Since it happens only once a year for the whole flock, shearing is a day of gathering, participation, celebration, harvest, and shared labor. There are few things I’ve experienced that cultivate a village atmosphere the way gathering around sheep does.

While you might think making yarn would be easy—isn’t it just, like, twisting some threads together?—there are so many steps that go into processing fiber from start to finish, not to mention the care for the animals that many natural fibers come from.

As a person who identifies as a plural and finds it useful to identify characters or sub-agents in my mind, each new character is not necessarily a new part of me. It is a piece of me that has, before now, operated below the surface of my awareness, and I want to “disambiguate” that identity to bring it into focus, make friends, and share knowledge.