Maria and I went out to the pasture to feed the sheep and donkeys this afternoon. With our three new lambs, our flock has grown, and we went to Tractor Supply to buy a new feeder, so the animals have plenty of space to eat and don’t need to crowd each other and fight for their food.
The lambs were getting squeezed out. The farm is a laboratory; it is all about beginning again.
Watching the sheep spread out and eat calmly as Maria marched past on her manure duties, I thought of what it means to begin again.
For me, life is full of beginnings, and every day is a chance to begin all over again.
I remember the author and farmer Wendell Berry’s tribute to his old friend, the poet Hayden Carruth, who was in his eighties when Berry greeted him “at the beginning of a great career.”
The courage required to live is to take risks, to fail, to get up, to begin again, and again, and again. To try again, differently if necessary.
Just as I’d rather love a dog than mourn a dog, I’d rather love life rather than fear or grieve it. Failure is a powerful fuel for me; I often fail and learn much.
At its simplest, life is one thing after another. I am constantly adjusting, groping, making my way forward, understanding how to be happy, and how not to fail.
Life is change, sometimes small, sometimes very big, sometimes everything at once. Again and again, we start over again, hoping to get back to contentment.
I think about what Louisa May Alcott wrote about beginning again: “I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.” – Jo March, Little Women.
Most people speak of 2020 as a hard year, for many, tragically, the hardest.
I greet you all at the beginning of another year. The danger of careers, wrote Berry, is that we may be found dead in them one day. I am either beginning, or I am dead.
This is why I commit myself to begin again, every day of every year.
This way, I can’t get too stuck. The earth cries out for all of us to contribute our personal gifts for the common good.
Beginnings are all about hope.
Each time I sit down to my blog to write, I stand at the beginning that I have made of my art and my writing and my life, again and again, and again.