Goats on a Hillside in Crete

As a younger man, whenever I thought of Crete, I thought of an idyllic scene with goats on a hillside. Like the picture above.

When I got to Crete, I found those kinds of goat scenes...but also these...

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And these... .

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Unless you look closely, it seems like the goats are flying in those two pictures. They're actually stepping from hoof-hold to hoof-hold, because they've learned over thousands of years how to scamper up a cliff that would make a veteran rock-climbing human with all the right mountaineering equipment pause and reconconsider.

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That cliff is too steep to climb! But nobody told the goats that, so they go ahead and climb them every day. There must be a healing lesson in that, or maybe something about prosperity. I don't know. But I liked the little goats, standing up there on little ledges so small you felt like they were wearing hovergear. Those hooves must be jetpacks! They just wagged their little tails and went , "Baaa, baaaa.." And then went back to foraging for lunch well out of reach of any predator, which is probably why they started climbing the rock walls thousands of years ago.

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Got a problem that seems impossible, a hill too steep to climb? Look at those little goats.

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