Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

The lake is a light slate colour this morning, with ripples running west to east across the surface. I have been cutting sheep faeces from a Cotswold sheep fleece. This blog is an attempt to document my struggle against battery humanism. Against our imprisonment by modern culture. I love my laptop and my car which gives me freedom to climb up Snowdon on New Year's day and swim in White Sands beach the next. But they come with a price. One is the deep muscle ache cutting across my shoulders as I type. This blog will explore my attempts to challenge within my own life the pathologies of our culture. It will document my efforts to be happy without damaging the earth, to bring well-being and sustainability into the lives of my children and to reconnect with what it means truly, to be human. 

Weaving is a part of my plan. So when my neighbour offered me a massive builder's sac full of damp, rancid, to quote Chaucer, 'shitten', sheep's wool,  I accepted with delight. 

As I type a long-tailed tit is tap tapping on the wooden panels above my window. Perhaps they are looking for insects sleeping beneath? The old dog is pacing around asking for some need to be met, a simple matter of a walk, or a meal or some water. I will attend to her soon. Outside an orange movement grabs my attention, Through the telescope trained permanently on my garden and the nature reserve beyond, I see a bullfinch, resplendent with colour, munching the seeds of a budlea flower. I looked at the scrappy plant all year, thinking I really should cut it back. Now I have been redeemed. This bird is like the brightest bauble on the saddest old Christmas tree. The tree feeds it, gives it life, makes fly its flash feathers. Life renews.  

In my bath tub, lies the coat of a 3 year old ewe. She lives in my village in an apple orchard, with her children and mother eating grass and growing this coat. She is there still. I have the honour of owning her fleece, a gift from a neighbour with whom, in the past I have had some differences. I feel duty bound to create something of beauty for both human and sheep. My intention is to weave this wool on a peg loom into a thick, loose rug for the children's beds, or for by the fire. But for now, it is an ugly mat of filth. It will take some transforming. 

First, I cut the ragged poo infested sections of wool off with a pair of scissors. Then I lug the unwieldy mass into the house. Luckily the bathroom is right by the back door. In it goes into a pool of warm spring water. My house is one of only two left in our village that is still fed by water from the Spring. This means I can never over run the bath. One of the twin dramas of my domestic life has been eliminated. The pressure is low, so the water slowly fills a tank. When the tank is empty, the water stops flowing, long before it fills the tub. I never over run the bath. I still, regularly, burn pans on the stove! Immediately I drop in the fleece, the water turns mud brown. Simple as that.  Hereford mud, which has a pinky tone from the iron ore in its belly.

And that is where I left off to write this. I know, because I have done it once before to the fleece of her sister, that this wool will undergo a metamorphosis in the next hour. When I have finished I will be the owner of a warm, grey-blue, curly mass of the softest, sweetest wool man has ever woven. And when I have made it into a thing of beauty in my home, I will cherish it, like no shop-bought thing, however stunning or finely wrought. This rug will be the heaven's embriodered cloth, and I will lay it at the feet of loved ones, along with my dreams. But for now... back to the sh*t. 

Sasha x