I am learning to celebrate the different ways in which people choose to live in the world, make decisions, react. One of the reasons I love writing about animals is that these different perspectives emerge, and speak to the diversity and complexity and wonder of the human mind. The fox attack was yet another way into those different views. Kill the fox. Don’t kill the fox. Take the chickens to a vet. Or not. Try 100 different remedies. Or one. Let them out of the barn. Don’t. Get rid of chickens because they get killed.

For many years, I believed I knew what other people should do what decisions they should make. I see that our culture takes all of these different points of view and turns them into arguments. I am in a different camp than you, wrote one person. But I am in no camp but mine, I said. I disagree with your decision to kill the fox, wrote another. I wouldn’t. I do not disagree with you at all, I said. I just made a different decision. Each of us is an individual. We have different lives, environments, emotions, finances, partners, beliefs. A million different things forms these views, and isn’t this the wonder of the human being? No one can really know what another person should do, unless we are living in their heads and lives. And even then…I remind myself every day that my values and decisions are not the stuff of cable news, not a process that denigrates differences the way our media  and political culture does. I am not a left or a right. How awful it would be for me to see myself in so small a way. That is the mind of a chicken,  not a human.

Aren’t these differences what separates them from animals and plants? And chickens?  Who do not disagree. Who do not have different points of view? Who do not explore the different ways of living in the world and bring different ideas to bear?

As a writer and photographer, I have come to celebrate these differences. They are not arguments for me, not disagreements, just different ways of looking at the world. i am  fascinated by these different approaches. Mine change and evolve all the time. As I learn to celebrate difference rather than make my beliefs arguments, I also am learning how to make my own decisions, take my own advice, be responsible for my own beliefs. I celebrate that too.