From the first, my farm was a great teacher.

If offered me one lesson after another, it showed me how far I had drifted from the natural world and all of the things I could learn from it.

I was lost, and on the farm, I was found. I was blind, and on the farm, I got to see. Maria joined me on this journey; we are on it together now.

The first thing I learned was how little I understood about life and its joys and hardships. I had to learn about the lessons I had left to others. I had to buy a gun and kill things, not for sport or violence, but mercy.

I had to help bring life into the world, save it, heal it, nurture, and understand it. I had to pull shit out of the bottoms of lambs, reach into their mother’s wombs to pull them out, burn tails off with red-hit scissors.

I had to kill beloved old sheep and tiny small lambs to keep them from suffering. So many of my conceits and preconceptions, and certainties buckled one after another. I learned what I didn’t know, which was almost everything.

I learned to be my own guru, my own kind of father, my own kind of steward. I relied less and less on others’ knowledge and wisdom; my life depended on my heart, my soul.

And best of all, I learned some of the many things that animals could teach me that I didn’t know or hoped to know. I got to live in the natural world, a different world than I had ever known.

Robin was a sudden miracle to Maria and me. He was a shock, unexpected, and minutes from death. Our inner child came out and grew and saved his life, something I might never have gotten to do if I had stayed in the ordinary world.

We have learned to work together as a genuine team, a dance of love and connection. We saved him.

In the other world, we hired or paid people to do the things we do here all of the time. I told my wife at the time that I never lived until I reached in and pulled two yowling lambs out of the belly of a dying sheep. Or shot a newborn lamb in the head to spare it the pain of prolonged death and dying.

Life and death are woven into the farm’s life – vicious roosters, rabid raccoons, gravely wounded birds, birds that fall out of the sky dead.

Nature is not especially sylvan or polite; almost all creatures around us live by killing something else. We see the bones and the bodies every day.

Nature is not cruel; it is just life.

Robin has entered into this dance, this drama of life and death. He was almost dead when we found him; we could bring him back to life. We amazed and delighted ourselves once we got over the shock.

There it was, right there, the life we yearned for half a lifetime without knowing it, the life we live, the life we love.