In the Sep/Oct issue of Great Scots Magazine I offered this definition of the good life:

“a covenant of owning and being owned in which artful work is no longer labor, but joy.”

My years with Scottish Terriers have taught me much about covenants. A covenant is more than a promise, more than a vow, both of which have a unilateral dimension to them whereas a covenant is promise and vow multiplied by two in a dynamic bi-lateral giving and receiving, receiving and giving. I think of it as the ownership of the owned. When you’re an owner you have a stake in the process that translates into responsibility and care-taking. When you’re owned by love, responsibilities cease to be drudgery; they are true labors of love.

My definition of the good life also points to artful living. Life can be a drag, of course, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s possible for us to see aesthetic elements, even humor, in any chore. Take the task of twice-daily shoveling of manure, for example. I feed oat hay to my donkeys and goats and sheep and, believe me, they are manure factories on legs. The quantity they produce is, itself, surprising for relatively small animals. I see them as standing sausage packing machines: hay in one end, poop streaming out the other.

But my Merton is not just a poop machine. He’s an artful crapper. Donkey’s aren’t like horses, pooping anywhere and everywhere; they’re more catlike, selecting preferred locations for their #2 dumps. Merton, as our head crapster, has chosen the wall near the southwest corner inside the donkey barn. Every morning and every evening when I make my rounds I have serious scoop detail right in that spot. That’s not especially ‘artful’ except that the wall of the old barn is clad with chicken wire up to about five feet high to discourage “cribbing,” the gnawing of wood common among horses … and donkeys (and goats and sheep and you name it!). The old wire ’skin’ on the wall is fairly effective against nibblers but over the years pawing hooves have crinkled and bent the wire along its bottom half toward the dirt floor, making catch-all creases and folds.

That’s where Merton’s ‘artful crap’ comes in. Scooping donkey dung up off the dirt floor and into my wheel barrow  is quick and easy with my wide bottom barn shovel. But dealing with semi-wet donkey dung stuck in a chicken wire sieve is a whole other matter. What’s more, given gravity’s pull, more or less straight down from Merton’s tail-end, it is required for him to shit horizontally to accomplish his dung-ball mosaic caught in the folds of the chicken wire, not at floor level, but well up the side of the wall. I imagine the process behind Merton’s barn wall aesthetic as something like tossing shit into a fan. He seems to enjoy my puzzlement and makes a point of standing nearby at the closest hay bin while I struggle against his art, as if to say with sideways glances, “I bet you wonder how I do that, don’t you!”

I’ve decided I can frame my chore as drudgery or I can frame it as humor by artfully making a game of it. I mockingly talk to him as I try to clean up, saying, “I wish you’d stop shitting sideways, Merton. I need an ‘ass’ pointed down, not sideways. I need vertical drops, not horizontal!” He twitches his big ears and side-glances me showing plenty of white-eye and a facial expression that looks a whole lot like a grin.

“A covenant of owning and being owned in which artful work is no longer labor, but joy.” I’m learning a lot about the wonders of ‘owning’ and being ‘owned.’ I’m learning when I work with head and heart and soul work is art … and even the ‘horizontal crap’ in my life can be unexpected joy.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine