Willow's Whisper to the World

This is all you saw at first, or maybe this is all that your mind could take in at one time -- not a whole picture, but manageable bits and fragments. You saw a large, white shape lumped by the side of the road. You saw an angular jumble of legs, knees, knuckles, elbows, hooves and ribs. You saw a broken, emaciated body whose breathing was so shallow as to be virtually indistinguishable from the constant shivering that rippled through it with a flutter so faint that it seemed stirred by the rustle of a passing breeze, not by the internal labor of muscles struggling and wrestling to keep the body warm and alive. You saw a pale maze of nicks and scrapes extending from the neck down to the back and sides, the record of the shearer's rush to take the last thing he could plunder from the dying alpaca -- her coat, her only remaining defense in the world -- before dumping her now "useless" body in a ditch outside the sanctuary gate and leaving her to freeze to death. You saw a bulging abscess on the right cheek and a deep indentation on the bridge of her nose from the lifelong grip of a tight harness that had only recently been removed.

And finally, reluctantly, as she opened her eyes and looked at you in silent supplication, blinking softly, shining her wounded gaze on you with a despair so intense it verged on sound, you saw, as you had to, the face of a desecrated young life. An interminable minute later, as she closed her eyes again with infinite fatigue, you saw simply a suffering soul. This suffering soul. Willow.

We bundled her in blankets, rushed her to the warmest barn, packed hot water bottles around her core, and started her on broad spectrum antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medication. A few hours of constant care later, her breathing got stronger but her temperature was still below normal, and she was still listless, disoriented and unable to hold her head up, needing support just to remain in sternal position.

But, by nightfall, she took a turn for the better -- she drank a few sips of water, ate a few handfuls of alfalfa, and became more alert with each bite. It was impossible not to be elated seeing her regain enough strength to sit up, enough will to nourish herself, and enough hope to look around, if not with interest, at least with minimal involvement. But it was also impossible to forget that her condition was serious enough that she might not make it through the night.

Amazingly, she not only survived the night, she woke up hungry, thirsty and, despite the deep, lingering weakness, she eagerly accepted every treat and absorbed every bit of affection with the intense urgency of the starved, demanding more, nudging you gently if you stopped stroking her, extending her swan neck towards you and leaning her face against your cheek as if inviting a kiss, nuzzling your nose with the fuzz of her nose, making intense eye contact as if trying to read something important in your gaze -- or communicate it -- and, when all this activity left her exhausted, she merely leaned against you as if the nourishment of a loving touch was enough to sustain her. And by mid morning she seemed strong enough to withstand the trying trip to the vet where she was scheduled for tests, evaluation, diagnostic, treatment and, we dearly hoped, a cure.

The diagnosis was as swift as it was grave, and the prognosis was poor -- she had been starved for so long that her organs were probably irreversibly damaged and her chances of survival were slim to none. There was nothing they could do for her at the clinic that we couldn't (and hadn't already) done at home -- keeping her warm, boosting her system with lightly heated IV fluids and additional rounds of Baytril and Banamine -- so we bundled her in blankets, settled her in the back of the minivan, and took her home where she could at least rest quietly, away from the noise and stress of the bustling veterinary clinic.

She was almost pert during the drive, sitting up, swiveling the radars of her ears to catch every sound, and peering at the darkening landscape that was unfolding outside the window, watching silently until all the fields and the roads and the sky disappeared into the early winter night and the only image left in the window was her own reflection.

Back at home, we nestled her in a bed of cushions, blankets and heating pads, and we took turns watching her for the rest of the night, holding her as she drifted in and out of sleep, making sure that she fell asleep in loving arms and woke up in the cradle of the same warm embrace. Throughout the night, she remained eager to commune, connect and communicate -- looking intently into your eyes, leaning trustingly against you, touching noses and drawing in the breeze of your breath as if inhaling not just air but some essential knowledge, some vital force that she found in her caregivers' love, and responding with the caress of her own dulcet breath. And, heartbreakingly, as her lethargy deepened, she grew more, not less, curious and engaged, as if compelled to learn something important about the brightness of this new life where everything could still happen -- this life that was finally releasing its nectar just as she was dying -- as if wanting to be present for this love that was now, astonishingly, surrounding her in such improbable abundance, and to experience this absolute devotion that was there when she went to sleep and that, amazingly, was still there when she woke up.

In our two days and nights together, we heard Willow's voice only once. She had woken up from a short sleep and lifted her head to touch noses again and to breathe in the loving presence of friends, locking eyes and gazing with a new intensity as if to entrust you with something urgent. And then she let out the softest feather of a sigh, the sweetest whisper, the most mellifluous of her 86,400 breaths, a sound of such aching purity and purpose that it felt like grace. A sound that your mind could not, dared not, take in as one seamless note but had to break into manageable bits and fragments -- there was the knell of her last breath, there was the muffled crumple of her body collapsing into nothingness, there was the terrible soundlessness that followed, the shattering silence of a stilled life. And then, long after her last whisper had stirred the air, you finally heard it. The soft whimper of all that is pure and broken, shackled, starved, crushed, buried alive under the wreckage of our reckless appetites, still breathing its labored breath under the collapsed building of our humanity, and still speaking of love, and still begging to be heard. Hear it. It's the only true voice you'll ever hear, the only true thing in your life, and the only guide out of the darkness of a humanity that savors the anguish of beings like Willow as a taste, a fashion, an amusement. Listen. It's your own voice.

Joanna Lucas
© 2012 Joanna Lucas

Ian's Crossing

Ian walked with his brothers only as far as the open gate, teetering slightly behind them in his usual hesitant way, two steps forward one step back. He watched them go on their treks in the open fields, from the safe side of the fence, lingering at the invisible, self-imposed barrier long after they disappeared from view, gazing into the distance, shifting his weight from foot to foot, taking two steps out in the open, three steps back in the safety of the yard, flapping his wings like a seal, pacing some more before gathering himself in a silent shrug and walking back to the barn like someone with an ache in his heart. He was free to join them but he chose not to. 

