Wanting

We humans want to be free from uncomfortable feelings.  We do all that we can to avoid discomfort. This “Wanting Mind” that I’ve mentioned over the past couple of days has been making me feel very uncomfortable. The typical way to get rid of the discomfort would be to keep trying to get what I want in an attempt to stop wanting, but it is really nothing more than a cycle.  You may get what you want, but soon, you’ll be wanting something else.

What do I want? Something really stupid: dairy goats.  Why the heck would I want to get dairy goats when I have two (three really counting Peach) perfectly good Jersey cows?  I prefer cow milk over goat, cows are much easier to keep in fences, they do not need as much shelter, they give twice to three times as much milk as a goat.  Why?

Who the heck knows why.  It’s a whim.  I do miss milking by hand. I do hate dealing with a 1,000+ pound animal when they misbehave and they do eat much more food than a goat.  That, in my very humble opinion is the only downfall: they eat more than a goat.

I had a really nice herd of dairy goats.  Back in 2012, I was milking 13 really nice goats.  We sold them when things got difficult with our neighbor on Herter Road.  We did not want to invest in the type of fencing that is necessary to keep goats in.  It was a good thing that we did not invest in this fencing because we were unable to take what fencing we had already installed.  We left behind approximately 500 feet of woven wire fence and fence posts.  That is over $1,000 of fencing materials.

We have good fencing now, but we still do not have shelter suitable for goats.  The plan is to invest in a building with some solid flooring to be used for a milk room and feeding area for our animals, be they goats or cows, but that is still on down the road; perhaps a long way down the road because we still have more fencing to do.

Over the past week or so I have made contacts about goats, I’ve looked at web pages, FaceBook, etc. and the prices of these goats is astronomical! Some places are asking close to $1,000 for a doe kid! That’s a baby that you need to bring up and hope to hell that she does not die, get her bred, hope that she does breed and eventually kid and then hope that she’ll give a reasonable amount of milk.  That’s a whole lot of hoping.  You can buy a really good Jersey cow for $1,000 to $1,500.

Why hope? Why want? I have all I need right now.  Stupid, stupid, stupid wanting.

So my little bit of Buddhism training is kicking in.  I am condemning this wanting mind, but I am trying not to.  In this post, I am acknowledging it and making it public. I am a bit bored and hopefully that will pass.  This semester at school is not as demanding as the last one.  The weather has prevented me from doing a lot of photography with farmers. I have a good start on my projects.  I need to relax and find some other use for my energy.

Until later …