The Secret Life of a Shepherdess

I live in a painting - or so I’ve been told.

Large round bales of hay dot my fields, horses graze in the pastures and the setting sun can backlight the path to the woods as well as any Fragonard. As classic or even cliché as those images are, they still carry the power to transport us to more magical places. That’s why painters paint them and why poets still sing their songs.

This is the secret life of a shepherdess. Each day I am transported in the way others are through a painting or a novel. But my experience is not virtual. It is real, rugged and it is magical.

Let’s start with the drama of life and death.

Farmers experience this all the time and I have had several traumas with my sheep. But past the penicillin, the drenches and the wraps are those magical moments where you come to terms with the visceral reality of death and the palatable desire for life. It’s in the moment where the life force in your being reaches for the life force of your animal and tries to find that magical chord of life. You seek it out and if you can, you grab it with your heart-mind and hold on for dear life - their life. These moments are heightened and crisp like a good Michelangelo.

You see the chord of life, you feel it wane, you reach to help, you think, you pray and you connect with this beast. When it’s over, regardless of the outcome, you step back into reality and pay your bills, clean your car or send an email. But you were in the painting. For a moment, you hung from the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

There are easier, lighter moments and they are just as transforming. These moments come while doing more mundane chores like skirting fleeces in the afternoon sun.

Time alters its speed and slows. Instead of telephones and automobiles you begin to hear the red wing black birds gathering by the marsh. A flock of geese call out to them as they vee south across the fields. The cat and her kittens climbing the hitching posts go stock still every time a flock swoops -the daunting sound of a thousand wings. The dogs, lounging still in the driveway, eye the hawk floating overhead. The sheep, idly chewing hay, beckons the rooster off the fence and onto her back. The llama scolds a lamb for infringing on his lunch.

The most I can do is nothing; otherwise I’ll miss it all, for I am hearing the earth turn. I am hearing Mozart. I am seeing Monet.

These signals, this other universe, this magic is what moves the artist in me and indeed in everyone. How can we not respond to this? All these random acts of the wild telling us the universe is huge and magical and mysterious. So we sing, we pray, we paint, we write, we knit.


My bounty is the wool from our beloved Rambouillets. As an artist and a shepherd I am in constant awe of the spirit that lives in those fibers. The stars that illuminate them at night and the sunrise they greet every day. The peace they hold in their nature.

I am inspired to spend the rest of my day with the wool that has already lived through so much and I ask it to transform so that it may carry its message on. Into a baby bunting the color of a new dawn, a wedding bag dyed in dandelion petals, a pure white ballet shrug, felted mittens for my son.

All the love of the world poured into a few fibers and mailed back out into the spectrum of human reality so that it may bless us, inspire us, keep us and tend to us.

And then consciousness strikes and I must ask myself, “Who is really tending who?” inside the painting, I mean.

And I find one more secret in the life of a shepherdess.