He had always been the odd bird out in the family, the one lingering slightly behind the others, the one standing at an odd angle to the flock and the world at large, the one who shied away from group activities and explorations, the one who fled from Walter's blustering invitations to romp, and froze in indecision at Clarence's assembly calls, the one who cowered in wide open spaces but bloomed like a hothouse rose in the confines of a close embrace, inhabiting your lap as though it were his only nest in the world—fluffing his round, billowy self into a white feather ball, pushing his petal-soft forehead into the crook of your neck, blushing scarlet, whimpering contended coos, putt-putting endearments with every beat of his heart, shutting his one good eye to the world and falling asleep in your arms with the softness and surrender of a small child, like his only defense in life was love. Yet, for all his yearning and gift for tenderness, Ian had never bonded with anyone. He was the loneliest soul of the flock. And, when Roscoe, the wild turkey, joined the family and brought his rapturous rhythms to Ian's cloistered world and lead his brothers on daily outings into the prairie he had come from, Ian disengaged even more, and gradually abandoned even the one activity that had always had his full participation (at least as much as his reserve allowed): greeting visitors. While the others paraded in full celebration gear—moving in perfect physical, emotional and spiritual sync, connected as in a dance to an inner music, acting in perfect unity of purpose and desire—not just to get your attention, but to amaze you, for they knew being amazed, not just to impress you, but to bedazzle you, for they knew being bedazzled, not just to seduce you, but to enrapture you with their rhapsodic persuasion, for they knew being enraptured, and they were sure you would, will, must too—Ian lingered farther and farther back of the resplendent procession, and secluded himself even more than before.

He was a shy and serious bird, a grave and silent little person, craving the affection that his brothers either didn't need to the same extent, or didn't know how to give in terms that he perceived or felt as affection. His calls for nurture were either misunderstood as fear or weakness, or simply ignored. You could see him on any given day waddling around in his plump pantaloons, ambling in a white halo of feathers, as round as the full moon and just as solitary, doing his "indecision dance", a tap dance of sorts, before proceeding in any given direction, to any given destination. Two steps forward, one step back, several taps in place, oscillating on the brink of a decision that never came, freezing in place with one foot in the air, as if torn between opposing forces, mincing the ground with shy, small steps, advancing and retreating at the same time, not strutting with a fat waddle like Walter, not gliding confidently, fluidly like Clarence, not charming the ground into weightlessness, like Roscoe. 

Everything he did, he did with a hesitancy, a delay, an almost regret in his being that the balance gained in the previous step had to be left behind. He was not an adventurer like Roscoe, or a performer like Walter, or a leader, like Clarence. He was a nervous, brooding, melancholy fellow who peered at life, squinted at it, gazed at it sideways—looking and not looking at the same time—from under the hood of his furrowed brow. Even his snood was shaped differently, looser, wider, softer, extending well past his beak and covering part of his face, his wattle blushed a deeper shade of red than anyone else—not a patch of blue left over on his face and neck, not a drop, not a bead – his face, throat, snood, cheeks, forehead and crown were utterly engulfed in the fire of his deep crimson blush. He stood in the hissing blaze of his blush, peeping at you from under the folds of his scarlet veil, smoldering alone in the flare of his internal combustion. That silent flame, that mute rhapsody of longing, was the only outer expression of his soulcall.

Then Simone came along, rescued from a backyard egg operation. A shy, pale, brittle-boned creature whose liquid blue eyes peeked from under the flop of her limp comb, and whose gait, made choppy and unsure by the beginnings of the neurological disorder that would later cripple her, gave her a hesitancy that resembled Ian's own, and communicated something—an ache, a yearning, a vulnerability—that he not only understood, but responded to in ways that seemed to speak her language more clearly than any utterance from anyone of her kind. 

From the moment they met, they acted as though they'd known each other all their lives, as though  they remembered each other and as though, by some immensely lucky strike, they had found each other again. They seemed to recognize something deeply familiar in each other: a small, steady inner weather whose gentle currents predisposed them to brooding and nurture, a misty, mellow soul-climate whose streams of thought and feeling had a subtle motion—not the sublime, heroic upsurges of Roscoe's spirit, or the giddy rushes of Walter's soul, or the sharp sunshine of Clarence's mind. They were not moved to explore, challenge, change, or engage the world, but to feel it, to be in it, to accept its grace and its mood, patiently and radiantly, and to illuminate it with their own lives. 

They gravitated towards each other. Where Ian went, Simone followed, when Simone stopped, Ian rested. They kept each other company, soaking each other's tranquil presence, moving together from sun spot to sun spot, basking together in the quiet of the morning and the afternoon. Their bond was not sealed by shared projects and activities, but by something else, a resonance, a lambent correspondence. They moved to similar rhythms—some, imposed by their physical limitations, some driving them from within—their needs, fears, pleasures and yearnings that predisposed them to similar experiences, perceptions, triumphs, and losses. And, in the daily exchange of those like perceptions, experiences, triumphs, and losses, you could almost make out the beginnings of a melody, a music, a steady, silent drumbeat arising from the dialogue of their minds, from the call and response of similarly blessed and burdened hearts—the thoughts, feelings, and images of kindred souls passing effortlessly from one being to another. It was not an alliance, a partnership or a love affair. It was a communion. For the first time in his life, Ian was no longer at an odd angle to the universe, but in a perfect, snug fit. He belonged.

Simone collapsed late one afternoon. We found her floundering on the ground, unable to stand, hold her head up, eat or drink on her own, struggling, and failing, to inch closer to Ian who was standing guard nearby. We cradled her in a soft blanket and held her for what seemed like hours, stroking her back, talking sweet, reassuring nothings, helping her nestle next to Ian one last time, before moving her into the house for care and hospice and, in the process, inevitably tearing her from everything she loved, knew and trusted. When we finally got up and carried her away, Ian followed. He walked with us as far as the open gate. There, he stopped in his usual hesitant way, pacing in place, flapping his wings, shuffling his feet, dithering between opposing desires—to be loved, to be safe—taking a few steps out in the open, turning back. Only, this time, after taking his first strained, faltering steps forward, he kept going. The fear of losing sight of Simone was greater than his fear of leaving the safety of his yard, so he pressed on, trailing behind us stiffly, haltingly, hemming, hawing, squirming and stuttering all the way to the front door. 

He showed up again the next morning, and the next, and the following, and every day after that for the rest of the summer, walking the distance with steps that got steadier and steadier with each new crossing, as though pulled by an invisible chord, as though answering a stronger and stronger call only he could hear. Once he got to the house, he waited patiently, marching up and down the garden fence, pausing at the open gate but refusing to enter until Simone was finally brought out for sun and fresh air—a gray lump of limp, oily feathers resting on a deep cushion. Only then did he cross the invisible border and nestled himself next to her, positioning his seeing eye towards her, and "opening" his blind eye to the rest of the world, or to whatever was left of the world that was not Simone. He came to see her every day, brimming over with what had happened to him. It was always the same thing, at least to our eyes—morning rush, breakfast, Walter's rowdy romps, Clarence's confusing commands, Roscoe's bewildering signals—but it created a new response in him, left a fresh impression on his living soul, it surprised and informed him with a new feeling, a new thought-image. And, in scent, sight, sound, motion, and mood, he brought the bounty of that novelty, that freshness, that discovery, to her. And she drew the essence of his "story" into her being, and savored it. Her eyes glistened, glittered and quickened with life when she saw him. He was the reed through which she breathed in the world that she could no longer participate in. Confined in her crippled body, she felt and did through him. And Ian not only brought her back the world—in presence, tone, cadence, sweetness and briskness— but he brought her a tumbling, fluttering, gurgling, gleaming world that produced more joy and more shining in her being than the one she had known herself. 

