Cow as Gift by Laura Riccardi Lyvers

Cow as Gift

Laura Riccardi Lyvers

I am in love with my cows. As child-like a thing as it is to say it’s the only way I want to begin, because it lives in me as a profound truth. I am amazed that the cow could become the center of my life, the thing that guides me. Their presence, their being, is a holy experience. I am in awe of who they are. As a friend recently reflected to me about the cow: “They are tending the etheric of the Earth”. No wonder they continue to guide my life after all these years.

There is a favorite quote I go back to, from my dear friend and teacher Orland Bishop: “What could happen if we choose each other’s life as a currency…for something different, for a new kind of decision making?” Orland is referring to human life and how we could choose to be with each other, but I see in the relationship with my cows a living practice, a currency, for this future-bearing impulse as well. I am learning what it means to be in service to “the other” through tending my small, extended-family milk herd, which exists for the most part outside of the economic realm of the farm I live on. I don’t sell the milk; it is given to family and neighbors and the cow’s manure is composted for everyone’s vegetable gardens. These cows have generated the biodynamic preparations for this farm for over twenty years. In this way their “spirit and matter” have been woven into these crop fields, the hog herd and our gardens. The term “extended family milk cows,” for me, refers as much to the human-cow-elemental relationship as it does to the inter-generational nature of the herd.

 

Divine Mother

I have been learning reciprocity through my life with the cows, a giving and receiving through something more akin to a devotional practice than to farming. I don’t take care of the cows for the milk. The milk is a gift.

And my goodness! The cow is a giver. She is one of the great manifestations of The Mother archetype. Fertility and abundance are two primary forces I feel through the cow. She gives to the land through the biology and forces in her manure. She gives to the Earth through the soul and spirit of her being, simply by walking and laying upon it. She gives of her body, and of the wisdom she has of her surroundings to her calf, through her milk and other forms of communication. But she gives to me, as well. I don’t take the milk each morning; she “gives down” and releases her milk to me, as freely as she does with her calf. She likes me. She comes towards me. They all do.

Each morning as part of my meditation or prayer while milking I ask my hands to serve this animal in the best way possible. May I know what she needs through these hands that milk her, through our shared breath and warmth. She and this land are literally within me, part of me through the milk I drink and the space we share. She takes me in through the connection of her sensory to her great digestive processes, and therefore returns me to this land each day. 

She is a connection point, a networker for everything that is part of her surroundings. She connects animal to plant and plant to animal through her grazing, rumination and returning of her manure. She transfers information in this great cycling, for the landscape she lives within, for her calf, and for her herd. In a subtle way I am a part of this network, as are the beings that live between and behind all of this physical life.

What we simply call “grazing” is to me an outer meditation of the herd. They are engaging with the grasses and forbes, exchanging with the landscape as a whole, and choosing where they go in a field and what they eat through their antipathy and sympathy for what is around them. When I have watched this closely, I am shocked to see how selective they are. They can eat a small patch of something they like (clover, solidago spp., dandelion) within a larger patch of something they don’t want to eat (fescue grass in the summer time) with amazing precision. I think part of why this seems surprising to me is because it is easy to assume they just have to consume quantities to support their large bodies. But the cow is sensing what she needs and selecting, if given the opportunity, and will take in a great diversity of plant matter if offered. Tree leaves, shrubs, bark, in addition to what we think of as pasture. I imagine it is the same with where she chooses to lay down and ruminate, when she brings this outer world meditation into herself. And here is a sacred moment if I have ever witnessed one: The cow laying down to begin this inner sensing, imbuing what she has chosen from the Earth with her astral forces, her divine Cow nature. 

Just in her lying down you can feel how earthly she is. It is as if her individual cow body is reuniting with its larger body, Mother Earth. I am gifted with the opportunity to sit with them in this moment, even laying against the cow (one in particular enjoys my company, Ginger, “the mama of the mammas” as I call her) as she ruminates. As she chews her cud I feel what I perceive as effort; it feels and sounds like work. Yet she is clearly “working” inwardly, both physically and spiritually. She is far away from the outer world at these times and is slow to come-to when disturbed. You can watch her eyes and see this; she has them closed while ruminating or almost closed, and when an outer stimulus interrupts this meditation, her eyes slowly come around to opening.

