Zen and the Art of Fence-post Carrying.

Oh gosh! It's more than a week since our last posting. How remiss of us. Our only excuse is busy business and constant hard work. Last week we bought another 110 fence posts (1.8m length, mostly 6 - 7.5 cm diameter, for those of you who care about such things) and a kilometre of wire (25kg) and began the relentless task of fencing our next area for the llamas, which has come to be known as The Rough Land.

As I believe I may have mentioned earlier, the land is steep, and access to it is not easy. We have to drive the land rover up country tracks, around the edge of some vineyards, and park at the edge of a wheat field, which we then have to walk round/through, before even reaching the boundary of our land. Then Simon has had to create a track through a long thin wedge of flattish, but overgrown land to reach the hilly area, where the boundaries of the land open out to create what could loosely be called a field. This steep 'field' is also heavily overgrown, but has a few clearings full of long grass, and other small vegetation.

The remoteness of the spot has its attractions (SO nice not to have to keep explaining what we are doing to passers-by), but it doesn't make getting 110 fence posts on to it very easy.



As usual, we arrived at a consistent division of labour. Simon did all the 'skilled' work of deciding where to put the posts, and then banging them in with big muscles and the post-banger. I did most of the 'gofer' work, moving the posts from the car to the land, and then up the hill to wherever they were needed. That meant five trips in the car with 20 plus posts each time, with each lot of 20 divided by the number of posts I could carry at one go, (which pretty much averaged out at three).

Now if you're keeping up with me, you'll have realised this meant around 36 return walking/carrying trips between the car and the beginning of the area to be fenced. Of course, we chose the hottest days of the week (of the year so far actually) to do the work, and the splinters on the posts meant substantial arm-covering clothing and gloves had to be worn.

Why, oh why are we doing this? Whose damned stupid idea was it to keep llamas in the first place! On a hot, sunny, Spring day in the South of France, any sane person would be sitting in the shade admiring the view from the terrace with a cold beer, a bowl of peanuts and a good book.

Still, such repetitive and hard tasks are always good for inspiring a bit of zen thinking. Of course, sweeping sand has gotta be a whole lot easier, but the notion is the same. Just be aware of this moment now. Don't let your mind fill with the horror of what is yet to come. Just take this step now. And another one. And another one. "The greatest things in the world must be accomplished through the smallest"; "A thousand-mile journey begins with a single step", (some nuggets of wisdom from the Tao Te Ching).

When one is concentrating only on This Step, it is very hard not to start counting them. Obviously, I'm not yet very good at concentrating on This Step. During the 36 return trips between the car and the 'post-depository' on the land, I counted 199 steps on the way in, and 177 on the way back. Clearly I take bigger steps when unladen. If my maths is accurate (ha!) that makes a total of 13,536 steps, more than 50% of which involved a heavy burden of splintered and unwieldy wood. And then the posts of evil had to be dragged up hill through the narrow, prickly, stumpy, steep pathways (that Simon had created specially for the purpose with his Big Strimmer), and laid out at appropriate intervals ready for the Banging-In.

Actually, during this last part of the process. my ability to concentrate on just This Step improved considerably. It took all my mental and physical powers just to stay upright and keep moving. But I swear at some points I was 'in the zone'. Just doing it, and doing it some more. It would be wonderful to be able to live all of life like that. Being aware of the detail of the present moment without passing judgement on it, or slipping into thinking about some undetermined point in the future when Things will be Better.

Suffice it to say, over the course of the hottest days of April, all the posts got put where they should be and banged into place. And despite a little bit of (slightly sneering, I think) health advice from our French neighbour (" You have a lot of colour! You don't want to work in the middle of the day. If you want to live long, you must start at 8.00am, stop at 11.30, eat and rest till 4.00pm, then work again till 7.00pm. And if it is too hot, you just don't work."), we were pleased with having accomplished a Great Thing.

Today, we started the next task of attaching the wire to the posts. Another big-heavy-pig-of-a-thing to get up to the top of a hill. Another learning experience. Allusions to the Myth of Sysiphus spring to mind. I don't like to hope too much, but at the moment we are feeling optimistic that the field will be secure and ready for the llamas by the end of this week. And yet, even as I write that, I sort of know that something will happen to confound such positive expectations.