If Ian's visits retrieved, or invoked, a luckier version of the world she had lost, Simone's presence opened an entirely new world for Ian. A realm he had never known before—a space where he felt and acted like a different person, a space he engaged, responded to, and inhabited so differently as to feel like a different world— a world that was shut and inaccessible to him in Simone's absence, as though it didn't exist except under the stars of her eyes. You could see this change, this crossing of the threshold, happen every morning. As he approached Simone's garden, his steps gathered speed, purpose and confidence, his being shimmered, his eyes sparkled, his throat gurgled sweeter and sweeter sounds. If, to everyone else, she was a pitiful, broken thing lumping along with the burden of a broken life upon her, to him, she was a shining destination.

And you could see that transformation again, at the end of each day, when it was time for him to return to his barn for the night. He left Simone's nest drunk on the substance exchanged in the close space of their connection, strengthened by it, temporarily immune to life's challenges and obstacles and blows. And, for a few steps, he almost strutted, chest puffed out, wattle reddened scarlet, wings drumming the ground as if in celebration, every step, hollering and bragging and taking possession of the world with glorious confidence and command. But then, the farther away he walked from Simone's garden, the more that substance drained from him, and the more he diminished—you could see him almost getting smaller, receding, caving into himself— and he returned to his shy, grave, rueful self. The tumbling exuberance that had sustained him for a few minutes, drained away. By the time he reached his coop, he was no longer airborn, he was grounded in uncertain life again, anchored in the ever uncomfortable present again, mincing his steps again, back to his small, frail frame that predisposed him to brooding, melancholy, and reserve. Simone left his life as suddenly and quietly as she had entered it. She went to sleep one morning, with Ian by her side, and never woke up. He sat there all day, as before, a silent, loving witness to her life. We didn't disturb him. He went to his coop in the evening and came back the next morning, as he had done all summer long. We brought out her empty cushion and laid it in the same spot on the ground, and he nestled in the grass next to it quietly, gently, lovingly, as if it still contained her. 

If, at first, he returned expecting, and later merely hoping, to find her there, after a while he trailed in—dull eyed, tattered coated, leaden footed—clearly knowing he wouldn't. But there had been no other Home in the world for him outside the space created in the dailiness of his communion with Simone, and there had been no other world where his soulcall was heard and answered.

As spectacularly as he had bloomed in her presence, so he slowly withered in her absence. His light dimmed, his body shrunk. What inhabited his heart now was an absence, the absence of all that Simone had been and had called him to be—her thoughts, her memories, her hopes, her fears, her desires, her unique expressions of those thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, and desires, and his peculiar responses to all that. For the next few weeks, he mostly sat patiently by her empty bed but, once in a while, he got up as if to stretch, lifting his burdened body on the tips of his amputated toes and flapping the stubs of his wings in what looked like a clumsy attempt to fly. Then he returned to his place of vigil as though keeping the nest safe for Simone's return. He never tried roosting in it himself, nor did anyone else claim it while he was there. 

One day we found him lying prone on the ground, his wings outstretched as in big, bold, ecstatic flight, his soft soles turned skyward, his head tucked under his left wing, as though to sleep. The summer was immense. His heart was full. It was time. He opened his wings, turned his soles to the sky, closed his eyes, and trusted.

Joanna Lucas 
© 2010 Joanna Lucas 

A Place to Live

In German: Ein Platz zum Leben

He shows up every morning, this small, slight, inky-eyed child. You can see him teetering across the prairie on his absurdly long legs, toiling across tough, tangled, thistly terrain on his pale hooves, struggling to cross the field that separates the neighboring farm from the sanctuary -- a nub of a child, pushing forth on his spindly bug legs, in his tiny bug body, with infinite bug determination -- so scanty against the hulking earth, so tender under the bleak sky, so unprepared for the demands of the journey, yet so determined to undertake it. Nothing deters him until he reaches his destination: a thorny scrap of scorched dirt on the sanctuary border where the fence wires are slightly bent, stretched and loosened. There, he stops with a sigh in his body, with a hitch in his shoulders, as if tossing an invisible burden. He gazes into the green distance, swaying gently from side to side, shuffling his small feet, sniffing the breeze for news of the free animals, focusing exclusively on the remote spot where he last saw the sanctuary cows disappear the day before, and ignoring everything else: the thirst, the hunger, the blistering sun, the burning prairie winds, the stings of angry fire ants.

He comes a long way to get to this thankless place. There are mean fields to cross and gaping ditches to sidestep, and snarls of barbed wire to wrestle, yet he makes the trek every day, in all kinds of weather, without fail and without complaint as if that bitter spot on the sanctuary border can give him something he cannot get anywhere else -- a refuge, a remedy, or at least a reprieve. 

He is the sole survivor of a "grass-fed beef" herd. Left behind in the commotion of "auction day", in the terror and thrashing of families being torn apart, in the deafening roar of mothers and children calling out for each other and, most deafening of all, the cries of his own mother being beaten, shocked, dragged into the truck as she begged for his life and hers.

He's here now. Standing there, in that forsaken border patch, with something resembling faith, waiting quietly, patiently, perched on long legs that stretch down like roots, straining for the deep waters, reaching for a new life. Once in a while, he extends his neck, throws his head back and opens his mouth as if to bellow out a mighty cry, but no sound comes out, only a series of hissed, raspy breaths, the voiceless sobs of a child who cried himself mute. He keeps calling his soundless pleas, mouth open in silent despair, eyes widened in anguish that verges on sound, as if someone can, will, must hear him. 

And someone does. A barely audible response in four different voices comes from the far reaches of the sanctuary: Juliette, Ember, Justice and Bumper. And, with that one faint, barely discernible sound, everything changes. His eyes glisten, his shoulders straighten, his body shimmers with anticipation. He becomes larger, stronger, brighter, steadier as the sanctuary cows amble slowly towards him, bringing the windfall of their loving presence to his lonely existence. 

