rams were making their way out. I stuck my knee into the wedge they were coming through and got a painful compression bruise out of it as a big vasectomized ram pushed through. He got out and among the young rams, where a butting contest ensued. Bloody and panting, the old ram, who has bad lungs, had to cede.
By this time, Butthead had his face in the corn and was hard to deflect. Finally I maneuvered him into an unoccupied pen.
Ben’s truck on the gravel. “Mary, can’t I leave you alone for a minute?”
With one sheep dead, I have become more than usually observant of the actions of the rest. One of the rams was hunched over, moving convulsively. “Ben! Is that ram sick?”
“He’s ejaculating, Mary.”
I think I spent too much time in graduate school.
Buddhist tradition tells of a monk bathing in a river, where he comes upon a drowning scorpion. Tenderly he lifts the scorpion out of the water and the scorpion stings him savagely. The cycle of rescue and attack repeats itself as the monk tries to get the scorpion to shore before it kills him. The other monks try to intervene but, “He is acting according to his dharma,” the monk tells them, “and so am I.” The word dharma here means a kind of internal wisdom: what Quakers call the Light, or sometimes the Inner Teacher. There is an old saying, “Live up to the Light that thou hast and more will be given.”
Last night when I checked the animals around dusk, two men were walking an unleashed husky near the pens. I hate huskies. Half the time a child or a small animal is attacked by a dog you’ll find a husky in it: this is part of the rural Minnesota belief system.
“Last year,” Ben told me, “a husky chased a ewe lamb straight to the end of the paddock, tore off her udder and ripped her vagina.”
The owner refused to accept any responsibility, saying, “It’s just her nature.”
Ben went on, “If I see that owner around here again I’m going to rip his ass. It’s my nature.”
IT WAS LAST APRIL in the north of England, one of those moments when it felt like I’d been traveling for about thirteen years, jazzed on homeopathic fright pills. I was telling myself that yoga is at root a practice of acceptance: acceptance of the body from moment to moment, day to day; people, situations, and events as they occur. Softening to whatever comes. I was having these thoughts while trying to surrender to a chilly bed in Birmingham, at a community where I was doing research. The mattress was the kind of penitential hump with a ridge running down the middle that forces you to deposit half of your body east and half of it west, divided precisely in two lest one side overbalance and you slide to the floor. The damp cold seeped into me as I lay watching the dark like a cat at God’s mousehole. Part of me delivered rational comfort: it will be warm in a minute, I’ll be asleep. Another part wailed, “There’s been a mistake! I’ve been buried alive in Birmingham, and this is the cold of a deep grave I can’t whine my way out of!”
Yoga mediates between these two voices. This moment is as it should be. This moment is my teacher. If I struggle against this moment, I struggle against the flow of the universe.
Finally I got out of bed and found my long underwear and a stash of those overwashed community blankets that lie on you like tacos, letting in drafts from all sides. I hoped the homeopathic fright pills were specific for being buried alive. Then I slept or fell down a coal chute till 5 A.M. truck traffic on the Bristol road committed me to the day. The pillow jammed under my head repulsed me with its smell of exotic hair oil, male and tropical. I pushed off the hump and made for the shower. The water was lukewarm, and I caught, shivering, the scent of a peculiarly British brand of disinfectant. Olfactory sensations go right to the glands of memory; I was back in an English youth hostel, adventurous, displaced, and twenty-four. On the skylight above me a spongy, plopping sound began and I sensed the peculiar light of snow.
But I was not twenty-four, I was unstuck in time, and in a few hours I was due to be in Manchester to meet the man who has been the companion of my life for some fifteen years.
The one given me to love, I think, fondly—sometimes—when he drops his socks on the floor. For to have someone to love is worth the price of admission to life; not even Birmingham could shake my soul on that point. Robin and I met in church, as Abby Van Buren recommends, or rather at Quaker meeting. And then we met again, singing. Both of us belong to a group that sings in a colonial American tradition called Sacred Harp or shape note. In fact, it’s music business that brings Robin to England: he will be teaching Sacred Harp singing to English choral groups and directing a national convention. Let me try to give you a picture of how strange it will be to transplant this raucous, unsubtle music into the ironic idiom of British choral singers.
YOU CAN HEAR the singing at a Sacred Harp convention twelve blocks away, I’m told. My children say twelve blocks isn’t far enough—death metal folk, they call it. For my part, I think it sounds best when you are standing in the middle of the hollow square, with one hundred fifty singers around you in full voice.
Sacred Harp, or shape note singing, comes out of a religious music tradition going back to early New England singing schools. If you look into the big red Sacred Harp songbook that Robin and I carry with us everywhere, you may think you’re looking at medieval chant, because the music is notated in triangles, circles, and squares (hence “shape note”); each shape represents a note in a modified solfège system. Sacred Harp was devised to teach music quickly to those unaccustomed to sight-singing and it contains, in contrast to the usual do-re-mi system, only four syllables (fa-so-la-mi). Unlike chant, the music is polyphonic and unsubtle; its conventions, indeed, are unlike any mainstream Western tradition. Singers belt out the pieces at full volume, singing first the shapes, then the texts; academic musicians often tell me contemptuously that it contradicts everything they were ever taught. Maybe that’s because it’s not precisely—or not only—music. It has elements of religion, therapy, sport, and catharsis.
How does one describe a sound? “Death metal folk” is one attempt. I’ve heard it called “white gospel” by those trying to get across the flavor (though black people sing it, too). It has a medieval feeling in its minor tonalities, its resonant fourths and fifths. “Wondrous Love”—a song that often makes its way into modern hymnals—is a typical Sacred Harp piece. If you’ve heard William Billings’s eighteenth-century American music, you’ve heard a bit of the shape note style—though probably not at the volume and level of idiosyncrasy that characterize a Southern country “singing.” For it was in the rural South that this music survived, often in Primitive Baptist communities where, today, the average singer is likely to be over sixty. It reflects a religion so fierce and elemental that its only other objective correlative (alternate Sundays) might be snake handling.
The conventions of Sacred Harp singing are many and subtle. I don’t know what goes on in other sections—treble, tenor, and bass: I can only describe the contours of my alto world. Altos need to be big (in some physical or metaphysical sense) and loud; they tend to squabble over the front row of seats. Singers sit in squares, by section, facing a song leader who stands in the middle. Conducting a song—which any member of the group may do—is something of a collaboration between the one who has gotten up to lead and the front-bench singers. The front benchers are responsible for keeping the beat, roaring out the part, and communicating, by means of some psychic energy, the song leader’s intentions. These singers are not appointed, anointed, or elected: they assume their places with a sense of noblesse oblige.
In a weekly singing group, rank is barely discriminated. Strong singers, responsible for carrying the part, tend to head for the front seats, but at weekly meetings, a beginner may sit up front without incurring the wrath of some senior alto. At a regional convention, by contrast, confident indeed would be the new singer who seated herself in the front row, unless she were simply, as I was at my first convention, ignorant of the