Killing Moon

(trigger warning, words about death, slaughter etc.)

This has been a piece I’m not sure how to share, or where I will go with it. I write with calendula flower resins and spearmint oils on my fingers that I will not wash off from a few hours of helping harvest at the medicinal herb farm today where I lived this season. I’ve been sitting with a blank canvas, with the feelings of it all resting on my chest, and unable to start the process of writing. But, the title has been there since Montana cut the sheep’s neck with a freshly sharpened knife and blood poured, literally the river of life, caught with handmade bowls, Madison whisked attentively to keep the bright red flow from congealing, with full moon on the horizon. And then we drank in pint mason jars passed around mixed with raw milk from the goats that the folks who own the butcher shop in Paonia graciously gifted us for this class. I’m preparing for an online class this coming Tuesday, and I prepare for these classes by writing to myself, by stream-of-conscious jotting down the ultimate intention of the space, and yet, I’ve been stuck there too. I know it will be fine, as it was all summer teaching my in-person field ecology classes on the Grand Mesa here in Colorado where I got to apply a lot of my curiosities about land and place, awareness and connection with some students who came as far as England to attend. Though I know it will be ok, the online class on somatic storytelling and ecological awareness, and the composition of this piece I am sharing with you now, I feel stuck, with how to encompass such things that feel so, damn, big, and web-like.

Killing moon is the harvest moon. Harvest freak is a being who is possessed by the harvest moon. And I am one of those beings who becomes possessed, by the necessity of what it means to be human who harvests, and transforms, who becomes a channel for the alchemized process of moving energy from one state to another. Food and death and seeds and meat and weaving and clay and stink and flies and rot. It had only helped me over the last decade or more, to make my body a vessel for this channeling whether it is with plants or animals, or another beings that fall outside of what western culture calls worthy ‘life.’

Last weekend, I helped facilitate an animal processing and sheep hide tanning class in Ridgway, Colorado with the help of my friends Madison, Beau, and Montana. The class was held on Madison’s land, a human who is underground low-key famous for her intuitive and ethical horse training work but insanely humble and generous IRL, she attended almost all my in-person ecology classes this summer and even my first ever Terratalks critical ecology study group online last late winter/spring. We’ve become friends during the summer. The class for teaching hide tanning was first inspired by my friend Forrest, who lives in Paonia, CO and sells his hides and tans a lot for a living, who asked me to teach with him. We worked out the dates all summer, and asked Madison about teaching at her land since it was in a central location to access more folks, and she was down. Forrest ended up needing to cancel co-teaching, and I went ahead to teach it anyway. When Forrest and Madison met about the class, they talked about doing animal processing as well since she has a herd of sheep and was willing to give one for the class, since she needed to slaughter a few at some point anyway. So, the intention was set, to slaughter a sheep, on the Harvest Moon, along with the hide tanning, a weekend Forrest and I had picked, not truly realizing when we close the date that it was around the full moon in September symbolizing the ‘Harvest,’ a theme I visited in a particular way in my last post, Harvest freak. Harvest means so much more to me than just the fruit of the gardens but also the harvest of the cycle of the years work and intentions. This time of year is particularly hard for me. The Harvest Moon, aka Killing MOON in this case, brought up a lot of grief. I think it can for a lot of people. It reminds me in the somatic map of my body, a construct I have been unable to separate myself from in both deeply personal matters and in the idea of ecological education work—- that this time of year reminds me of ‘things’. Many things that are often hard to compartmentalize and put into words but trying to find the stories in our bodies I think can reveal something to us. An acorn for example, which I am gathering right now, reminds me of, wandering through the woods of Appalachia next to my old cobb house picking white and black oaks, drying and shelling not fully dry with Amber’s shelling tools who is indigenous Alaskan moving back now and someone who I haven’t seen in years even when I was in Appalachia last, making acorn bread with my grandma’s bread bowl kept as a shelf ornament that I actually USED. Walking through my parents’ farms’ woods and gathering White Oak and Blackjack Oak for loaf after loaf of bread. Seeing the Valley Oak acorns in California, the foothills where it loves to grow, fall at weed farm scenes on cheap metal roofs where I sat like a slave laborer, during the era that I was a lonely trimmigrant, without groundedness anywhere, not letting myself prioritize the harvest of food anymore, instead it was sweet stick smelling bud, and coming out with cash, dark circles under my eyes and back pains, and deep deep longing for village that I left but then just napping in Redwoods and Live Oak groves for days, literally acorns falling on me that I never picked up to eat. It reminds me of finishing the Colorado Trail and seeing abundant acorns while descending in elevation from a summer up high documenting plants and walking, with my ex, who was my best friend in the world, and vowing to come back and gather once we were off foot and we never did up there. It reminds me of his burr oak coolers, with the fat nuts and extravagant acorn caps and planting them on the Ute reservation by the La Plata River. And carrying the cooler east where the rest of the acorns tragically molded in the humid air. It reminds me of grinding flour with a mill at my friends’ place in Gila, New Mexico, right when the pandemic hit, and later made pinch cakes with the flour that molded before we could eat them in the wilderness because of storing them wrong. It reminds me of thanksgiving at my friend Nina’s cabin where we made acorn porridge with ghee and yampah flour for breakfast every morning. A single being, texture, or smell, color, shape, plant, animal, experience, time of year can become a vital map. An ecological map that we were never separate from. And so can the time of harvest, as the landscape becomes the memories in the body itself, and within that harvest multitudes of beings, and stories, are held.