And, finally, they're there. Within his reach! They stick their long necks through the fence, bending and stretching and loosening the wires in the process, they bring their large, generous, benevolent persons into his lonely existence, they surround him with something that feels and heals like love, they breathe him, they lick his sad face, they moo sweet, reassuring things in his ear, they caress his mute throat with their raspy tongues until they love a small sound out of it again—a whisper, a whimper, a sigh of relief, perhaps not relief from sorrow but relief that his sorrow is finally heard. 

He responds to affection with affection, to warmth with warmth, to joy with joy. He nuzzles Ember's face, he rubs his cheek against Juliette's neck, he tries to attach the entire length of his bitty body to Justice's ample side. He basks in the warmth of their nurture and protection, he freezes in delight. This is the substance he needs more than food, more than water, more than shelter, more than the comforts of the body when his soul is in turmoil—this substance that feels like love. He lies down on his side of the fence and they lie down on theirs, inching as close to him as possible, their massive flanks and backs touching his slight, skinny frame through the fence. They doze off, they dream together for a while, sharing the living, happening moment, passing thoughts and understandings from mind to mind. And then, as if driven by an invisible force, he unfurls his lanky legs, leaps to his nubby feet, shakes his head, wags the wild reed of his tail, and starts running puppy laps up and down the fence, bucking, kicking, bouncing, leaping, playing pretend games, chasing imaginary friends. A child again.

He lives there. In that harsh, wounding place that batters his body and wrenches his heart. It's the only place in the nonvegan world where he can get a meager measure of happiness, warmth, love, hope. The only place in the world where his heart ekes out a song. For a brief moment. Eventually, inevitably, Justice, Juliette, Ember and Bumper get up and walk away, back to their lives, called by the fullness of their own free lives that make their own demands, that call to be lived and experienced to the fullest. Juliette is the last to leave, she lingers a while longer next to this thumb of a child, perhaps reminded of her own lost baby, and of all the times when she left the safety of the sanctuary and ran back to the farm where her calf was caged and crying, and risked her own life only to bring him a measure of comfort. But, soon, she gets up too and ambles off with the others. He watches them walk away, quietly at first but then, when he finds himself alone again—alone in the blistering fields, alone under the shattering sky, alone in the bitter pit of his life, he resumes his mute cries, his chest heaving and wrenching with each new silent sob.

We try to comfort him but he rejects our offerings of food, water and affection. He doesn't need human consolation, he needs human restraint, human decency. He doesn't want what humans have to offer, he wants what humans have taken away for a taste of burned flesh—his home, his family, his future, the freedom to live out his life and pursue its wonders. His whole being is focused on the spot where Justice, Juliette, Ember and Bumper are slowly disappearing from view. When he can no longer see them, he folds himself in the tight curl of his body, clutching himself in his own meager embrace against the sadness that is to come, the sadness that is already there, batting its black wings at him, pressing itself into his pores. He furls himself into a tight coil but sticks the tips of his hooves past the fence, as if trying to get a small part of himself into the sanctuary. The bulk of his body is anchored on the farm but the tendril of his tail, the buds of his hooves, the nub of his muzzle make it into the sanctuary, reach, touch, live on the other side.

By evening the "farmer" will come and wrangle him back to the farm. By morning, he'll teeter back over the field again, all legs and elbows, and he'll park himself in that same blistering spot again, under the same withering sun, and he'll issue his silent sobs again, pleading to be held, to be helped, to be heard. We'll offer him food, water, affection knowing full well he'll reject all, and we'll witness again his faithful vigil at that spot in the fence where the wires are bent, stretched and almost ready to give, where the seemingly insurmountable barrier between two worlds has been loosened by such gentle and relentless straining, and struggling, and sobbing, and wrestling, and grasping, and yearning, and loving, and hoping, and reaching through to the other side.

Joanna Lucas
© 2010 Joanna Lucas

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A Followup

It is gratifying to know that this calf's harrowing story has moved many readers to become vegan. Indeed, as many of you have aptly stated in your emails, this child's tragedy is the tragedy of ALL animals brought into existence for human amusement (meat, dairy, eggs, skin, etc), and reading about his plight is a reminder to all of us why vegan living is not a "lifestyle choice" but a moral imperative. 
 
Of course, it should go without saying, question, or doubt that, if there were anything in the world we could do to rescue him — or any of the many other victims who come to the sanctuary fence every day begging to be saved from the misery of their existence on neighboring family farms — we would have already done so, and have already done so for all the other sanctuary residents who could be rescued without their former captors profiting. The grim reality is that there is nothing we can do for this child except share his story and ask consumers to confront the atrocities they are supporting, rewarding and perpetuating with every purchase of "humane/ free-range/grass-fed/organic" meat, dairy, eggs, and any other animal-derived products.

As many readers have recognized, “buying” this calf's freedom would only enable the "farmer" to purchase another victim with the ransom money, thus perpetuating the very atrocity we are struggling to stop. We cannot solve a problem by making it worse. 

There is only one solution. Go Vegan and encourage others to do the same. Use this child's tragic story, along with the many other stories on this blog, and the outreach materials on our website, to educate others about the necessity of going vegan. Download our literature and distribute it. Donate to our printing and distribution costs. Be an activist, just like us.

Everyone at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary already gives as much of themselves as possible—we use our own funds, our time, our labor—and we know that everyone has something to give. We are not wealthy people – far from it – but we manage to give every day, so, when we ask others to please find a way to give, we never ask more of our supporters than we ask of ourselves. 
 
Please donate to the sanctuary so that we can continue to save animals without ever contributing to the systems that profit from their exploitation. Remember that the sanctuary is filled with animals who have been rescued, and there will be many more over the years who will join their ranks. The costs of providing rescue and lifelong care to individuals who often have debilitating health problems as a result of common "farming" practices, are significant. Your donation can help us continue our lifesaving work.

Honor the Heart!

The presentation below is a tribute to the sentient heart in all its splendor, folly and grace. It is inspired by the extraordinary lives and loves of the rescued animals at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, and it is dedicated to the doomed farmed animals of the world whose misery and death we demand and perpetuate with every nonvegan bite, and whose battered hearts still yearn, to their last breath, for the same miracle that your heart and mine beats for: to not only love, but to be loved.

Tell someone. Send as an e-card to a friend, with your own personal message. Or bookmark and send it as a standalone webpage.

