'We're all just waiting around for life to take us,' Eliza said, 'life is death that takes us little by little.' Eliza couldn't hide from it. Even when she closed her life away from the world's movement and became forlorn and wistful, death followed her everywhere and had no sympathy. Indeed it was form without a mind, the all-mighty meaningless destruction and creation that offered no explanation. It was greater than our imaginations. We liked to think that love conquered all, when in fact death conquered all, every time. In every transformation - a life, a death, and life again and so on. Eliza stayed locked away in her secure world and hoped for some sympathy for her vulnerable heart. But death brought no such thing into her life. Instead it seemed to be working in her. 'The death is working inside us all. There is no safe place, no airtight container. Our bodies are a malestrom.' 'No,' I said, 'fuck that, I will create heaven on earth and to hell with nothingness and the monster of oblivion!'
Eliza said, 'if you run that animal sanctuary, you can only fail. You will see death nibbling at every spot of blood and bone on every one of those sentient beings. Death will be in their eyes at all times, working patiently away under the wing of the smallest hen at night as she clucks softly to herself, the frayed knee joint of the old hinny and the death of baby chicks in the eggs before they know life. Just when you think you are too weary to be affected, you will come across unexpected death, the old kangaroo rotten by the pond where the duck has landed and a cicada shell washed into a red gum sapling. And the moment will have you cry like rain and howl like the wind in your grief.
Death will be sudden in accidents - lightning, tractors, gates, swollen creeks, wheat bins, fence wire, ditches, rocks, dams, tree limbs and storms or as slow as an ache in the heart or long-term barreness through psychic drought. That is death's unwanted way into our lives. It has many invitations and visitations. The farm makes it easy for death. This existence is like walking onto a playing field where you are always the loser. That's if you try to win. But we do. The fear is born into us through our physical need for survival. Our minds of love work against the bodies of fear. The question is which is the greatest and most adequate survival tool - the body or the soul? There will be those rotting skulls in the ditches and way out on the property, you will remember the grave where all the property dogs and the grandfather were buried and where you will be buried, that's if you aren't eaten by the hawks and ants first.' 'So it's a cemetery I'm working on, when I really want paradise!'
The question is always 'do I have the strength?' Life had pounded me down since I was an infant. I had a rage in my heart that fired beyond weariness, but I was afraid. I was an infant in a dark and fiery infinity. Did I have both the empathy and the endurance in order to create 'heaven on earth' when earth didn't want to be heaven, but simply itself? I cannot relax. My mind is in a perpetual state of motion and there can be no rest. I love work better than escapism. 'When death comes for me, it can fucken knock me down in my boots,' I said. I wasn't the type to want to die in my sleep. 'Until I can see a better option, I'm going out with a fight!' Will I run the animal sanctuary and have to be the one to turn them away from paradise on earth?
It has been said, '... once you open the gates they come, indeed those poor unwanted animals come ... but they are not followed closely by the funds ...' Would I have it in me to mop up their pain and misery - bloody sores and aching limbs and fragile minds day by day by day by day - to dedicate my life to healing injury? To fight the long battle with nothing but love? Love even when faith has failed. How dedicated was I? Where is the dedication beyond words? Let's face it, I've worked so hard to survive myself that I can hardly relax. I may as well keep going. I can handle anything that life throws at me. All my actions speak of deprivation of some kind. But does it really matter about the reason behind things? Love is in action, more than in thought. Love is now. We are physical. We are of the spirit. Which will be more relevant and beneficial to the future of the earth?
I remember the day where my idea of 'heaven on earth' started. It was the afternoon before the full moon on the property at Rylstone. The grassy paddocks were rounded when viewed from the ground, like the back of a hand will be rounded when it is stretched and delivered to the lips of another for the kiss. As the sun is physical so does physical love complete the landscape. Paddocks are always completed by the sky and by the sun. This gives them half of their existence. The body of the gigantic black cow that stood in front of me was muscular and round. The sun was well on its way to setting behind her. It would set behind her as it set behind a building or something monumental. It would complete her. The small fire trails of sun licked up under her belly and udder and down over her dark back and fine flick of tail. There was a cow of the great paddock like the greatest structure in this city. She should be preserved within me for heritage and prosterity. This lifetime is all about cows.