It is the same as she rises – or separates her body – from Earth. Such effort to move those heavy limbs in the right position to rise! And then, slowly she stands. Pause, stretch, more pause. The whole process is like Earth becoming mobile. That inner life, what I imagine as an “inner cosmos” with its unique inner alchemy of her four stomachs, meets the outer life of her world through the manure. 

This inner alchemy that works with mineral, plant and animal substance and forces produces the most valuable and abundant form of fertility on Earth. Holy, holy Cow.

Milk as Sacred Substance

The sacred nature of the cow is known to many in the world, and I am grateful to have entered into this mystery. Sometimes when I am with the herd I “step into” what I perceive as their space, the space that exists between them. It is something akin to a very subtle substance that alters my own consciousness just a bit, so that I am experiencing their higher energetic field. The milk of the cow has a sacred presence, too. I lived with cows at the center of my life in different ways before arriving at what feels like the most intimate connection: The cow, the calf and her milk.

My earliest experience with cows was through my life in biodynamic preparation making, which was also my first experience of a devotional path. This took me into agriculture and led me to a larger-scale biodynamic grass-fed beef operation where I worked and lived with the preparations, the land and the beef herd. Eventually I moved to my husband’s family farm and began working with the small dairy herd of Jersey cows, which has evolved into my beloved extended family herd. It is through tending and milking these cows that I have experienced a recognition that milk is a sacred substance, a medium for spiritual forces. It is the only way to physically bring the animal into ourselves without taking a life. Instead, I get to give my life for hers every day, and my realized intentions live in the milk.

The best of me shows up for these animals and their pasture each day, but also (rarely, thank God) so does the worst of me. Animals will challenge you, and at times I fail to be who I want to be for them. What has shown itself to me through these moments is that the animals forgive. I’ve asked for their forgiveness when I lose my patience and yell or otherwise disturb the space, and I experience their forgiveness. It is quite humbling. Everything that happens between us, everything they eat and smell and otherwise take in through their senses and through their physical body, it’s in the milk, which is also in me. It is a spiritual form of currency.

I also experience milk as a sacred substance through the food source that it is. Something ancient lives in the milking of a cow and in the receiving of her milk as food, as sustenance. This daily giving, so fresh and clean and life-giving from inside her body! Our cow’s milk stays fresh for over two weeks in the fridge, and for days just sitting on the counter. The cheese and butter and yogurt are foods that connect me to some old, wise thread of human life.

Last year I had to abruptly wean the calf from the cow I was currently milking, and take the cow to my neighbor’s bull. She had been lactating two years straight and this was our only chance to get her bred. I had a profound feeling well up in me when we had to go without milk for several months: When you have a milk cow, you have food. Fresh, living, sacred food - every day. I felt a real loss without this substance in my environment. I actually became a little bit depressed during the first weeks. I joked that I was the one having a hard time with weaning, not the cow or calf! But it was true. I had lost my central purpose, my daily routine…not just with the cow and milking, but with the milk itself. I still had cows and pasture to take care of, but without the milk to care for, there was a void. It is not like all the other food we grow, harvest and prepare with reverence. It is different. It is a substance of life force from the body of a beloved. My love and care enters her being each day and each day she gives her body to us. 

A Hope

Something that I have held as a hope for the world since my earliest time tending cows is that anyone might have this opportunity to live with the cow. It used to be common, especially for women, to milk a cow for their family. Now it is, ironically, economically and socially/culturally near impossible for this simple and sacred reality to exist. “What could happen if we choose each other’s life as a currency…?” And what if our “each other” was our “other than human” kin, too? I believe we enter into a spiritual co-evolution as participant when engaging with the plants and animals that live closest to us, with those that come towards us. They are a living, working medium for our evolution with Earth, and even though the potential to engage with them through our devotion to place over time is almost non-existent, we can still choose this path into the future, as part of a currency that generates life. It is ours to do if we feel called, and it is a gift, both given and received.

May we once again recognize the spiritual potential that exists between human animal plant and place. May we create new futures out of this love for our extended family.

 

Laura Riccardi Lyvers lives in rural Kentucky with her husband Philip, her cat, her herbs and flowers, and her cows. She learned preparation making from Hugh Courtney who established Josephine Porter Institute, and is a lifelong practitioner of biodynamic agriculture. Laura is devoted to bringing life and beauty to the land, as an offering of prayer to the world.