Libby and Louie, A Love Story

It took extraordinary events – a shattering blow, like the loss of her right foot to the wire floor of the "cage-free" egg farm where she was rescued from, or a rapturous release, like her arrival at the sanctuary, or a seismic shift like Louie's absence – to shake, charm, or punish a sound out of Libby. It's not that her voice was frozen in fear, like so many of her fellow refugees. It's not that she was shy, feeble, injured, or ill. She was quiet. And, unlike so many of her kin, she did not enjoy, or need to, commit her inner experiences to the stream of constant humming that often fills chicken communities with the music of their thoughts. Libby's thoughts were silent. Silence was her nature, her disposition, her remedy, her talent, her power, her gift, and her pleasure. She looked at the world in soundless wonder – her thoughts, streaming and darting, swelling and swarming in the dark pools of her eyes – and filled it with the hush of her mind.

In the blush of her first weeks at the sanctuary, when everything astonished her – the open sky, the endless fields, the scent of rain, the feel of straw underfoot – we thought we heard her voice a few times: small, joyful cries coming out of nowhere, seemingly formed out of thin air, the musical friction of invisible particles, not the product of straining, vibrating, trembling vocal chords, but a sound of pure joy coming from the heart of life itself. But, after she paired up with Louie and became his sole partner, Libby turned so completely quiet, that we began to wonder if the voice we had heard in the beginning was truly hers.
Louie's delight in the sound and functioning of his own magnificent voice, his pleasure in putting sound faces on everything – their finds and failures, their contentments and complaints, their yearnings and fears, their joys and hopes, the major, minor or minute events of their daily lives together – gave Libby the improbable ability of being heard without making a sound. For the first time in her life, she could enjoy the bliss of silence and the full power of voice at the same time. Her thoughts, her needs, her feelings, her pleasures and displeasures, were all there – perfectly voiced, perfectly formed, perfectly delivered in Louie's utterings – each experience, captured in the jewel of a flawlessly pitched note. And in these notes, you could hear the developing musical portrait of Libby's inner happenings.

There was the sighed coo for Libby's request to slide under his wing, the raspy hiss for her alarm at OJ, the "killer" cat's approach, the purred hum for her pleasure in dustbathing, the bubbling trill for her enjoyment in eating pumpkin seeds straight out of the pumpkin's cool core on a summer day, the grinding creak for her tiredness, the rusty grumble for her achy joints.

There was the growing vocabulary of songs used to voice their shared moments of delight – the lucky find of the treasure trove hidden in a compost pile, discovered by Libby and dug out with Louie's help to reveal a feast of riches to taste, eat, explore, investigate or play with; or the gift of walking side by side into the morning sun and greeting a new day together; or the adventure of sneaking into the pig barn and chasing the flies that landed on the backs of the slumbering giants.

Occasionally, there were the soundbursts for their shared moments of displeasure, hurt, sadness, fear, or downright panic, such as the time when Libby got accidentally locked in a barn that was being cleaned and Louie, distressed at the sudden separation, paced frantically up and down the narrow path on the other side of the closed door, crowing his alarm, crying his pleas, clucking his commands, flapping his wings, showering us with a spray of fervid whistles, following us around, then running back to the barn door, clacking at it, knocking on it, then running back to us, whirring his wings, stomping his feet, tapping the ground with his beak, staring intently, and generally communicating Libby's predicament in every "language" available to him: sound, movement, gaze, color, and certainly scent too.
But, for all of their panache, Louie's most spectacular acts of voice were not his magnificently crafted and projected vocal announcements but his quiet acts of allegiance, his tacit acts of devotion, his daily acts of restraint. The things he did not do.

There was the silent song of giving up his treasured roost in the rafters, his nest in the sky where he had bunked every night of his years before Libby, the space where he felt safest surrendering to sleep, strongest entering the night. Happiest. The spot closest to the clouds. His personal Olympus. But, in her lameness, Libby couldn't join him there. She managed to climb next to him a few times but, with only one foot to grip the perch, she kept losing her balance and fell to the ground and, after a while, she stopped trying and just stayed there, grounded, anchored to the earth. So Louie quietly descended from his blue yonder and settled next to her in her terrestrial roost – a long, narrow tent created by a leaning plywood board – and he slept near the entrance, exposing himself to the intrusions of curious goats, wandering cats and restless geese, the better to protect Libby from them.
There was the soundless song of limiting the sport of his summer days to fewer and fewer hours when the stiffness in Libby's stump increased with age, and the effort of following Louie in the fields, hobbling and wobbling behind him, turned from tiring to exhausting in fewer and fewer steps, and she started to retire to their nest earlier and earlier in the day. At first, she was able to make it till 6 in the evening, but then 6 became 5, and 5 became 4, and then it was barely 3 in the glorious middle of a summer day when she felt too weary to go on. The day was still in its full splendor, there was still so much more of its gift to explore and experience, and there was still so much energy and curiosity left in Louie to explore with, but Libby was tired, and she had to go to her tent under the plywood plank, and rest her aching joints. And Louie followed. With Libby gone from the dazzling heart of the summer day, the night came early for both of them.

Then there was the tacit song of forfeiting his foraging expeditions and his place in the larger sanctuary community only to be with her. When Libby's advancing age, added to the constant burden of her lameness, forced her to not only shorten her travels with Louie, but end them altogether, and when her increased frailness forced her to seek a more controlled environment than their plywood tent in the barn, she retired to the small, quiet refuge of the House. And Louie followed her there, too, even though he still enjoyed the wide open spaces, the wilder outdoors, the hustle and bustle of bunking in the barn. But Libby needed the extra comfort of the smaller, warmer, more predictable space inside the House and, even though Louie did not, he followed her anyway. And, when she started to spend more and more time indoors, curtailing her already brief outings, Louie did too.

And there they were. Just the two of them in the world. A monogamous couple in a species where monogamy is the exception. Determined to stay together even though their union created more problems than it solved, increased their burdens more than it eased them, and thwarted their instincts more than it fulfilled them.
It would have been easier and more "natural" for Louie to be in charge of a group of hens, like all the other roosters, but he ignored everyone except Libby. He paid no attention to the fluffy gray hen, the fiery blonde hen, the dreamy red hen, the sweet black hen dawdling in her downy pantaloons, or any of the 100 snow-white hens who, to our dim perceptions, looked exactly like Libby. Louie, the most resplendently bedecked and befeathered rooster of the sanctuary, remained devoted only to Libby – scrawny body, scraggly feathers, missing foot, hobbled gait and all. It's true that, with our dull senses, we couldn't grasp a fraction of what he saw in her because we can't see, smell, hear, touch, taste, sense a scintilla of the sights, scents, sounds, textures, and tastes he does. But, even if we could see Libby in all her glory, it would still be clear that it wasn't her physical attributes that enraptured Louie. If he sought her as his one and only companion, if he protected that union from all intrusions, it wasn't because of her physique but because of her presence.