But there is something else I must tell you now. I was on a roof of a huge tin shed with some other people. We were looking out of the huge industrial landscape lit up by shed lights and startled by two hundred thousand screaming hens. We had come out onto the farm in the early hours of the morning to try and save a few of them. We were overwhelmed by what we saw. Fiona gently touched my hand. It was the first time I had seen Hell. I didn't know what to do with it all. My greatest fear was that this would be the last scene inside my head at the moment of my death. Until now I didn't know what to replace it with. But these days things are different. Now I will think of the black cows on that golden hill before the sunset, the night fires already lit in their eyes and how their bodies warmed to a bright chestnut brown. I am sure they were alight and warm to the touch, those watery pupils gently lashed and curiously staring. Johnny said, 'they think you're food.' But this would be the image that I would see - simply, twelve black angus cows standing over me.
At first Johnny was not inspired by the idea of turning the cattle farm into a cattle sanctuary. It was me who had failed to inspire him. As I got desperate I let go of reason and began to sob. 'I love them,' I bawled, 'I love them and you will destroy them.' Johnny grabbed me around the waist when he saw that I was about to shoot off like a flywheel. There was nothing good in this world - in this little universe of focused pain and suffering that I had created for myself. There were no dreams and miracles! 'What can I get you?' he asked. 'I don't want your matchsticks!' I screamed back. 'When you have just tried to put out the fire!' It was hideous to see the detachment for the cows and the attachment for me.
I thought how easily we could switch positions. It would be easy for him to switch our positions, substituting one for the other. It was easy for me when we were one and the same. He wanted to kill the cow inside me. He wanted to kill all my faith in the world that had been restored. The problem was greed - emotional sociopathy. I smiled through the tears. I lived in my flesh. I said, 'Your problem is how do you kill the cows and preserve me? Because if you kill them you kill me. Or you can save them and save me. Or you can kill me and save them. They won't mind. They don't know me.' He replied angrily, 'I can kill myself and then you'll all be saved!' We were breaking through the barriers.
'If I was here when you loaded them into a truck for the slaughterhouse, you would have to do it over my dead body. I would hand you a big knife and say, 'You'll have to kill me first, because I would rather be dead, than dead inside without the Rylstone cows!" 'You don't know me', he said. 'Even if you offered me the cows now it wouldn't matter. Something is dying inside me, so let it die as things on the vicious farm must die and my feelings for you must also die, by the water trough and by the barbed wire fence, in the long grass with the ants and the maggots turning in the cow shit. Let it all die slowly by the muddy dam and the horses on agistment and let it just keep dying until it is dead like a tractor or until it decomposes forever like an old bomb car that no one has bothered to move in a long time.
Let the black crows come and the bullants and the cockroaches. Let us feast our eyes upon the carrion. Let it sing in our empty hearts. Let us say 'this life is nothing. There is no love.' Tell me later that you care. Tell me later that you might change your mind about the cows. I won't even be here. I don't care about them now. Let them die inside me. Don't stop them.' This dying needs to happen. This life the meat in my graveyard mouth. This wisdom for my own good. My heart is filled with the stench of a world without love. 'I know it would be tainted now and that's why I'm not offering anything.' Ultimately it had to be his decision. And when he decided to kill the cows, I would leave him with no words, and him moving through the dark on his own, like a dung bettle.
