I was out walking with Tillie last night and when we reached the end of the road I could see a flock of sheep coming off the dune on the edge of the big gulch. The light was just starting to turn golden and I turned the stroller around and pushed my girl home as quickly as I could. Once there, I dropped her in Robbie’s arms, grabbed my camera and ran out to meet the sheepherder. I promised myself I would grab a couple photos of sheep this spring and I DID IT!!! It might seem like a simple enough thing to do but when you have a new baby, as some of you might know or remember, it takes a particular alignment of the stars to do…well…pretty much anything. Ha!

Anyway, I made it out in time to catch a few photos of this herd and I hope one more outfit rolls through in the next few days so I can pick up my camera again. Photographing the sheepherders is truly one of my passion projects, the sight never fails to delight my soul and bring me a sense of peace.

I fell in love with this quintessentially southern Idahoan sight on a trip Robbie and I took fourteen years ago in our 1971 VW van (you might remember that van if you’ve been here a while). On that trip I saw this river valley for the first time and was so struck by the rugged, volcanic beauty of the place that I prophesied we would live here one day. On that trip we saw a sheepherder with his animals between Gooding and Fairfield and I exclaimed with wonder as we passed by. It was beautiful. It’s still so beautiful. I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure I’m really living here, doing what I’m doing, making, growing, creating, becoming myself more by the moment, the day, the year.

Last night we opened the bedroom windows and fell asleep to the pastoral sound of a few hundred sheep muttering and milling about in the night, a lullaby that is punctuated by the occasional warning bark of the livestock guardian dogs keeping watch. It’s wonderful to fall asleep to such gentle noise while sirens are screaming in the city. I’m so thankful we experience this quietude and centering each spring. This aliveness and awareness of ancient patterns anchored by the seasons, by the tilt of the axis of our beautiful planet and our orbit around the glorious sun. Springtime is a time for elevated hearts, for rising, for worship and celebration.

Turn your faces and hearts to the sun.

I had these wonderful words shared with me today and I think I’ll affix them to these images in this post for you to enjoy:

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours of men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference among the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.”
{George Eliot}