Commentary On The Shepherd's Life By Rebanks

Another main theme of the book is the connection to the past and ancient cultural ideals shepherding has kept regardless of the modernization surrounding the Lake District. Throughout the book, Rebanks references how in many ways, the lifestyle has held tight to the core values of farming. While there was a shift to machinery and quad bikes in order to make life a little easier on the farmers, the overall work and beliefs have remained the same for generations. One quotes states, “the past and the present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts” (Rebanks 2015: 39). In this way, the modern techniques of shepherding are also products of those …show more content…
The narration of the story was both informative and captivating. I was personally attracted to the book because I grew up in a similar lifestyle. While my immediate family are not farmers, nearly everyone I knew was and in my teenage years, my mother remarried into a farming family. It was not unusually to encounter high school students who had woken up at four in the morning to tend to the cows and pigs before coming to school. Often times they would even come to school wearing their farming outfits and smelling of hay and muck. I was truly struck by the statement, “You can always tell how alien someone is to our world by how terrified they look of the muck” because I experienced this here at Penn State (Rebanks 2015: 248) . Growing up, few people were worried about their clothes or how dirty their shoes were, but once I came to Penn State, nearly everyone was shocked by the dirt. One time, when I took my roommate home with me, she was shocked by how many people simply went to the store looking and smelling like a farm. Before she pointed this out, the thought had never occurred to me, it had always been a normal part of my