Helen Whybrow > Quotes

“Me, I’m trying to remember that letting go of something is not the same as losing it.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“Annie Dillard’s advice in The Writing Life about not hoarding one’s ideas: “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“able to follow her out of the enclosure. I’ve watched sheep die a horrible death in electric fence before I could cut them free. I once released a badly damaged wild turkey, and I’ve found the fried carcasses of spotted salamanders who crawled over the bottom wire in their spring migration. So I reached down and picked up the fawn—who weighed less than a newborn lamb and was limp and warm, with a dappled coat—and I carried it to the edge where I had seen the doe in the trees. She was gone, but I left the fawn in the ferns. Later, I saw them walking together under the apples.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“evocative photographs about people’s relationship to land. He has a gift for translating values into action, for inspiring people, and for creating programs and structures that shift movements for change. Building our livelihood from scratch around nothing but the conviction of our ideals, in a place that required so much labor and devotion, so much vulnerability and humility, scared me as much as it inspired”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“The one thing about Mom that is utterly magic and never changes is how easy it is to make her absolutely happy and overflowing with appreciation; she’s a bright-eyed sparrow with a blighted leg who always finds the next delicious crumb. Maybe, to her, a crumb is not even a crumb, but a whole cake. I have heard that the temperament one carries in the world, whether we are born with it or cultivate it, shines through when the mind is gone. True or not, the core of my mother is this brightness, a brimming glass.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“Coyotes, like wolves, live in family groups of a dominant breeding pair, their pups, and several nonbreeding males and females. The family makes a den and claims a territory of up to ten miles around it, defending their hunting ground from other mating pairs who might try to settle. In an area like this valley, where domestic livestock provide a ready source of food, each coyote clan might defend a smaller territory. Though they are omnivores and survive primarily on small rodents, grubs, and fruit, coyotes will occasionally hunt larger animals such as deer, calves, and sheep, especially when they have a litter of pups to feed in spring and summer.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“I was using an ancient technology that, in the hands of Indigenous women, also became a source of spiritual power. Symbols of salmon, bear, and eagle carved into the round disk of the spindle by tribes such as the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest were carefully chosen to spin that animal’s power and personality into the item of clothing or blanket that was being made. My mother spun most of the wool for our blanket, unwashed, after it was shorn from the backs of Dana’s Dorset sheep and combed into roving on hand carders. My job was to research and collect most of the plants to dye the skeins she made, from the fields and forests around our farm. We had a book from the library that named many plants I recognized in the fields and others in the garden, but to turn them into dye was something I’d never thought about before. I’d walk around with a burlap sack, stuff it full of flower heads and leaves, even roots and lichen and the shells of butternut, then come back to the kitchen, where my mother and I would shred and cook the plants in giant pots, filling the house with strange astringent odors that lingered for days. Dana grew tansy, a button-shaped yellow flower that had been used since colonial times to make muslin brighter. Goldenrod collected in late summer made a rich orange or a pale ochre, depending on which metallic salt—or mordant—we fixed it with in the dye bath. Onion skins were a deeper yellow. From one plant we got a beautiful sage green, but I don’t remember now which plant it was. My favorite dye was a rosy gray from an unidentified lichen I scraped off a rock ledge in the woods. All of the”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“resulting fleece, which falls off in one unbroken blanket. The lamb’s fleece grows on the board with each long stroke, revealing the bright-white underside that has never seen the sun. Soon the naked lamb is lying in a bed of her own luxurious material, as if having shed a satin gown. The fleece shimmers with the light of all the spring and summer mornings of dewy grass from which it came. Wool is an alchemy of animal and plant, and a miraculous one—a lofty fiber that is warm when wet, resistant to rot and mold, and strong enough to make history’s first coat of armor, the felted wall of a ger, or a rug that can be walked on for hundreds of years.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“As I cut up a wormy apple, I’m aware of how my hands ache, and a bone-deep bruise made by a horn on the back of my thigh throbs against the chair. I’m aware of my own fear of getting hurt, and most of all of getting old. I’m afraid I’ll be that old woman with moth-eaten clothes and a dog leash for a belt, eating moldy bread and forgetting my daughter’s phone number, losing my shoes. I’m aware, too, of how happy it makes me to be in the company of these dear people, sharing this work as we have”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“I had no inkling—when we first unloaded eight sheep into the fields at Knoll Farm nearly twenty-five years ago—of the impact that learning to be a shepherd would have on me. I see, in the fascination visitors to our farm express over and over, that others share this ancient, almost primal pull to the shepherding life. It’s not the way of life people crave so much as a way of being, I think, something they sense encloses both wandering and home, the wild and the cultivated, uncertainty and joy, solitude and also being part of a community so broad that it encloses all of you. Shepherding could be a fertile edge place, both real and metaphorical, that we might draw on now in our collective lostness, to find our way toward healing ourselves, each other, and the land. It offers us a way to care for the more-than-human, and to find a holding on, inside ourselves, as things whirl apart. But, you don’t have to become a sheep farmer to cultivate shepherd’s mind, which is about finding a way to listen, to tend, and to immerse in the living world. Sheep may be one way. Most importantly, may you find your own.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“laboring ewe and unborn lambs to the wolves. On Vermont hill farms like ours, most of which were self-sufficient by economic necessity well into the twentieth century, another live birth would have meant hope for a family that faced spring with little left but potatoes and cabbage in the cellar. The peaks surrounding our farm tell this story—Scrag, Stark, Mount Hunger—while Shepard Brook drains their slopes to the Mad River.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“She feels ephemeral, a ragdoll of bone and blood, water and air.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“The earth sighed a long sigh, so soft, so calm that no more than two or three eddies of birds rose. —JEAN GIONO, THE SERPENT OF STARS”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“I WOKE FROM THE DREAM AND REACHED ACROSS THE BED TO feel Peter beside me. He had come home very late that night after being away. In the shower he stood behind me, soaping my belly. There was too much to say for words. You can want a child more than anything in the world. The thing people don’t tell you, that’s too big to talk about, is the fear that comes the moment you realize—the moment you dig a hole in the rain—that if anything ever happens to this child, you cannot imagine how you will possibly survive. There isn’t another love like this. It’s beautiful and terrible.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“else. Though clearly dementia, and just plain old age, changes the rules of the game, it’s true that the more we practice a way of thinking, or a physical skill, the stronger that nerve pathway gets and the harder it is to lose.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“the act of colonization it is. On a farm, nature gives us everything we have. It’s”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“I miss a life in books the way you miss an old lover. You can’t go back, but the nostalgia is a kind of ache.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“We never shot a coyote. Instead, we adapted, and things improved. We stopped burying sheep on the farm. We installed a dog-proof fence around the lambing paddock. We got another guard llama, Habibi—a magnificent, nervous animal with huge eyes and long ears who has the instinct to herd the sheep to the highest point in every pasture at dusk—and an English shepherd pup, Rue. Now Rue is a year old and sees herself as ruler of our hillside. The coyotes seem to respect that it is her territory now. She patrols a circle around the fields each dusk and dawn, her nose to the ground on the traces of nocturnal footprints, hackles raised. If she hears coyotes in the distance she sits down, throws her head back, and raises her voice with them—long, low, moaning howls and high yips, her wild relatives’ voices infinitely more complex and layered than hers but in total kinship. It is the wild and domestic sharing a song, and it is a beautiful sound.”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life

“I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. Nature herself keeps giving and never giving up. Can we be like the trees that keep growing to seal over barbed wire, like the Diné who hung on to their ceremonies and traditions and are reviving their Navajo-Churro flocks, like the injured ram who will learn to see danger coming with one excellent eye?”
― Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life