The Mastery of Fields - (Free Write)

 

The lamb crouched low and squeezed it's whole body under the gate... 

It danced up, down then around for the briefest of moments then cried out

to the mother and two siblings it had just separated itself from. 

It called in a way that cried freedom, this is the way!

But the mother and siblings' heads stayed low and grazing, 

unpeturbed by this new arrangement. 

They neither looked at the gate nor acknowledged it.

From there, the lamb began to panic at its own new-found freedom.

It could go where it liked now, in this new, more expansive place

yet instantly recognised that space as a cage.

In that new field, only I knew as I observed from a bridge above, were cows, calfs and a bull.

These were also a family but of a different kind; the kind the lamb could graze happily among

while at home with its own, but now faced alone.

I couldn't help the lamb, though of course I tried.

I ran down, opened the gate and tried to coax it through while I knew the bull

was at a safe distance. But my presence only made the lamb run away.

I knew my efforts were unmatched by its own mother.

And I wondered if she, in her stoic separateness, knew something I didn't.

Perhaps she knew it would be okay. 

Perhaps she understood, more than I, the natural order of things.

Funny, when she is the sheep and I am the person.

I am free, while she's in a field.

She knows.

She knows about practising non-interference as I am only learning it.

She's decades younger and universes older.

Perhaps.

In what she shows me, in this knowing I become the lamb, not the sheep,

yet I'm growing into her.

This I know

is the natural order of things.

HS 7th June 2026