We came into the pasture to check on the snow and ice and Lenore rushed up to visit the donkeys and sit with them a bit. Lenore is a spirit from another world.

A friend called me last to tell me how upset she was about the world. The Republicans. Sarah Palin. Horrible winters. The Mideast in turmoil. The economy. Government showdown. Protests in Madison. Breast cancer billboards. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq.

Are you upset?, she asked.

Well, I said, I just took  a great photo of Rose walking with me in the sunlight and I’m eager to finish a story I’m writing called “Animal Dreams.” I asked her why she watched and listened the news all day, and chose to let the outside world and the way it is presented to us drain life from her. To me, that is a kind of first death, carrying the worries of the world. How would she have fared a half century ago, I wondered, when the world was truly disintegrating in a horrid firestorm of war, genocide and suffering? Or during the Dark Ages? Or the Plague? Or the Crusades? Or the fall of Rome and Greece?

Storm Center isn’t just about the weather. It’s a way of looking at the world, the antithesis of a spiritual life. I am aware of the worries of the world. And the suffering in it. I do not carry it on my shoulders. It will not drain life or love from me.  And I do make my own news. My own stories, and it will not be their news, their stories.

They do not, I believe know or understanding what is happening or will happen in the world. They simply bring us all of the bad things they can get to, and we, being lambs that we are, take it all in.

We spend so much time worrying about death. Yet it is so easy to let the life drain out of us. My friend has made her choice, and she is entitled to it, and I am making mine. I would rather life my life than worry about the end of it.