Madison Shambaugh

I first attended a slaughter class led by Harmony in the fall of 2022. During this time, I was in the beginning stages of bringing my life into alignment with my values, which meant questioning daily habits, practices, and ways of being in the world that I had previously accepted as “normal” and “necessary” parts of daily life. One part of my life that I was questioning was the practice of eating meat. This was especially important to me as a lifetime animal lover, often feeling more connected to animals than most people. In fact, my whole life had been organized around my love for animals, my central work in the world being advocacy for wild horses, a deep focus on helping rehabilitate “untrainable” horses with trauma, and researching & teaching ways of connecting with horses in a way that is based on mutual respect, trust, emotional attunement, and two-way communication versus the ways of force, compliance, coercion, and dominance that are so commonly observed in the horse world today. I was ready to give up meat for good- if I felt I couldn’t kill and harvest animal kin myself in a way that felt honorable, loving, connective, and ultimately life-sustaining. When I found Harmony’s work through a friend and read the description of the Honorable Harvest offering, I immediately knew I needed to attend. Looking back, I don’t think I could have ever fully understood what I was signing up for or the experience that was about to unfold. My experience with Harmony was completely and utterly life changing and went beyond all of my expectations.

We worked with Goat for this class, and when it came time for the kill, we each held a goat as the rest of the herd peacefully grazed around us. I was last to go, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to actually do the kill. I held the knife over the goat and checked my placement, then went back to stroking him and did this repetitively in between tears. I tried doing a count down in my head, but quickly realized that was way too much pressure. I never felt pressured by Harmony. She just held space with me and supported with a beautiful balance of both believing in my capability of going through with the kill — and normalizing these feelings as part of the process— while at the same time never pressuring me to go through with it if I truly didn’t feel I was ready. In this way, she helped me connect with a deep trust in myself. What also gave me strength was knowing she would be there to help if I wasn’t able to go through with it. I changed my approach and focused on my breathing and re-grounded myself, and then it was like some ancient part of me took over and seemed to know exactly what to do. I never consciously made the decision, it was just as if my animal body knew what to do, as if it had been here before. My hands knew just how much pressure to apply and where to make the cut. 

I shed tears and stroked Goat as he ran to the spirit world, as the women around me sang over him and whisked his warm, bright red blood in a bowl to keep it from coagulating (in the honorable harvest, every part of the animal is honored and given new life). This goat’s death was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. The magic continued to unfold throughout the whole weekend with Harmony as we continued to honor Goat in the way we put to use every part of the animal’s body under her guidance— meat, bones, blood, organs, skin, and hooves. All of this felt like a ceremonious participation in the alchemical process of turning death back into life; a sacred prayer and praise of gratitude.

I came searching for an answer to my original question around eating our animal kin. That answer came to me through the blessing of Goat and the sacred holding of space and facilitation by Harmony. I was questioning whether to eat these animals whom I love, and now I can say, thanks to my time with Harmony, that now I only eat animals whom I have loved, whom I am in direct relationship with in some way. I now live amidst a small flock of goat and sheep kin and continue to re-weave myself into the web of life through the sacred life-death portals that Harmony first led me through. 

But while I came looking for an answer to that question, I left with a greater understanding- and felt sense of- what it means to be fully human. There are so many ways this experience deeply moved me and brought me back home to myself, some of which I am still digesting over a year later, as well as ways in which Harmony as an individual inspired me deeply through who she is, the ways in which she held space, and the way she walks in this world. But for now, I will try to focus on just a few.

After this class, my whole experience of what it meant to be alive completely changed. Before attending the Honorable Harvest with Harmony, I had been struggling with bouts of depression for a few years. I had found myself in a state of ambivalence. I was ambivalent about my own life—Did I want to be alive? I wasn’t really sure. I felt like I had one foot in life and one foot in death. I think this state of ambivalence about life is only really possible given the modern culture we find ourselves in, in which many of us never have to confront death and what it means to be alive (while others are utterly inundated with it). I was of the population for which it becomes possible to feel ambivalent about wanting to be alive while mindlessly putting food in my mouth. Already dead, flattened into tidy packages, and disconnected from the beings that had given their life, essentially all I had to do was cut open some plastic and pop it into a microwave for it to feed me so that I could keep on living not really knowing if I wanted to be living or not! I didn’t see another life when I ate my food- I saw a blur of plastic, bright labels, and a list of calories and ingredients I couldn’t pronounce shipped from soils I had never stepped foot on. Eating and sustaining my life in this way did not require me to look into the face of Death, and I didn’t want to. I was many comfortable steps removed from it—or so I thought.

