It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the donkeys who can’t graze and are cooped up in the pole barn in unrelentingly frigid weather. They seem unhappy and irritable.

I went out to the pasture and found Maria sitting between them, talking to them and listening to them as she does. Her relationship with these donkeys is moving, sometimes it makes me want to cry.

We can talk to animals if we would only learn to listen to them and stop telling them what they think. Maria and the donkey’s trade feelings all the time, they understand one another in an undeniable way.