I’ve been doing a photographic and word series on Red’s world, a beautiful place. There are parts of Red’s world I can enter, parts I cannot reach, and sometimes, I give him the freedom to live in his own world apart from me and people, in it’s most natural state.

Sometimes I just leave him alone with the sheep, as happens in the British Isles where border collies take the sheep out to pasture for the day and bring them back into the farm at night. Border collies in America rarely get to do that, I imagine Red did that in Ireland, that was his world. Yesterday, as I sometimes do, I left him in the outer pasture with the sheep, he lay down and watched them graze, and after a few minutes they settled and began grazing, and I left them in peace and came back an hour or so later. Red was just where I left him and the sheep had moved back a bit to graze near a bush and I thought this is a gift to Red, leaving him alone in his world to do what he was destined to do.

Sometimes I can enter Red’s world, sometimes I can share it, but there is a part of animals and their world that human beings can never reach and see, and that is the beautiful mystery of it.