Do You Know When the Goats Give Birth?

I have a new essay up at Flourish, a wonderful organization that “inspires and equips churches to better love God by reviving human lives and the landscapes on which they depend.”

Although I had hoped that this essay would be about my experience observing a goat giving birth at our local Catapano Dairy Farm, it didn’t work out that way; goats, like people, refuse to birth on schedule.

But you can find goat births on YouTube!

Here’s some of what I wrote:

Birth is messy. It’s bloody. (The birthing tub ends up looking like an abattoir! one Scottish friend had remarked.) And it is painful.

But it is a pain unlike any other. It is not the bloody pain of surgery or injury. It is the pain of a body giving–giving way, giving space, giving shape, giving life–to another. And at the climax of that giving, when it feels like your body will be split in two, great pain gives way to great love, as everything in the mother rushes toward the being that has just separated to bring it back again in a different kind of closeness.

There is tremendous power and poetry in birth.

Even in goat births.

{Read it all here.}