We took a sheep’s life on the full moon, before it has risen in its large and orange glory over the La Plata Mountains, ripe with closeness to death as it is so woven almost indistinguishable with life. On the first night being on her land, and Montana and I were struggling to find a flow in the stress of preparation, Madison yelled to us, as she was bringing water to her sheep in the field uphill from where we were doing carpentry: ‘Kelly, come here! The moon, you have to see!’ Montana and I looked at one another and decided we had to stop trying to drill holes into wood, and run up the hill. It was getting dark, and we hadn’t made food to eat for dinner, we were trying to build frames for the class and felt we had so much to do still before students came the next day. But we stopped and ran up the hill into the grass pasture and through multiple metal gates where the sheep herd lives and the individual sheep we were going to kill the next day fed in the grass, to stop, turn around and look at the moon slowly rising over the mountains, lighting up the landscape around us. It rose over the mountains and continued to go up, getting slightly smaller the higher she went. We weren’t able to see down by the. construction area at main hide camp was by the creek down low.

Madison facilitated a ceremonial aspect to the kill that surprised me, not that I didn’t expect that she would hold such immense space for a monumental act our culture teaches us to numb, forget or downplay, literally not allow, to not complete in a way, to not fully feel. Flash to a factory farm, the symbol of our society where human beings and machines cut heads off animals one after the other day in and day on over and over, to feed out disconnected lives. This is considered NORMAL, and I’m supposed to accept it. I didn’t know what to actually expect from her opting to facilitate this piece of the class, though she has taken such a deep dive into grief work this past two years and had a lot of share with us about it.

