I asked jokingly, “if Heidegger can say that the human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being, then is all thinking milking and shearing?” But then, in fact, what do we ever do, in thought, as thinkers, but knead and extract? Any effort at knowing scrapes off the surface of Being, to card and to spin, to knit a garment that warms us from unknowing cold. And any conclusion we draw, an attempt to curdle, so that we have something to hold on to, a way to handle and store the ungraspable of our raw experience.
Then, finally, the ethical, because I speak on the side of shepherds who have no need to kill or eat from their flocks, no desire to kill or devour as I make my way; at depth, our responsibility is to care for Being, not to harvest it.