It would have been easier for Libby too – so vulnerable in her stunted, lame body – to join an existing chicken family and enjoy the added comfort, cover and protection of a larger group, but she never did. She stayed with Louie, and followed him on his daily treks in the open fields, limping and gimping behind him, exhausting herself only to be near him.
What bonded them was not about practical necessities or instinctual urges – if anything, it thwarted both. Their union was about something else, a rich inner abundance that seemed to flourish in each other's presence, and that Libby nurtured in her silence and that Louie voiced, sang out loud, celebrated, noted, catalogued, documented, expressed, praised every day of their 1,800 days together.

Except today. Today, it was Libby who "spoke" for both of them. And, this time, there was no doubt whose voice it was, or what it was saying, because it not only sounded off, it split open the sky, punctured the clouds, issued forth with such gripping force and immediacy that it stopped you dead in your tracks. It was a sound of such pure sorrow and longing, hanging there all alone, in stark and immaculate solitude, high above the din of sanctuary life, like the heart-piercing cry of an albatross. She had started to cluck barely audibly at dawn, when Louie failed to get up and lingered listlessly in their nest. She continued her plaintive murmur into the afternoon, when Louie became too weak to hold his head up and collapsed in a heap of limp feathers. And then, when we scooped him up and quarantined him into a separate room for treatment, her soft lament turned to wrenching wail.

The next morning, she was still sounding out her plea, her love, her desperation as she feverishly searched every open room in the house, then wandered out into the small front yard, then the larger back yard, and the small barns behind it. Soon, she left the house and the fenced yard and took her search to the open fields, cooing, calling, crying like a strange sky creature, using her voice as a beacon, it seemed, a sound trail for Louie to follow back to safety, and roaming farther than she had in months, stumbling and staggering on a foot and a stump, the light in her being dimming with every solitary minute, her eyes widened as if struggling to see in dark, her feathers, frayed at the edges, as though singed by the flames of an invisible fire, their sooted ends sticking out like thorns straight from the wound of her soul, her whole being looking tattered and disoriented, as if lost in a suddenly foreign world.
And, for three excruciating days, we didn't dare hope she'd ever find him alive again. Louie was very weak, hanging to life by a thread that seemed thinner and thinner with each passing hour. He didn't respond to the treatment we were advised to give him and, after three days of failed attempts, we were beginning to accept that there was nothing more we could do except to keep him comfortable, hydrated and quiet until the end.

But we underestimated both his strength and her determination. Libby did find her soul mate again. We don't know how she managed to get into the locked rehab room, but she did. We were planning to reunite them later that day – going against the Veterinarian's advice, as we sometimes do out of mercy for the animals – because it had become clear to us that Louie's ailment was not contagious, it was "just" a bad fit of old age. But Libby beat us to it. She found her way into his room, only she knows how, and Louie found his way back to life too, seemingly at the same moment. There he was, looking up for the first time in days, life flaring in his eyes again, and there she was, huddled next to him, quietly sharing his hospital crate. And there they still are, Louie, slowly recovering, and Libby, blissfully silent again. She hasn't moved since. She won't leave his side now that she's found him again, she refuses to even look away from him, as if he might disappear in one blink of her eye, as if the force of her gaze alone can keep him anchored in life.

She beholds him with her deep, black eyes, thoughts streaming and darting, swelling and swarming in their dark pools, and she envelops him in her symphonic silence, which – you hear it now! – is not really a silence, but a space in which Louie's voice may shine, a protected space where his voice may grow stronger, vaster, freer – not because it can boom against her muteness, but because it can speak for someone other than himself and, in so doing, it may grow from an instrument of self expression to an instrument of grace. Not the abstract concept of grace that we like to discuss and dissect, but the daily practice and experience of it.

They are both quiet now – Louie, exhausted from his ailment, regaining his strength, Libby, exhausted from her dark journey, gazing steadily at him. Both, brimming, basking in the rich silence that is so alive with voice and flowing conversation, that it glows between them like a strange treasure. And it shines.

Joanna Lucas
© 2009 Joanna Lucas

Just Before Dawn

What passed between them transformed them both. Yet, even though it was communicated in close proximity, it grew and flourished in each other's absence. Their most dramatic encounters, the now famous Slow Speed Chases, were not the real exchanges and, for all of their spectacular pageantry, and despite our desire to dwell on them and relive their excitement, they weren't the real story either. The real story, the deepest work of their lives, the real work of transformation, began at a point when their lives and their stories seemed to end – in the last chapters of their lives, not in the action-packed, heroic days of their youth. Although those are the days we like to remember and retell.

We like to remember Agnes, a gorgeous, shimmering apparition gliding through the grasslands on legs that got shorter and shorter as her body got larger and larger until, one day, they disappeared so completely in the folds of her enormous body that she seemed to be swimming through fluid earth. A strangely amphibian presence floating slightly above the earth-bound prairie. A terrestrial white whale gliding through the gift she never ceased to be grateful for – another Day. And, all around her, swaying, bobbing, raising and falling like waves, ebbing and flowing, moving in unison with her, the rolling backs of the 9 other pigs in her sounder, the 9 siblings with whom she communicated incessantly, with that sound that was so uniquely her own – half song (a sound to self), and half call (a song to others), part expression of her soul, part an expression of her sounder – each note, a distinct, plaintive or joyful utterance that seemed to begin and end with an "we", and was understood, heeded and answered back in 9 voices. There had never been a day in her life when she had not been connected with her community, and not just any community, the same community, and that communal way of being had entered her person – her posture, her gait, her voice, her gaze, her expectations, her view of the world (the way Petunia's lifelong isolation had entered hers) – it defined not only her own self but her family too, the 9 siblings who orbited her ample person and hung in her gravitational pull. She was in charge and in service to the sounder, connected with each of its members, dominant of them and completely subservient to their needs at the same time. She was the one who decided who could enter the pig village and who was not to be trusted around her family, which of the pig newcomers were friends, and could safely join the family after a period of testing and coaching, like Lucas; which pigs were simply not a good fit for the group, like Oscar; and which pigs were foes whose presence would disrupt the group's peace, order and identity, and had to be chased away, like Petunia. And she enforced her decisions, often enlisting the help of other group members.

