The Day No Pigs Would Die

Wright Thompson said, "The land is never just dirt and loam and clay and slate. It contains everything that has ever lived on it or in it, fossils of tiny animals, the spirits of the people who tried to make their agrarian's stand,...Every man and woman, every race and tribe and family, makes their own history, on their land, in the dirt. They bury things that mean something only to them. Every history is deeply personal. Every history is unique."

In the cold Rexburg winter of 1986, we shot our pigs in our gravel driveway, led there so we wouldn't have to drag their carcasses the distance from the shed out back. The blood turned the snow red, soaked in, then turned brown and eventually disappeared. But not really. It stained the earth forever. This experience stayed with me, not because we did wrong, but because life is precious and killing is not a light act. That moment is worth remembering because it ties me to the earth and reality.

The land represents our potential to fill the measure of our creation. We sew, we cultivate, we care, then we harvest. This law, the law of the harvest, experienced universally as part of reality, is the great law of existence itself. Some associate it with the circle of life. Some call it natural selection. Even survival of the fittest. But these are all supplementary ideas to the great potential that our relationship with the land alone can provide. It is so ingrained in the very fiber of our make-up and therefore impossible to escape. And so we learn to embrace rather than rue the day that we were born. Harvesting the most we possibly can out of life.