During the kill with Harmony, I was snatched from my slumber and ambivalence towards life. All of a sudden I couldn’t pull boxes of food from the shelves and into my cart as I rolled it down a linoleum floor halfway asleep under the hum of fluorescent light to the lull of the latest pop song. With the sun on my forehead, kneeling on the grass in front of a goat holding a knife in my shaking hand, my eyes were opened wide as I was confronted with the question, “Do you want to live enough to take another’s life?” Goat was beckoning me for an answer. 

I think that is the part of me that woke from her slumber and took over that day, knowing exactly what to do; Yes, I choose life, as my knife pierces beloved Goat’s precious neck. Yes, I accept the gift, as my hot tears mix with the warm river of blood staining a path on his snow white neck, flowing towards the green grass below. And yes, I now truly know in my bones what a gift it is to be alive in this world, as I sing over Goat, “thank you, thank you, thank you,” joined by voices other than just my own. 

After this experience, I had an epiphany: For me to be alive, others must die. It wasn’t something I’d read in a book, or even a line of a song that stuck with me—it was forever seared into my bones… the smell of blood, the sound of one’s last breaths until they mix back in with the wind once again, the little glitter and shimmer of life leaving the goat’s eye seen with my own two eyes, the trembling life force I held in my hands departing from his little galloping hooves and the taste of his heart on my tongue, hearts swallowing hearts!

Accepting that as part of my reality meant that my entire understanding of what it meant to be alive had completely changed. My life became sacred because others had died so that I could live. I owed it to them to live in a good way, to feed who has fed me, to use their life force to serve their kin and the continuation of life on this Earth. I needed them and they needed me, too. I felt part of the great weaving of this web of life once again. My depression had me asking “Why am I alive?” But from this moment forwards, “why” didn’t matter as much; it was a gift and I owed it to the giver to walk in a good way. I could no longer live in ambivalence with one foot in, one foot out; instead, it required my full throated participation. It was a gift to be honored; and I wanted to be a Giver, not just a Taker. 

But more than that, even, I began looking Death in the face. Before my time with Harmony, I was scared to. The first day of our time together, I listened to Harmony as she spoke about the first time she touched Death with a little squirrel, and how her hand would jerk back every time she went to touch his little body. And how she kept reaching for him until she didn't feel that impulse to pull away. That's how I've felt most of my life. I retract, I dissociate, and I numb out when facing the loss of an animal or those I love, versus leaning in closer. I also would describe myself as squeamish-- the sight of blood made me light headed and the 9th grade biology assignment of dissecting a frog was my worst nightmare. But throughout the processing of Goat, I learned the beauty of blood, bone, and flesh and became intimate with the body in a way I never knew was possible. I feel this was made possible by the way Harmony held space, encouraging and leading with wonder and awe, and also feeling inspired by the transformation she herself had gone through--If Harmony did, maybe I could, too, I thought. 

And sure enough, it was possible for me, too, to touch Death without pulling away. I was fully present for my grandmother’s death a few months later, no longer dissociating and numbing out in the presence of death, and cried a river of tears to carry her to the next realm. I no longer sped past dead animals on the side of the road, but stopped to pull them to a safer area and offer them songs and flowers and imagine their lives before they were hit and make offerings to their living relatives, sometimes even alchemizing their bodies in the way Harmony taught me. I tended mindlessly shot prairie dogs on a neighboring ranch, some of whom were left injured to slowly bleed out and bake by the heat of the sun, helping them cross over with more ease and love than the person shooting them was capable of doing themselves (I wonder if they, too, were able to look Death in the face how things might have been different). I held space for land as she took her last deep breaths before being struck open for a mine, leaving a gaping and unhealable wound. 

I stopped looking away from Death. I realized running from Death was slowly killing me— but not just me, all of our more-than-human-kin, too. I can’t think of a more important task we humans have at the current moment than to bear witness to the Deaths around us, to grieve, to tend Death in a beautiful way, to commune with our ancestors, and to stop trying to suppress, fear, and run away from Death as it seems that suppression has turned us into a culture obsessed with mindlessly killing both the planet and ourselves. I recently read an anonymous quote: “If we keep looking away, there will be no other place to look.” My prayer is that we humans learn to look Death in the face and give her the beautiful tending and ceremony that she deserves, weaving this ritual into our daily lives, and I cannot think of a better way to get started than to spend time learning with Harmony.