Insomnia has been with me all my life, a relic of lying awake keeping wary vigil over my alcoholic father. I have developed strategies and drawn myself maps to navigate sleep, and some of them work sometimes. Like most adaptations within a living system they have to be adjusted constantly. They can’t be set once and forgotten like a mechanical system. This is the same thing that frustrates ranchers when they first adopt non-lethal methodology for living with coyotes. As you learn and adapt to them, the coyotes are also learning you, and you have to account for that within your planning. The coyotes that live in my brain have the same learning curve that I do. I can’t just use one trip or trick to solve this issue forever, because as fast as I adapt to a routine, the insomnia coyotes adapt to that new regimen. The coyotes are loud and chaotic and talkative, they demand attention and engagement. There are lions in the nocturnal landscape too, but they move slowly and silently around the edges, until the moment my sleeping brain is between their teeth.
In the deep history of Europe, people tended complex poly culture systems that developed around the hazelnut. The climate change that decimated the hazelnut and necessitated the emergency, short-term strategy of grain agriculture may have doomed us as a species and set in motion the cascade failure that created the modern world. There’s a good chance we’re all still living out the ripples of that one event, to our serious detriment.
The hazelnut trees were coppice trees, meaning the central trunk leader was cut and the shoots that come up from the base were tended over time, selected for long whips. This causes the tree to live much much longer than it would otherwise, sometimes hundreds of years longer, and makes straight, consistent, usable building and weaving materials. This is what Europeans did before they invaded places with redwood trees. They created basket houses woven in a spiral, the form of which makes a natural triangle shaped door. The form of the basket leaves a small open space at the top where smoke could escape.
I read an article about the history of these woven coppice trees on a camping trip with the flock. In my insomniac brain, as I was trying to talk myself down to sleep, that basket shape of an ancient hazelnut house melted in my mind with images I have seen of woven Bomas or Kraals, which are an open topped woven corral usually made of thorn bushes which keep livestock and humans safe from predators at night in Africa. I make a version of this ancient night corral by using a tall electric fence in a small circle within the larger paddock where the sheep spend peak lion hunting hours in North America. Night corrals can be seen in stone outlines across Europe, and on the ranch I’m grazing now, there is a night pen left behind 100 years ago by Basque herders who followed genocide into this land. When the fires burned over the whole ranch in 2020, the black earth contrasted starkly with the white stones of the old pen, which looked like a chalkboard with a rectangle callously scrawled upon it. The night pen is universal in pastoralist cultures everywhere that has not extirpated the native carnivores. They come in many forms, but the intention is the same- to create a small defensible space to ride through the most vulnerable hours of the night for hunting animals. The experience I have had in those intensive spaces is one of milling and then settling flock, who finally all lie down around me and breathe the semi-conscious sleep of sheep, gently rising and falling swells of darkness in darkness, coming together like a slowly rolling tide. Sheep have a shared identity more than a primate like me can fully grasp, and no sense of personal space. To be with them, on the ground, at night, is to be part of the general pile.
In my dream, I was inside a giant basket looking up at the round framed space of stars above. The walls are woven hazel, and the floor is deep springy grass.
I dreamed that the flock was breathing in tandem around me, their small breaths in unison forming the lungs of a great body that I was tucked inside and listening to from within. The woven walls flexed and moved slightly in the wind, and the warm bodies around me wrapped their long necks and breathed their soft breaths and nibbled my cheek and hands and ears with their dandelion down mouths. I felt the flock around me, but I watched the stars moving across the sky overhead, and they seemed to be moving faster than I remembered stars moving, the line of the galaxy forming a spine whose ribs enclosed around me as the woven walls, all of us inside the night pen carried in the body of a smoothly padding immense cat, traveling around the night sky with their gently rolling gait.
That made sense. I knew the point of the night pen was to be safe from lions, the safest place logically would be within the basket of their ribs. My sleeping mind dissipated, letting go of narrative into a stream of feelings and images, and I woke up quiet and whole to the steam of communal sheep breaths in cold morning air.
