My dear reader.

Each evening, right after we finish cleaning up from dinner, my partner and I go outside and spend about a half hour with the baby sheep.

They munch on grass, they come to us for chest scratches, they playfully headbutt each other and run around in circles again and again. Sometimes Rosie tries to climb Bella and ride her around the pasture, but Bella is fast and unimpressed and it never lasts more than a second or two. Rosie, in her stubbornness, remains entirely undeterred.

This time together in the pasture, ordinary as it is, feels holy to me. Out in the pasture with the baby sheep we are not on our phones. Instead we are eating ice cream sandwiches; we are watching birds high up in the trees; we are discussing next steps for our ever-expanding garden. The potato plants are absolutely popping off right now, so we’ll need to mound more soil up around them soon. The lilac is in full bloom, maybe I should try making lilac sugar? The list is long and filled with tasks both pleasurable and daunting. There both is and isn’t enough time for all that I want and need to do each day.

This dichotomy of time, the both/and of patience and urgency, feels particularly acute to me right now. The death of my parents — especially against the backdrop of so many interwoven crisis points like climate collapse and staggering inequality and geopolitical fuckery — has given me an unrelenting feeling of “well, you better do every single thing you’ve ever wanted to do right now before you can’t do any of it ever again.”