She was the Matriarch. Not merely Agnes, the individual, but Agnes, the family of 10 and its tragic early history, and its miraculous rescue, and its arrival at the nearest place to Heaven that a pig can find on this human-dominated Earth. She was the repository of her family's social knowledge and memory. She was We, Agnes.

We like to remember Petunia, big, bad, red, fire-breathing Petunia who, after spending most of her life alone, isolated from family, kin, and community, tossed from solitary breeding cell, to family farm, to abusive "rescuer", where companions, if they existed at all, were meteoric at best, had learned to enjoy her own company, and trust no one but her own sturdy, embattled self. She strutted around, scorching the earth under her feet, with her chest puffed, her eyes steely, her jaw clenched, her skin thickened to armor, each step thumping the ground like a judge's mallet, calling the mutinous world to order, her tragic order. She moved through life like a battleship, Battleship Petunia, advancing in a cloud of preemptive fire, tar, piss, vinegar, gall, sulphur and damnation, rejecting all social contact, connections, entanglements, expectations and negotiations. She shoved smitten Lucas out of her way, she shooed subservient Oscar out of his mud holes, she knocked down the tripods and equipment of visiting TV crews (and one or two crewmen along the way), she took down tents, feed bins, water troughs and tool tables with one thrust of her hammer nose, she uprooted freshly cemented fence posts with one push of her steel-plated shoulders. She never tired of reaffirming her bigness, her badness, her invulnerability, and most of all, her complete and absolute independence from everyone and everything. She was anchored so exclusively in the space that her battered, embattled self occupied in the world, walking in such complete and exquisite solitude, that she made even the most teeming, bustling, densely populated place look and feel deserted. She was her own tribe, and her own self-sufficient, self-contained, independent, sovereign country: Petunia. Population 1.

We delight in remembering shy, retiring Iris, the shrinking violet of the family, the pig with the personality of a swan and the body of a rhino, a large, unwieldily sow with the delicate heart and yearnings of a bird forced to fulfill the joys of a bird's soul in a wingless, flightless, four-legged body. Given the chance, she probably would have chosen the company of birds over the company of her fellow pigs, and she probably would have moved into he bird barn to live out her days surrounded by wings and feathers, like Oscar, but her fear of leaving the pig village and its secure boundaries and its certain terrain and its predictable rhythms anchored her in place with such force that she rarely dared go out on her own even for a short stroll – and, oh, how enviable solitary, self-sufficient Petunia, the nation of one, must have seemed to her. So she stayed with the pigs and tried to be a good pig and live up to pigly expectations and, on rare occasions, she actually acted as fully and powerfully pigly as magnificent Agnes herself and, perhaps, even experienced herself as such. Those were the times when she "helped" Agnes chase Petunia away, and when she broke out of all of her comfortable prisons – her cozy barn, her protected yard, her secure world, her own comfortable self – and, for a short while, became a different person, perhaps not so much the person she truly wished to be, but the person she wished to be seen as: Iris, the Spitfire.

But, most of all, we remember their now legendary Slow Speed Chases (that get more legendary with each retelling) that started when Petunia uncharacteristically approached the sounder she had dissed at all other times, and humbly requested acceptance only to be rejected in spectacular, exemplary displays of Matriarch power and authority that branded her an Outcast and banished her not just to the edge of the pig village, but farther, to the very edge of the known world, the Sanctuary.

You felt it long before you saw it. It started as a slight stir under your feet, a tremor that got stronger and stronger as the distant rumbling got closer and closer and gathered the force of thunder. You saw the cavalcade approaching as a tumbling storm cloud. None of them uttered a sound as they charged past you – Petunia, leading the way, her whole body one gesture, aimed at the space in front of her, cutting the air like a red-hoofed comet with two stars caught in her train: Agnes, heaving and huffing in hot pursuit, honed on Petunia like a shuddering, sputtering 10 ton Tzar cannon, and Iris, trailing behind both, trudging and wobbling wildly, like a gigantic jello sumo wrestler about to spin off its axis. All you heard was the huffing of their breath and the thundering of their hooves, and you felt the sheer force of three massively huge bodies moving the air, shaking the earth, creating their own weather and riot in their wake. To anyone watching, the chase looked like the romp of three rowdy giants running in the open field. But there was nothing fun or friendly about it. The force that drove Agnes and Petunia together was closer to fury, fear, and loathing but also a deep, vague longing, a hunger, for something that each lacked and the other possessed in such obvious abundance that even we could see it.

Agnes chased Petunia away like a thief, like an illness, like a bad dream. There was something about Petunia, something in the way she carried herself, a turbulence in her inner weather, a wounded, hunted, haunted something, that reeked of the fate Agnes and her family had escaped narrowly.

The nightmare Petunia had endured until her rescue had entered her person, her voice, her gaze, her gait, it followed her around like a tar cloud, it flowed, issued forth from her every move – the way she hung her head, the way she heaved in her sleep, the way she breathed with the halted breath of the hunted, the way she expected good things to vanish and bad things to flourish, the way she trusted in the solid reality of strife and never trusted anything good, kind, tender, but pathetically searched for it anyway, the way she carried the cross of her anguished life, her rootlessness, her exile from everything she had ever loved and needed, into the inviolate space of Agnes' Home.

And Petunia returned to haunt Agnes, again and again, just like a bad dream. Showing up out of nowhere, a black cloud materializing out of the blue of Agnes' sunny life, blackening the sun of her peaceful existence, threatening everything she loved, nurtured, and protected, and demanding the immediate action of a Chase to restore the world to the order she had grown to know and expect.

After each chase, the world was indeed restored to the order that each of them had grown to expect and understand as order. Their social expectations were confirmed: Agnes, the Matriarch; Petunia, the Outcast. Their place in the world was reaffirmed. Agnes emerged further empowered and increased, her power and plurality, affirmed and expanded – We, Agnes – the boundaries of her world, redefined and reinforced. And Petunia emerged further rooted in herself, the fortress of her solitary self, strengthened, its boundaries made even more impenetrable, her isolation, her place among the world's exiles, reaffirmed: I, Petunia.

And they walked around displaying their identities like badges, like blazons, like coats of armor. Agnes, standing her ground, not taking another step further, enforcing the law of the land, her land, by gaze and posture alone. Petunia, stomping away in a red fury, fuming like a battleship after a battle. And Iris, frozen in mid-field, as though suddenly realizing where she was – alone in the middle of the open prairie, far, far away from her secure yard – would tense up and give a few low whimpers before gathering her shoulders in a protective shrug and teetering back to the pig village, back to the old shoe of her shy, bird-gentle self. And sometimes, on very rare occasions, she would stop by the bird barn and rest there with the birds, in the deep straw and the gentle fluttering of wings, and the soothing music of coos and clucks and chirps, as though she belonged there.

