Kayaking with Lambs

Brian Miller’s Kayaking with Lambs is about the idyllic farm life of your imagination--fresh fruits and vegetables, livestock large and small, endless gatherings of kith and kin around a table of homegrown food and handmade drink. It is also about pain, blood, deaths, mud, storms, droughts, and failures. The author, who owns a small East Tennessee farm, lives an ＂antiquated life,＂ that is, a life often out of sync with modernity and closely in sync with the natural world. His book is structured as a breviary broken into the eight monastic offices of the day. Written as a series of meditative notes, it follows his efforts to live with purpose and stewardship. Kayaking with Lambs is about learning to dwell alongside neighbors, nature, and even the planet as if it mattered. In language that is poetic and writing that is honest, insightful, poignant, wry, and self-deprecating, Miller ponders everything from the cycles of life to his family heritage to what Wes Jackson refers to as ＂becoming native to this place.＂ And, of course, he shares the many times along his journey that he’s found himself in situations totally unforeseen when he began . . . like kayaking with lambs.

Brian D. Miller has farmed with his partner, Cindy, since 1999 in one of what naturalist John Muir called the ＂small slanting valleys＂ of East Tennessee. They raise sheep and hogs to provide meat for their own table and those of their lucky customers, as well as growing far more food than the two of them could possibly eat.