If you love people or love animals, your heart might go out today for the hard days so many are enduring, these are among the hardest days I have seen the donkeys and sheep and barn cats have to get through, the temperature fluctuates wildly, plunges to painfully cold depths, and if there is a silver lining in this dark cloud, it may be that Mother Earth has finally found a way to get our attention.

To move us past the mind-numbing paralysis of the left-right paradigm where everything, even the earth itself is politicized and polarized and awaken us to the power of what we see and feel and hear. All most of us have to do is look outside and see the roiling world around us to see that that the earth is bleeding and calling out to us. Most of us – not all – can easily survive such cold, we sit by our wood stoves, turn up the furnace, get our parkas and blankets out, but the animals we love, inside and outside of our houses, cannot do those things, they flock to the heated water buckets to stay warm, the wind and cold blows snow and ice into their shelters and onto their coats when they venture out, there is hard ice to try and walk on, no place for their hooves and paws to dry out for long.

I can give them shelter, warm water, good hay, I cannot make them comfortable or keep them warm, they accept their lives, but I do not accept our blindness and cowardice, my mailbox is filled with the struggles of people all over the country to keep themselves and their animals warm, people in Mississippi and Alabama and George are not prepared for this kind of cold, they have no simple way to keep themselves or their animals warm, millions of livestock have perished in different parts of the country.

Perhaps our common love of animals will jar our sleeping sensibilities to awaken and hear the messages I am hearing these past few days, the bitter cold, shrieking winds, plunging temperatures. I hear them, to go straight to my heart, for me, for you, for Lulu standing guard out in the pasture. Perhaps the wind brings the news of a great awakening, I am resolved that we have to try and heal our world.