The forty days of Lent, kicked off last week by Ash Wednesday, is one of the last remaining Christian seasons not co-opted by modern marketing. There are reasons for this. Its color is dark purple and its tone is of gloom and sacrifice. Instead of magic reindeer or bunny mascots, Lent has rocks. The fun activities of Lent are confessing your sins and giving to the poor.

Obviously, Lent is my favorite season of the year. For one thing, it's quiet. There's nothing to buy. You are not obligated to have fun, which has to be my biggest nightmare (the obligation to, not fun itself). And yet it is a season of gradually realized hopes: its name is derived from Middle English and means lengthening; the days are getting longer. In this part of the world, it is the time when the annual wildflowers put on their biggest show, and all the fruit trees flower.

For me it is a special time of reflection. Sometimes it is so hard to believe that things are unfolding as they should. I so often want to be somewhere else — I want to have a sheep farm, I want my dog to do a perfect outrun, I want to master driving; in fact I have a very long list. And often it seems all I am doing is treading water. Like now, in fact.

So it is good to stop striving so hard for a bit and look away from all that. On Ash Wednesday Catholics show up at church to be lectured about changing their lives and to have a smudge of ashes wiped on their foreheads with the ritual words, "remember you are dust, and to dust you will return". This is an effort to try to make you pay attention, the goal of all good religions.

So, I dutifully try to pay attention. What I notice (among other things, of course):

I divide my herding time between chores and practice. Chores are things like fetching goats down the road and back again, putting the hens away, puttting the goats back into the stable when they push past me into the hay storage. I could probably do all my chores with Bonnie without saying a single word. What does that tell me about stock work?

Practice is on other people's sheep, and is always a mix. This week, because it rained a lot, I only got one practice in, and it could have been a demo for mixiness. First I drove for over an hour, and then had to set up the exercise I had planned, which took another forty-five minutes or so, because of all the prop assembly (homemade cones, other dog tied on the fence to keep sheep in middle, bait of grain fetched from home to set the sheep), and all the sorting problems I had, which mostly had to do with unexpected broken gates.

The exercise itself took about eight minutes. It was an outrun exercise. Bonnie will take off at the perfect ninety degrees away from the stock, gallop in a nice circle until about three o'clock, at which point she'll turn straight in. Of course, I want her to be able to get to the back before she turns in, at least, when I tell her to. For this dog, that is going to mean a "mechanical" outrun. So, I am beginning to try to put those mechanics into place. I did four way t'me's, from a very short distance. None was anywhere near what I wanted in the terms of widening out in back, but each was better than the last, so I stopped at that point.

Then I did what good dog trainers never do. I decided to move on and do something hard that we'd never been very successful at. We had come all that way and put so much effort into something so small, and I was so tired of her bad outruns, and I wanted so much to be doing advanced work, not the same old fetching and baby gathers, over and over.

So, I tried setting up parallel drives in the arena. Total disaster. The sheep were old and very set in their ways, which meant that only an experienced dog would have been able to keep them from trying to get back to my knees, or failing that (she did manage that part), drifting straight to the gate. Because I can't tell my right from my left even when relaxed, I have given Bonnie so many wrong flanks she really only consistently takes cues from hand signals now. Which she can't see when she's driving.

A lot of yelling, mostly at the sheep. Everyone was confused and frustrated, sheep included. I lost my temper somewhere near the beginning, and never found it again. I felt like such a loser. My dog tried so hard for me.

Ashes. Despite my "successful" initial training session, in which at least I accomplished what I set out to do, because my goals were so modest, I drove home morose. More than ready to try harder to be consistent, to not be too ambitious.