I’ve been witness to a few killings. But, I’m more comfortable dealing with the dead and stench after, with curious mind-altering, and dedicated tending, ecstatic really at times. I have tanned hides since 2013, but haven’t given myself that same amount of time staring death in the face in the moment of impact. I avoided that part. I grew up not saying I love you much. Not wanting a pet because I didn’t want it to die and have to feel the loss. Not dating much, not letting myself love fully because it meant that I might be vulnerable to another, that I might lose that thing, that I would let me little soul be out and malleable, permeable, and movable to love and death itself. Even in the killings, I have found myself slightly numb, turning away even when witnessing or catching blood or being right there. I feel it within myself, a nervousness, that then becomes somehow a lack of feeling, but is this what ends up happening eventually? Madison addressed just this as she talked about our choice to kill the sheep for this class to teach us, feed us, nourish us. Why turn away, to be able to ‘stand it’ with stoic emotion? It reminds me of funerals in the south where I grew up where everyone stood still with tears streaming and no space to wail and shake, and yet, my uncle balled more than anyone at my grandfather’s funeral few years ago, and it wasn’t even his biological grandfather, while we all tried to keep our shit together. Love, and grief are literally the same thing. And yet we are encouraged to tame both. We often do this to one another, too. She also brought up questions like: why is a quick death ethical? Is this need connected to our inability to face suffering and pain? The reality that death is unpredictable, feral, and often painful, drawn out and uncontrollable? And, in another conversation this week with a friend about loving animals we kill for food, we ask ourselves, about the relationship. To love, means that we WILL feel a lot of pain, potentially. Even if we live a long time being able to love a thing, place or person, or animal. And we must kill it, take it, or leave it, transform it, harvest it, to understand how deeply we love.

And also after this whole 4 day workshop, which I’ll wrap back around to here in a sec, I photographed a celebration of life and love for my ex’s ex’s goat, who lost part of a leg due a freak fence-tangle dog attack accident. I feel a unique care for those who those I love loved, and through all the unresolved messiness, I felt that it was the right thing to do, despite having been a part of the taking of one life just days before, I chose to honor the choice of another who wants to fundraise to support the long life of a pack goat she chose to caretake, a very human who I for a moment equated in one way with my immense suffering, without realizing in my body she was human too.

Sometimes other peoples’ sufferings is what contributes to ours, and we cannot blame them for suffering the same as we do, and really we must understand that we are actually in it together, not opposed as some kind of binary forces. (I am thinking about this too as I tune in to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently unfolding) We cannot blame them, but only feel empathy for them, or we suffer with out own animosities we impose on ourselves. I say this while feeling some days so much anger and hurt that I can’t function, towards people in my life who I felt betrayed me. And yet, it is I who cause my own suffering, no one else. And it is my capacity for love that causes it. The Israel - Palestine conflict is so tragic too because it is essentially two marginalized peoples pitted against one another in part created by players outside the space all together who want tangential power and control over such a pivotal geographic region. I wrote on instagram yesterday in a story share, about how much learning about ‘salted earth’ in this region struct me. There’s been so much conflict in the region for hundreds, if not thousands of years that often warring parties after ‘winning’ would cut all the trees and salt the earth so nothing could grow. Punishing the land itself so that the people could not survive and thrive. But yet, it hurts everyone. An herbalist I met at a skills gathering who grew up in Israel and whose father was a biblical scholar, told me about this alongside biblical references to certain plants, a kind of ethnobotany I find super fascinating, especially do since so many of the stories have pre-Judeo-Christian origins. What about the earth’s suffering in all this?

We kill the sheep that hopped the highest in joy.

Little hopper, little jumper.

The blood poured as a drum was hit, in cadence, by a friend/colleague/intern of Madison’s who popped in and out of the class over the four days, who admitted she used to pick up roadkill back in the day.

After the passing, legs kicking in final dreamlike runs and jumps, eyes glazing over, we stepped away for a bit, to allow the sheep’s best buddy to come up and sniff and check out his friend’s body. Madison thought this was important for the sheep to properly grieve, something we haven’t had a chance to do enough as humans with the deaths of those we love, human and non-human kin alike. A lot can be shifted with proper grief rituals, or space to grieve.

The buddy sheep came and sniffed, looked around, nibbled some grass. Blood stained the sheep’s face. As we were catching the blood, it convulsed and raised its head, and dipped it into the bowl of our collection, for a moment, leaving the dried red smear of the vital veins of god itself.

