In my photography, I’m drawn to the idea of the Peaceable Kingdom, and Maria has brought that into focus. When she appears by the barn, the donkeys, chickens and cats gather around her while she talks to one, then the other. My animals do sometimes care for one another. The donkeys protect the chickens, Minnie the barn cat loves the donkeys and the dogs, Lenore loves the cats, Frieda seems more and more to be guarding everyone.

But in the animal world, the Peaceable Kingdom is constantly interrupted by life. A fox enters our lives. He injures a chicken. The other chickens try to kill the injured hen, as chickens do. Simon protects the chickens but doesn’t like dogs or cats and drives them off.  Another chicken is killed by a hawk. A barn cat kills a bird. In my experience, animals that have good, water and shelter and are around calm and attentive humans become calm and loving themselves. But the Peaceable Kingdom, like St. Augustine’s City Of God, is a notion, an ideal. You learn quickly on a farm that life happens, all the time. That is the nature of life, and of spirituality.  There are moments of beauty, love, peace and calm. They are punctuated by challenge, surprise, sometimes pain and loss.

The Peaceable Kingdom is something we aspire to. But it is not an escape from life. It is life itself. Life makes our peaceable and loving and spiritual moments all the more meaningful, but we cannot escape life any more than the animals.

The fox is a wonderful metaphor for life, one of the reasons we follow his story so closely, and he captures our imagination. He takes many forms, and can appear anywhere, in any life.