced, walking, I followed the sound around to the side of the barn. I gazed on the mess of blood and Josh bent over the goat. Josh had tried to shoot the goat but, to his surprise, the shots didn't kill the billy. They just maimed him and he was screaming horribly. I had never heard cries like that. Then Josh tried to slit his throat but see, to do the killing - it's not an easy thing. It's not an easy thing. But Liz was there. Liz was teaching indigenous skills and she didn't want to do the killing but the group decided that if the killing was going to be done, that she would show them how to butcher an animal and how to give thanks and how that gift was a sacred thing. But Liz knew how to kill. She came over and showed Josh that to kill, you have to do it all the way. She showed him with the knife to slit all the way back. She showed him and then he did it. Within moments, the billy was dead. But this was no ordinary billy. This billy was the son of the milking goat. See, they would rotate out the goats, get them pregnant at different times. He was two years old and he was her son. He was the reason why she was producing milk but what we had been old was that at this dairy farm and many others too, the males have to go because they're rambunctious and they stir up all the goats. They said they had "no use" for the billy. "You know, we'll get 'em pregnant and then what do you with 'em?" I remember how it echoed in my head, "It's just how it is. It's just how it is." Later, they carried out the goat. Josh was in tears. Liz helped him bring out the goat and we had a ceremony. We all stood and burned sage around each of our heads and gave thanks to the goat for his offering. Then, carefully and thoughtfully, they butchered the goat. Every part of him was of use. Liz showed us. She used to have a poem up on the wall of the shanty where she lived. It was called "To be of use," and it was all about how in ancient times art, jugs, things like that, weren't meant to sit on museum walls. They were meant to be of use. The day went on. It was a long day. I only glimpsed moments of this whole process that took the entire day. I was preparing for an exploration of the solar system that had been planned for that very evening out in the big field on the eve of the full moon. Everything seemed to hold a heightened sense of significance. They continued on while I, moving like a shadow on the terrain, placed sticks in the ground to mark the positions of the planets like markers on tombstones. We all came together to put stones in a big circle and make a fire which was the Sun. We ate our dinner and, like the fire, people seemed to lighten up, even started to play some games to pass the time as we waited for the skies to darken. It took a long time. Then, when the moment was right, we gathered around the Sun. We orbited and did the dance of the planets as the moon rose and the sky brightened and the mist crept over the land. We had set up the constellations of the zodiac way out on the edge of the field, all around us. The thing about the zodiac, the word itself meaning "animals," is that its constellations lie in the same plane as the orbit of the planets around the Sun so a planet always appears against the background of one of these constellations. The Greeks considered them sacred, a haven for the planets, the wanderers of the heavens, offering the vagabonds a dwelling place, a home. We circled the zodiac until each of us stood by that particular collection of stars against which the Sun appeared on the day that a mess of atoms assembling itself as human was born. When everyone was in place and we had gone all the way around, a bell rang and we all took in the energy of the day we were born, our home of origin. And there we stood, gathered at harvest time, on the eve of the full moon, in the season of Capricorn, the season of the goat. When the bell rang again, I cried out, "come back, come back," those being the first words of a meditation about the history of our planet, and of the solar system, the Galaxy, and the Universe. It struck me that "galaxy" originates in "galactos" which means "milk," hence our own "Milky Way." An image came to me of all those worlds in motion flowing with milk to feed and sustain light itself, the great messenger, as it connects all the worlds. I looked to the light of the fire, our Sun. Everyone gathered around it and listened. I kept thinking about the goat. Liz was beating her drum, sacred drum, made from the hide of a deer she had found dead by a roadside. The meditation was set to the beat of her drum to reflect the heartbeat of ourselves, the heartbeat of Gaia, Earth, the Mother. When it was over, we didn't talk. We just went out own ways into the night. That goat was with us, haunting us. It was almost as if we had gathered to pay homage to that goat, as if he was our guiding spirit. The fire crackled, the sky glowed, and as the smoke rose higher, at times choking in our throats, then drifting, passing through, I knew I had been touched; that blood and fire united this day; that this long journey into night was necessary, a coming home, a rebirth, a ritual true in form as one could never have predicted or planned. I went back to the barn, that same barn, because we had decided, some of us, that we would stay over. It was very late so I slept in the barn that night, fitfully up on the hay bales. In the morning when I got up, it was milking time and he had come to milk the goat. He was a forester and I loved him and this was his place and he had said to me, "this is how it is." Something changed that morning, because until then I had wanted so badly to believe and to feel. He was of this land. He was of those woods. He had a nursery of native plants right next to that barn, and he cared for those animals and cared for these plants like they were his children, and I couldn't understand. It was milking time. I came down. He was trying to coax the milking goat into the pen. I can't remember her name. Funny, that forgetting, because she had a name but they had never named the billy goat. He told me they didn't name him because they didn't want to get too attached, because they knew what was coming. And now I can't remember her name. He tried to get her into the milking pen. He gathered all these different plants that she liked. He tried but she would not go near it. She was shivering. She stomped her hoof and would have nothing to do with it. See, the billy was not only her son but her stud as well. They had used the billy to impregnate her. That billy was the reason she had milk to give. He couldn't understand why she was so afraid to go into the milking pen, and then it clicked. He asked, "Do you happen to know where Josh did the killing?" and I replied, "It was over there. I think it was over there." Over there was the milking pen. She wouldn't go in and from that day forward she refused to let them milk her. I think of that now when I think about what I eat and drink and where it comes from and giving thanks and what it mean to connect in the hardest places of all, in the heart. A while later, when we knew that the time had come for us to part, when the rains came once more over the thirsty terrain, when words were exhausted and there was nothing more to say, I came home. There in my room, laid carefully upon the bed, was his drum, sacred drum, made from the goat skin that had been roughly, carefully, and lovingly stretched over the oak body, scrap wood for which he had also found a use. Some say that truth is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not really sure I know what's true but there's something that flows in the moment. When heart speaks to heart, it seeps into all the spaces in between. And we, finding ourselves flowing with it, whirl like wanderers searching for home, like our own solar system, the galaxy, all those worlds in motion, dancing a cautious dance around one another spiraling in, ever slowly, to center.