Crying Over Spilled Milk
Originally published on Aug. 22, 2020
There is no point in crying over spilled milk, right? But how many of us truly know, deep in our hearts, the challenge posed by this casual saying? I don’t know its history, how old it is, who coined it, and under what circumstances and with what intentions it was first uttered. Was it a compassionate consolation from an admirably chill mom on a lazy Sunday morning, to a young child crying after dropping a cup of their favorite chocolate milk at the breakfast table? A stern and judgmental word of warning from the family patriarch in the 50s, home after a long day at the office, when the supposedly happy housewife got upset about the mess on the kitchen floor and lost it? Or a kind-hearted response by a good farmer when a clumsy milkmaid of old dropped a pail on her way from the milking parlor to the creamery?
When you get your milk out of the fridge, easily replaceable with a quick drive to the local grocery store that carries unlimited types, flavors, varieties, and brands, you may even wonder condescendingly who would be so emotionally unstable as to cry over such a minor thing! Or maybe, in the midst of this pandemic and all the challenges we all face, you understand that even the tiniest mishap can push us over the edge and provide a much needed release, manifesting in a flood of tears that nobody else can really relate to or saw coming. It’s a saying with a lot of potential applications and interpretations.
Given how much I love looking at things from an outsider’s perspective, I contemplated Chinese equivalent phrases, my beloved four-character phrases (成語), and found it explained as “覆水難收” (spilled water is difficult to collect). But is its meaning really just as innocuous as not wasting energy or being upset about things in the past that you can’t change?
As somebody who has started my mornings off with milking goats for much of my adult life and often handling gallons of the precious stuff at a time, in the dark, in 40 below freezing or sleet or rain or heat, covered by clouds of mosquitoes, interrupted by coyotes, fourth-of-July fireworks, a screaming kid falling off the trampoline, or turkey attacks, rarely with access to a sheltered electrified barn, training countless young or wild or abused goats, I have spilled my share of milk. Usually this happens when an untrained or traumatized goat kicks the milking bucket and provides both of us with a free shower. Receiving the occasional milk bath is the price I pay for training the ladies in my charge and refusing to hobble their hind legs, as many people would do for a “difficult” doe. I want my animals to be relaxed, affectionate, and enjoying the experience of the massage and the release of all that weight and pressure in their udder. A precious time of mutual bonding as I can closely connect with each individual animal, on a physical level but also with our emotions and spirit, our Qì and Shén. I have always known that milking goats for me is medicine.
From that perspective, the spilled milk means many things to me: First, it is the manifestation of a disturbance of the goat’s equilibrium, whether due to my neglect or lack of patience, especially when I have to rush to get ready for teaching, or to the goat’s embodied trauma that is triggered in some way to cause her to respond by kicking. Udders are a sensitive area, and I really get that, so I hurt for and with those ladies who have a hard time learning to trust my hands because of their experience with humans in the past. The kicking then represents a setback in my training process, a humbling reminder that the reality on the ground is not the peaceful happy little ranchito I so want my place to be, the love-filled rainbow-covered haven from this raging pandemic all around me.
On another level, because of my non-traditional career choices, single motherhood, and a series of karmic events or whatever you want to call my strange life, I have lived a very abundant but pretty marginal life in financial terms for most of my life, and I have always treated the milk from my goats as a precious gift from the universe, drop by drop, liquid sunshine, the essence of abundance and health and medicine. For me, it is truly the substance of life. That expression, the “land where milk and honey flow,” I really get that on an elemental level and have found such deep solace whenever I have been in a place where I can have both bees and goats.
I consume one to two quarts of milk a day when it is available, as milk, yogurt and kefir and buttermilk, cheese, cajeta, pudding, etc., and it is the mainstay of my diet. It is my ticket to freedom and health, because it keeps me out of the grocery store, in collaboration with the chickens and garden and forest and happy neighbor trades. My European genes and physically active body thrive on it, raw or cultured, there is no easier (or more delicious) way to feed myself. So a spilled bucket can mean a hungry belly, literally, or at least the absence of my precious morning milk tea ritual. Which is indeed a grave loss. And when I was depending on milk sales to cover my mortgage and had a customer waiting for that morning’s milk years ago, it did mean a real palpable financial loss in an operation with non-existent profit margins. Lastly, I also know as a formerly breastfeeding mom how exhausting it is for any maternal body to be producing such an abundance of milk and how truly life-giving of a resource is. Plus, in Chinese medicine, milk is identical with blood, so spilling my goat’s milk is literally equivalent to spilling her blood! Thus to me, spilled milk is a much, much bigger can of worms than spilled water.
This morning, I got a spilled-milk lesson. I suppose the universe figured I needed one. I have been tired and busy and on edge ever since I adopted two goats, out of the blue, a few weeks ago, in a very intense process of getting my little place set up for goats almost overnight. So now I am the happy caregiver of a exuberant four-month-old kid and her very sick aunt who was on death row due to her declining health, a young first-time mom, severely malnourished, with a nasty nasty case of mastitis, and totally freaked out, because the humans in charge had decided to limit her feed during pregnancy, to make the birth easier. From that point on, it had only gone downhill! If that doesn’t make your hair stand up on end, you don’t know Chinese gynecology. On top of that, she had had two kids nursing on her for far too long, plus she was getting milked for human consumption as well! As any dairy farmer and maternal health advocate knows, the kids, goat or human, will always take what they need from the mom, during pregnancy and lactation. As a simple truth, repeated over and over in traditional Chinese gynecology texts, it is the mom’s health that suffers in the end when moms are not cared for properly during the reproductive cycle.