'I don't want to buy them,' I said. 'There is no signing over of papers here.' 'I know,' he said, 'I know you don't. You are asking me for their destiny and that is my answer for now. Please don't loose faith in me. I understand your point of view. I just don't understand your level of feeling. I have until December to deal with my livestock. At this time I will decide whether I continue to breed them, or whether I de-stock the property entirely to make room for hardwoods. I will not decide until that time, as frankly there are more pressing issues at hand than the destiny of a few cows.' But he was a fence post standing on his own and they were black nuns. If only he could have felt what I felt for a few seconds, he would be begging for their lives from his own heart, even if only to escape the amazing agony. How do you have one feel the world and act upon those feelings? Was it that they watched your emotions and wondered what they were missing out on? Or easier still, was it that they dismissed you for having them? Yet I understood that Johnny had to be free to make his own decision. It was important to me, that he make it and not me. Otherwise he would never truly make it.
I staggered off with a head full of pressure to find the cows to say good-bye for now. They were way down the very last paddock and the day was hot. I stopped when I didn't see them and thought, I don't want to see them when I feel like this. I want to remember them and what they were like that afternoon, twelve cows in the sunset and then as moon cows. That's how I want to remember them. I was going to find the cows and lay down in the grass and sleep with them until the paddocks healed me. It would be like laying on the chest of the mother of all cows. Almost without knowing it and without effort, the twelve black cows have the ability to take all the strange energies out of my body and transform them into gentle peace. They don't intentionally do it, how could they know?
Johnny doesn't even know what they do! Instead, Eliza, it's as if their very presence does it unwittingly. Their presence is so spiritual that it doesn't need conscious intention. The sun was good for me and so was the moon. The twelve black cows were laying the foundations for the peace of future cows and other animals on this property. It was their place. I thought we were going to gently wash and shine upon the ragged shorelines of all the overtired hearts on an animal sanctuary. But Johnny and his mother carved up the lamb every weekend in silence together and they didn't like pigs. They have missed out on so much by not liking pigs, I thought. A few months later Johnny gave the cows to me and even if nothing else came of the property, way out on the back paddocks where the black cows were grazing unhindered, that is how the sanctuary really started. I now live in them as they live in me. The black cows just live for today. They don't need to know why.
There were twelve black cows in all. I can't begin to explain to you how the cows provoked a change in me. It was happening for hours that night, as they continued to graze out beneath the flood of the moon. They would graze all night beneath the intensity of that dull light like cows that belonged to the cosmos. I can never sleep fully beneath the magnetism of a full moon. I should have left the cottage and drifted over the fields to be in their company, as they never sleep, but keep churning into the many varieties of grass like ploughs and the grinding wheels of farmland industry. But I tossed and turned in my bed in the cottage, half wild with restlessness and hemmed in by old glass.
A great big huntsmen that scampered along stonework outside the dwelling. I left them to it with their thousands of eyes and legs. The night is not for me. Yet all night that warm wind that shifted perception was occurring inside me. The baby grey rabbits came in to feed on the English garden by the cottage. The night was timid and switching like horse tails and a little further away the deeper silence set in on the tip of a foxes bark. The idea of saving the lives of these twelve cows was enough to make me happy for a year. Can you imagine what it would be like, to be perpetually happy for a year and every time you got down or something bad happened, your mind would always have a peaceful black cow inside it, with the deepest brown eyes saying, 'thanks to you I am at peace forever out on the Rylstone paddock?'
Even if you lost everything that ever mattered in this world, something else mattered. You were able to think of the beautiful black cow and you were able to believe in yourself through her and you were doing it tough, but she's all right. Yes she's alright and you're alright along with her. Everything else in my life is a shambles, but look at the black cow! How beautiful and serene she is now beneath the moon-drenched gums and how she shines in the sun of all the days of her life with all the others she belongs to.
I dream their fat black backs and how I have helped to make their lives lovelier by allowing them to be, to live in perfection and simply as they are, within their long and perfect night and their perfect moon cow peacefulness. And how you did just that, Johnny, and how I loved you forever for it, as if you were a god and not just a cattle farmer. It is enough to be grateful for. Just this moment and nothing aside from it. It is enough to keep me happy and to restore my faith in this place and for us to know that 'the beautiful' now lives upon this earth. It is a dream of black cows. Black moon cows with stars in their night eyes and flesh still working wonders on their bones.
