I could have been a goat herder.
No, seriously. Have you ever herded goats? I have. For about 15 minutes. And I enjoyed every single bit of it. I’d have stayed there all day, just herding goats, if I could have.
I was down visiting Will Harris and his White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. Will reminds me of my grandfather. Ray once made the courageous decision to look himself in the mirror and say that the way he was building his company, his family’s financial security, and his legacy was wrong. Ray decided that Interface, his company, could only be responsible if it sought to be as sustainable as possible. Will Harris did the same thing with his family farm.
His story has been told before, and a simple Googling of “Will Harris White Oak” will tell you much, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say that I was impressed by the man.
Instead, I want to write about his goats.
This is challenging, actually. The “what” of this brief story is that I helped separate a flock of kids from their mother goats so that the kids could be weaned. By helped, I really mean that I stood in a line of much more experienced men as we corralled a manageable section of the herd. But the “what” is such a small part of what I experienced in those too short 15 minutes. So let me try to describe it this way….
Every now and again, a person encounters something so natural and wholesome that he or she feels united to something greater than the present. In this age of smartphones and instant gratification, our attention is so fully captured by the “now” and the “about to be” that we lose sight of the “once was.”
In that sunny summer field though, I was experiencing something truly ancient. Mankind has been weaning goats from their mothers for thousands of years, with the process largely unchanged. My connection to the past in that moment filled me with a simple joy that no modern luxury can offer. In an instant, I realized that one single word best characterizes the sweat-filled work that herding goats requires: it is noble.
There is an irony in how I tell this story. Each of you will be looking at this on some type of a computer, the one invention that best defines our modern world. And ultimately, I don’t see anything wrong in that.
But I do have one request. After you’ve finished reading this, let that computer screen go dark. Then go find something ancient.
And lose yourself in it.
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