Life lessons learned as a sheep farmer

I was reminded in recent times, on reading John Connell’s book, Twelve Sheep, of the value of savouring our work situations, observing the spiritual to receive gifts we might otherwise miss out on. In his book, Connell take the reader on a twelve-month trip around his small flock of ewes and in doing so, reflects on an experience that changed his life, mentally, physically and spiritually.

It might come as a surprise to some, but Connell’s book goes to prove that there is a spiritual aspect to nearly everything. With the help of his flock of sheep and a year on the farm, Connell has created a piece of work that is more than mere non-fiction, it is a meditation on the rituals of rural life.

While this news is unlikely to make any Ox Mountain sheep farmer any better off financially, it might just enrich lives in other ways. Most people would agree it can be difficult to teach sheep anything, but maybe, just maybe, we humans might have something to learn from the sheep.

Burnout 

John Connell describes his life in two phases: before sheep and after sheep. Early in his book, he gives us a picture of what his life was like before sheep.

Before the twelve, I was suffering from what I can only call a fatigue, that was perhaps soulful as much as physical. For six months before the sheep, I was empty and worn out, I had finished a book and found myself spent. It was a new threshold, a dark threshold. I battled a tiredness such as I had not felt in many long years, and though I slept, I could not rest. My wife called it burnout; I called it a soul tiredness.

Connell goes on to describe his crisis, and while distancing it from outright depression, he touches on something that he says was even more difficult to understand: a kind of loneliness. Connell is first and foremost a writer (rather than a farmer), and his anxiety was doubled by the fact that what he was experiencing was robbing him of his creativity.

I tried to write book after book but nothing came and then the stories dwindled down to a trickle and the well, as I had known it to be before, so full and overflowing, was dry and empty. It made me sad for the first time in a long time. It was not a depression, a dog I had danced with before, but there was melancholy and it wore me out all the same. The sadness felt harder than depression, as it bred a loneliness in my body and my mind that I did not want or like.

Returning Home 

John Connell is a multi-award winning author, journalist and documentary producer. His memoir The Cow Book was a number one bestseller and won non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards in 2024. While Connell has travelled and worked all over the world, he returns to and relies heavily on his family farm for recuperation.

His latest farming venture takes him into the world of sheep. Taking over a section of his father’s farm, he started small, with a flock size he could handle. As he gradually eased himself into the role of shepherd, he discovered a host of parallel realities and reflections that changed his life for the better. The blurb on the cover flap of his book explains his progress.

For John Connell, the lambing season on his County Longford farm begins in the autumn. In the sheep shed, he surveys the dozen females in his care and contemplates the work ahead as the season slowly turns to winter, then spring. The twelve sheep have come into his life at just the right moment. In the hard work of livestock rearing, in the long nights in the shed helping the sheep to lamb, he can reflect on what life truly means.

Seasons of the Year 

According to Connell, the shepherds of old were great people for waiting. They knew that everything had its time, a place in the seasons of the year. They began in March and April with lambing and did not let rams to their ewes until October and November. It is a cycle that sheep farmers still follow. He says that one of the big things, one of the last things, we understand is ourselves. In waiting, he suggests, we can find an understanding of our relationship with the earth.

In waiting, I have found myself to be part of the unbroken chain from the first farmers who combined the natural and spiritual world. The first men, the first women, they made this world, these fields, this culture, this way of being. They too waited, just as I am now doing.

This is the time of year when local sheep farmers are just about getting to the end of their lambing season. Lambing is not a short game; there is a first half and a second half and very often, it goes to extra time. The game is focused on results and apart from taking on water and coping with fatigue, there can be little time for reflection, especially spiritual reflection.

What if, like Connell – and I know he had only twelve ewes – we can generate this ability to reflect and contemplate on our work? I imagine this as a mindset or a kind of philosophy that we would carry with us, not just in relation to shepherding but in all work, from truck driving to parenting. It is a question of knowing that most situations contain something sacred and being able to spot that, and call upon it when it is most needed, seems to be the trick, as Connell demonstrates.

The season has ended, though I have not and nor have the sheep. We push on now through the good spring days, through to where we can earn a living from these sheep. The twelve have taught me. In ways, l am a wiser man, and my decision to stay on the land has been the right one. Walking through the lush grass now, I know that my soul tiredness is gone. It has been replaced with a weariness brought about by hard labour, and yet that has made me bloom. It is a pleasing tiredness.

Greener Pastures 

Life as an Ox Mountain sheep farmer presents itself in the form of a lot of hard work. There is the mountain itself; its high outcrops and marginal ground. There is the weather; sometimes it comes in just right but, more often than not, it breaks at just the wrong time. There is the work of sheep sheds; cleaning, bedding and making sure the water connection is not frozen.

Then there is the sheep themselves; minding them, feeding them, dosing them and as anyone that has ever stood on a farm knows… where you have livestock, you will have dead stock. Finally, there are the men, women and children who care for the sheep and lambs; nights in cold sheds, hourly tube feeds for weaklings and the joy (or curse) of pet lambs. I am not saying it is easy to find the spiritual in all of this, but in truth, it is there, flowing within the tumbling river that is sheep farming.

More positively, there is the autumn preparation; the breeding season, where all new life is created. There follows a ripening period; where a new crop of lambs is grown, unseen in winter but utterly secure. There is the anticipation of birth; new arrivals, and what can give greater joy than that. We are eventually presented with the flock’s gifting period; a new crop, a new season, a new year, income. And then… there is the sight and sound of baby lambs as they frisk and play along the headlands of ever-greening fields. It is in these fields, on these evenings, that the spirituality of sheep farming is to be found... a treatment for frayed nerves, a sustenance for weary souls.