Since then, I have tried to call back this universal nighttime pen when I am trying to find the place of acceptance into sleep. Some nights I imagine building the pen in as much detail as possible, from wedging green willow and hazel into soft earth, to laying and lashing the woven basket form of the structure, to laying shingles of cut gorse branches around the perimeter to defend us with their thorns and magic, like they did in the night pens of my Celtic ancestors. I imagine lighting the fire in the center with the gorse wood, the traditional first wood to start any fire, being the chosen plant of the sun deity Lugh… and also being imbued with volatile oils that help it catch and maintain its hot flame. I imagine the willow and gorse and hazel and myrtle and elderberry whips rooting, their private white tendrils reaching through the earth and leafing out overhead.
I imagine laying on my back and pulling down the grass seed heads from around me and naming each one, trying to commit them to memory and learn them. The bright, delicate needle grass, so soft in one direction and so sharp in the other, the granular columns of deer grass flowers in their thick bunches, the tight braid of blue wild rye with its neat way the flower joins the stem, and the dense, soft mounds of deschampsia. Remembering each grass in as much detail as possible usually gives my mind enough to do that it doesn’t notice my subconscious stepping into sleep in time to sabotage it.
Inside the night pen, it is simultaneously a carpet of spring flowers, and has the honey soaked scent of dry pine needles on a hot day, and the deep duff and moss of the redwoods threaded with sorrel. Sometimes it’s warm sand with sedges and reeds and seaside daisy and gum plants weaving over it.
Walking in through the extended spiral of the door, just like stepping over the electric mesh in waking life, causes a momentary social mixing, just like the turning and stretching and smoothing that happens with a new handful of fruit or nuts is added into a kneaded loaf. The occupants of the night pen have to greet me, and each other all over again because my arrival has subtly shifted all of their relationships too. I’m never surprised by who finds me there. Bucket settles his heavy head into my chest and I run my hands over his stubby ears, taking in his slow gentle regard. I know, in those moments, that he died long ago. I remember his ancient eyes gazing deeply into mine as his heart slowed under my hand. In the night pen, his warm shoulder leans against my leg as I stand and look up. Riff, the old gray horse I loved to ride as a kid, is there too, and I see him sometimes. So are a whole cast of characters I’ve known over the years of a life spent close to animals. Some are alive, some aren’t, but there’s no additional consideration given to the departed; they have to snuggle and shuffle and wedge themselves into the throng like everyone else. Sometimes that hurts, and jerks me back up into narrative thought. Apple the goat, tucking her tidy hooves and plopping her round belly down beside me, sent waves of deep regret through me. If I knew as a beginning farmer what I know now, maybe I could have avoided her death. She isn’t able to receive my regret and remorse for the cost she paid to my learning curve. She’s a goat, these things are too abstract for her, even in this space we are what we are. What she is able to do is stake out her place in the soft grass, and chew her cud with the reflection of the stars in her eyes.
Inside this protected night space, we all find our way to being one flock, all fitting together, and the hopes and regrets and desire for learning and remembering, the litany of plant names and flock medicines and history and culture are not of this space necessarily. They are just trails I can step onto that sometimes lead here, or sometimes switchback and turn me away to vulnerable open spaces. The yapping pack of coyotes that circle my inner night pen, reminding, scolding, distracting, have their parts to play and my inner ecosystem would be impoverished without them, but everything that exists acts on everything else in its turn, and they can’t control the entire narrative any more than the night pen can. We are creatures of rotational grazing, nothing stays.
When we move from paddock to paddock, the patch of land that we leave behind that was the night pen is always the most beautiful, but not until the next spring. At the time we leave, it can seem too heavily trampled, too impacted by nesting bodies and their dropped feed and waste. It looks like overused ground. With rest, though, that deep massage, that stimulation and fertilization, is rejuvenating for the soil and grass. Rest is the difference between exercise that builds strength, and exploitation that destroys it. Rest is where the hardest work and greatest transformations take place.
Within the ribs of the great woven lion, whose branches are flowering and decomposing and covered with turkey tail mushrooms and the nests of birds, over which the stars are running like the discs in a languidly powerful vertebrae, we are carried through the night together.