New Website, New Farm Life, New Mercies from Doggies
Someone living in the heart of darkness wrote this in Lamentations 3:16-17:
[God] has made my teeth grind on gravel,
and made me cower in ashes;
17 my soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is…
Six short verses later the same author writes:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning…
A few weeks ago my teeth were grinding and I was anything but at peace because one company bought out the other I was using for my domain for this web site, there was a cross in communication, and the web site, with 14 years of labor, had dissolved into ashes.
However, I soon realized that this was a good time for rebirth and rebuilding. We started Heatherhope in 2002 in order to commit ourselves to being married to this bit of God’s green earth rather than raping it. And, since we had seen for ourselves how shepherds lived this way in Britain and Ireland, we followed their example with the help of the animals who really did all the hard, hard work: dogs.
Border Collies would gather and move the sheep gently, and Great Pyrenees would guard them. Very little gasoline. No compacting of the soil with machinery. Very little carbon footprint.
And the bonus was life. And life with the dogs did two things. It soaked our lives in love from them, and it gave focus and amplified the love we had to give the world.
Now Heatherhope is at a turning point. My wife and I discovered we were too old to keep up the breeding, wintering, and lambing. A great wind disturbed the sheep on the first day of our last lambing by banging the big sliding doors of the barn, and from that point on I had to wrestle 200 pound ewes into the barn so that they would care for the lambs in warmth. I almost had a heart attack.
So now we graze other people’s sheep in the warmer months. And now we have turned our attention to finding more and more ways to make the farm more bio-diverse.
It is a time of turning ashes and the grinding of teeth into something new.
But there is continuity too. There is something that never ceases. And that is the love that circulates between the dogs and us. No matter how bad the news on our smart phones is, and no matter how our old bodies ache, we go to the dogs and they love us without ceasing.
Today we received a beautiful black and white album of pictures and testimonials from Puppies Behind Bars, a non-profit we support that helps people in the heart of the darkness of our prisons to adopt and train dogs that are then placed as service dogs with veterans living with their own darkness of post traumatic stress disorder.
In this program men who have learned the only way forward is to be tougher than the next guy, have shed tears into the fur of puppies and dogs that need them and who give them unconditional love.
Unceasing love.
You too can support this miraculous program. Just go to their web site by using this link:
https://puppiesbehindbars.com/
And we hope you enjoy our new website. From time to time I will post blogs that I archived before they were turned to ashes in the nethersphere. Let us know what you think.
And hug a dog today!