There once was a goat at my brother’s homestead with an unusual personal history. She was acquired from another farm where she was known for having a habit of finding and creating holes in fences and frequently leading the entire herd out. Just as her former owner started to ponder ending her life short, the news of a new settler (my brother) had spread upon the region and he rushed to offer this goat for sale.
In her new home the rascal goat received a new name – Hromnica – derived from Slovak word hrom, which means thunder. Borrowing from the Norse mythology wherein Thor is the God of Thunder, and whose name has become familiar in the Western civilization through the revival of Viking culture, I find a female equivalent ‘Thora’ to be a loose translation of her name that seems to fit the spirit and withhold the element of thunder.
Coming to her new home, a huge clearing on a steep mountain side with a house and a barn without any fences on the outskirts of the property, Thora may have thought she had reached goat heaven if not at least a parallel universe. Here the only fence to conquer was the garden fence by the house wherein the goats were not allowed, and which must have not interested her much as she lost her reputation as a fence breaker. Everything else was open for her to roam about in pastures lined with forests. I imagine she no longer felt the need to search for greener pastures elsewhere.
I cannot recall the specific topic of the discussion in which my brother told me about Thora and her former habit but I believe her name was mentioned as a predecessor of a different goat while telling me another story about a plastic surgery he performed on Thora’s descendant that was injured by a wild animal on one of her teats that, aside from deformation, reduced her milk production. Since goats are greatly loved and valued at this homestead and because my brother had a guiding dream of how exactly the injury could be repaired, he undertook the surgery with a precise dose of tranquilizer from his vet and assistance from Vidimir, his right hand man. Sterilizing all tools which consisted of a scalpel, feather, needle, and sewing thread, he inserted a short hollow tube cut from the end of the feather into the tip of the teat to open the path for milk extraction. She was separated from other goats for a few days and later the small tube was removed and voilà; she recovered and is now back to milking the full volume and looking well. This lucky goat may be a descendant of Thora and one way you could fact check this is to check the detailed record that my brother and his wife keep for all of their animals. They carefully breed them and their herd is known not only for their milk production but also their look which resembles wild mountain goats.
The reason I am writing this story is that Thora has been haunting me in an inspirational kind of way whenever my rebellious blood starts simmering, which through this past year has been quite often. I see her as a symbol of a great liberator.
I see the fences we have been herded into in the cyber space where we are now recommended to work, socialize, and live. I have a problem with Google Chrome forcing me to identify which user is using my PC, Microsoft forcing on me their annoying new security system that does not let me search anything outside the new norms and annoys me with warnings of the most trivial kind of topics, and Facebook correcting me in a very politically incorrect way shoving down my throat their false claims of having to fact check the information I am sharing as if it were not an issue of algorithms catching the banned keywords. The nerve of the new big brothers is appalling!
And as the result of this, as Thora lives within me, I uninstalled the Microsoft security S mode that attempts to keep one within their interpretation of ‘safety zone’ (boy, did the bots resist) and installed my own paid antivirus (yes, I will pay the smaller tech companies rather than being a fly in big tech’s free web), installed non-google search engines, and am moving my eggs out of Facebook as well as their impressive Messenger that seems to have signals everywhere on the planet.
The only fences I intend to keep are those that protect me, by my own definition of safety, physical and mental. For that same purpose, I recommend anyone to set up greater barriers against the wolves dressed in sheep skins.
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