After the killing and butchering breakdown, we proceeded into a weekend of hide tanning, of turning the animal skins of other sheep into rugs, throws or vests eventually that keep out bodies and homes warm. I am reminded through the transition, after talking to a friend after about ethical death, that a recognition of life, and how it nourishes us, causes us to face our own relationship to our own bodies. We must love ourselves and want to be alive fully in order to take life and properly grieve.

We scrape flesh off of our hides in 40 mph winds. The temperature in the air is mild, but yet, we are forced to be in ourselves during wind gusts tbecause we can bareky hear one another talk. I get everyone to scrape the flesh of their separate sheep hides into a circle, where wolf-dog Nali sits in the pile of meat and fat watching us as if she already knew.

Madison’s rabbits who live in the pasture in rotating tractors, suffered from the wind as some of the cages flipped which I don’t think they have ever happened. Fence and gate blew down. Our army tent kitchen collapsed. Maddy and Beau’s bell tent tore a hole from the wind. The valley gets winds like this in Spring she said, but not usually this time of year. The funnel bursts from the La Platas to Ridgeway, and if you’re in the way, it is unpredictable the effects.

Death seems to dominate the weekend.

A hawk kills chickens. I watch him on the fencepost way in the distance as Maddy hears their distressed calls and runs up to their pen in her ATV to try to see what is going on to find only legs left.

Wind, the mover of energy, during this harvest, floating wool from our brushing clean skins dirty hair from life lived outside. organ dishes. bone broth on the stove that didn’t spill in the wind. a collapsed kitchen set up again by Beau who was in the kitchen and got hit in the head, mildly, thankfully. Who says ‘nothing can hurt him’ after what he experienced in his childhood growing up in the hood.

Wind, and chaos and blood and killing. Killing with prayers set. Killing Moon. SO we feast, on meat and milk and vegetables from the year of grasshoppers massacring just about everything.

Call it what it is, killing, but it doesn’t make it any less sacred.

Smoke and fat and soap, big moon and blood. We manage to finish the class with everyone leaving with their softened skin, smoked to seal the deal, and yet, slightly disjointed in the scurry to get back to life as wind and culture tend to do.

Madison, Beau, Montana and I clean up after the weekend on a calm warm day, fall colors in full glory, willows yellow, gambel oaks yellow and orange— and reflect on the moments where presence was held and moments where we weren’t present at all. And yet, this remains true: It was the Killing Moon. Something trickster was in play. I had trouble with some communication. The wind tore holes, took animals that didn’t intend to go during this moon, knocked over sturdy fences, disrupted out neat piles, law and order.

Tune into my friend Christa’s youtube video with Alt-J’s music Deadcrush, below. Alt-J has been on repeat this summer when trying to still grapple with incomprehensible grief while getting reacquainted with an old love of mine- dancing. Christa was there for an August sheep slaughter. She came out from Moab to this class and tanned a skin. I wish I was that cool at 20 years old. I have hope.

We all had some small mushroom therapy this August, unexpected, dancing to Dirtwire in a small barn, in Boulder, Utah, after killing a different sheep and cleaning its intestines, tanning ball sacks, gathering green Piñon cones and Grindelia flowers for tincture. I don’t usually pair psychedelics and groups of people. But this time it worked for me. It appreciate wrapping back around over and over. When people come back around. When I come back around to people and places. It is what I live for.

Life begins as soon as life occurs, Madison said. And as we broke down the sheep, the flies and the meat bees came to swarm us and take their bite. Life and death have no clear lines, and this hit me hard. It’s really true. How do we draw a line, like how we cannot draw a line where a Juniper Pinon forest starts and a Gambel Oak one begins? Or where our bodies and others start and stop? Is there really a true line? Others feast when death is properly grieved, and held, and promoted.

So we bury our kin in climate controlled boxes so we feel good that the roaches take longer to get to us. It prolongs the dead’s reentry in all things (they, them, infinite) and probably makes for lots of spirits in limbo. We talked about that kind of thing last week too, but that’s a post for another time.