To return to this goat that showed up in my life, she comes from a very fancy award-winning bloodline of American Dairy Goat Association champion “producers” (oh how I hate that word!). The standard of that breed looks something like this (depicted here the Alpine "grand champion” from 2017)
Contrast that to my poor April, a couple of days after I got her….
Based on her family history, she is an American Alpine who has been bred for generations to produce the maximum of milk, with heavy input of the highest quality feed and grain and supplements and ready access to veterinary interventions, instead of for subsistence on a small farmstead with good pasture and no vet access. In my experience and based on my knowledge of this goat’s family history and ADGA standards, this means that humans have intentionally interfered with natural selection, as all farmers have been doing for thousands of years, obviously, for factors like a calm temper, solid health, and easy births. In this case, though, selection has been in favor of sheer “productivity,” measured in gallons of milk that the poor animal will pump out day after day, whether her body can handle it or not. As anybody who is knowledgeable about the bovine growth hormone controversy knows, such heavy milk production comes at a cost because that milk has to to be drawn from somewhere in the body.
As with everything else in this strange life, there is a balance between productivity and ability to maintain health. For a variety of factors, my beloved goat has lost this delicate balance, and I have been dealing with the manifestation of that loss ever since. For three weeks now, she has been on an intense program of twice daily hour-long udder massages and other loving treatments, browsing walks, moxibustion, snuggle sessions, big herbal bouquets from my garden so she can snack on a variety of medicinal plants (her current favorites are comfrey, sage, burnet, parsley, green onions, rosemary, with some mint and oregano thrown in), pounds of carrots a day, kelp from the beach, turmeric and ginger and anything I can think of offering her, and the salal, huckle- and black- and salmonberry leaves and berries, wild roses, and whatever else we find on our walks.
This goat has also been fed by my neighbors’ generosity and brought us some beautiful connections. Since I don’t have a large pasture and am so concerned for her health right now, I put out the word and random strangers have stopped by with gifts of apples, a 25-lb bag of carrots (!), a car full of grape leaves, brambles and kale going to seed and other presents from their gardens and woods. Lastly, she has been on an herbal formula prescribed by my dear friend, wise woman, and amazing healer Sharon Weizenbaum, a formula that was created by her teacher Dr. Qiu Xiaomei 裘笑梅, that has finally started making a change for the better in her mastitis. She is not out of the woods by any means, and her weight continues to concern me greatly. Unfortunately, she continues to produce too much milk for her body condition in her good udder, and I have had limited success in my efforts to at least slow down this milk production. This is a long slow slog, not a race, and there are good moments and challenging times.
In addition to her abysmal physical condition, she also has a lot of trauma in her system, which resulted in her unexpected kick of the milking bucket this morning, a good reminder to me that we have a long way to go still and that I am working with a creature whose system is out of whack on so many different levels. On a side note and as yet another unexpected silver lining of this whole situation, this trauma has meant that she seems to only fully settle down and relax when I am nearby, so I have actually set up my “writing studio” on a desk made from old boards on saw horses in the open barn right next to her pen. This will work for the next couple of months, until it gets too damp and cold and rainy. I can only hope by the time the cold weather comes, she will have acquired enough fat to stay warm!
As above so below. Sitting in the midst of a pandemic that has forced the whole world to take a collective break from the productivity rat race and has given the whales and forests and bees a chance to breathe, I have been thinking a lot about the human role or “heavenly mandate” (天命 tiānmìng) in “harmonizing heaven and earth,” as envisioned in the ancient Chinese medical and philosophical classics. I have also struggled personally with this concept because right now, for me, the ability to maintain health has taken on more importance, but has also become a bit more challenging, especially when we include emotional and spiritual and cosmic health. Like for so many of my friends and colleagues, productivity has taken a back seat, whether forced upon us by political powers and other outside forces (in my case canceled conferences and my printer’s inability to reliably produce books) or due to a change in our values and priorities.
For most of us, it has been a mixed bag, with some unexpected silver linings. For me, my canceled teaching and travel schedule has allowed me to firmly commit to a life of taking care of these goats and their daily needs, which has brought an abundance of love (and some milk) into my life. As I milk and massage and love up my goat many times a day, she gives me the opportunity to ruminate (honestly, no pun intended) about so many pertinent themes with innumerable lessons for me: on my goat’s rumen and the role of the spleen and stomach, related to earth as the body’s center of health; on milk production and maternal health and my own transition from being primarily a mother to just being Sabine and the challenge of learning to shift back to taking care of myself; on our current human insistence to extract from the natural world instead of learn from and live in coexistence with it; and, of course, on the power of love that always flows in both directions. Oh the lessons in a bucket of spilled milk!
(And yes, I should have taken a picture of the spilled-milk scene to post at the end of this blog, but was too upset and in the moment to get my phone.)