So, when we talk about them, this is what we generally like to remember – their young, vibrant days, the "doing" in their lives, the heroic, purpose-driven actions, the vibrant, healthy, able bodies and the life force that quickens them.

When they grow old and they fall ill, and their bodies shrink, and their life force diminishes, we consider their stories done, finished. If we mention that part of their lives at all, we usually contain it in one short paragraph. Often, we don't mention it at all. Yet this is when the richest part of their stories is often just beginning to ripen, when their most important work of living is done, and when their deepest transformations often happen. So this is where this story truly begins.

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Agnes began to falter in the Spring. At first, she was late for breakfast, trailing behind everyone else in the morning. Then there were the mornings when she didn't come out at all. Soon, the mornings extended into full days, and the days stretched into nights. Sometimes, several days would pass before she managed to get herself up for a stroll in the yard, but they were short strolls, she never made it very far because her joints could no longer support the weight of a body that had been genetically forced to grow so morbidly large, and they'd give, and she'd get stuck in the mud, and stay there, helpless as a bug with crushed legs, until a team of people could be gathered to help her up.

For the past 6 months, she had grown progressively crippled. After a summer of failed attempts at normalcy, when moving about became increasingly difficult, when she often ended up sleeping under the open sky, or in the least spot in the pig house rather than risk being trampled by 9 clumsy giants in their rush to get to breakfast, when she'd lost, one by one, every thing that had sustained her throughout her life – her place, her health, her youth, her purpose – she finally mustered enough strength one day to get up, teeter past the open gate, and leave her world, her family, her known life for good. She wobbled past several empty barns and took shelter in a secluded, pigless barn, Melvin's barn, a cool, quiet, cloistered place, where she collapsed in the deep straw, exhausted after her long trek. She stretched herself safely (for the first time in weeks), comfortably (also for the first time in weeks) on her right side, and never returned to her sounder, her world, her purpose, her post, her duty, again. It was the closest thing to suicide anyone could experience. But it was her choice, and it was where, and how, she started the last chapter in her life – alone for the first time in her life, in self-imposed exile from her kin, in a pigless barn, where Melvin, the turkey, was mourning the loss of his last friend, Shylo, and where often, during busy summer days, they were the only two souls inside the empty space.

And, with her departure, the sounder was left without a leader, Iris stopped leaving the pig village at all – without the cloak and diversion of an explosive, dramatic exit alongside Agnes, she felt too vulnerable, so she made it only as far as the open gate where she stuck out her head, looked left and right, sniffed the air, and turned around to the safety of her fenced yard – and the Slow Speed Chases that had quickened the sanctuary landscape stopped as suddenly as they had begun, while Petunia, Agnes' nemesis, was still at large, still roaming the fields with no one to oppose her, free to join the sounder if she so desired, but, as it turns out, she never did so desire. What she did do, now that Agnes wasn't there to chase her away, was walk into the pig yard, go all the way to the barn, and stand there silently in front of the open door, watching the ageing sounder sleep, and snore, and grunt soft, reassuring things to each other, and hum in their sleep, and inch towards one another the better to dream together. Sometimes, if one of the pigs got up and lumbered towards her, Petunia walked away and hid behind the corner of the barn from where she continued to watch quietly, as though in the thrall of a good dream. Maybe this is all she ever wanted. Maybe it was never about acceptance in the sounder but simply about being allowed to get close enough to watch the improbable sight of a pig family growing old together.

As for Agnes, she was alone for the first time in her life, and without the skill to be solitary. She was alone, unguided and unmoored in an alien world. Yet, despite her burdens, she embarked on doing the work of living required by the last part of her life without hesitation, without delay. She rushed into the work of her new life the way she always had, as if each day was a great gift. And she learned, one by one, the treasures of her restricted world – the pleasures of the soul, the pleasures of the mind at rest, the lavish absence of desire. If happiness is a state of being, not of doing, she could learn to be happy.

When she was healthy, and it felt good to be in her body, when its own functioning was bliss – the running, the chasing, the digging, the foraging, the wrestling, the sprawling, the sunning, the mudbathing with its cooling, crackling skin of drying mud – she desired every bit of life's lavish, luscious, lustful abundance and savored it with pigly passion. But, now that the pursuit of pleasure had become painful and she spent her days lying in the deep straw with the sounds of life chiming safely, seductively in the distance, with the breeze carrying the scents of life happening, struggling, suffering elsewhere, with the hum and tremendum of life no longer intruding on her with either its beauty or its destruction, she learned to enjoy the luxurious absence of things – the absence of jarring stimulation, the absence of painful movement, the lavish absence of desire, the massive power of being helpless and secure at the same time.

Often, we caught her daydreaming, drifting between dream and awareness – eyes open, breath even, body relaxed, mind roaming in the free, vast, happening world within – until a sudden sound or movement would startle her out of her trance and bring her back into the burdensome reality of her body. She was daydreaming of whatever she was daydreaming of – memories or intense imaginings, a mixture of things felt at the moment, things she remembered, things she fancied, all held together by the fluid logic of dreams: chasing Petunia, digging to the molten jelly core of the earth, mudbathing, searching, searching feverishly for a way out or a way in, escaping at the last minute from some vague, terrible danger, tasting the incomparable taste of peanut butter growing on flowers, endless fields of peanut butter and jelly, to eat, sleep and and wallow in forever, clouds bursting, water spurting out of hoses, cooling hands on her back, running on willing legs, running, running so fast if felt like flying. More and more, she started to stay awake late into the night when the world moved at her pace, when she was in harmony with the gentled breath of the world. There was a time when she greeted mornings with enthusiasm and great anticipation. Now the nights were her time, and she lay awake longer than most everyone else. You could often see her lying there with her eyes wide open, the moon glinting in their glistening mirrors, humming gently to herself, enjoying the bliss of having her stilled body be in harmony with the stilled world, the comfort of not having the world demand more than she could give, the pleasure of giving as much as the world asked of her – sleep, stillness – a synergy of sorts, a freedom. Moving at the midnight world's dreamy pace, feeling included, adequate and in sync again, humming to herself as many pigs do, a thin, steady stream of sound that flowed forth like a sigh, like a musical breath, like a lullaby. And, more and more often, on more and more nights, we started to see Petunia parked outside Agnes' closed door, listening to Agnes' haunting song, transfixed, as if absorbing what the matriarch was transmitting through song, and recording it all, understanding, preserving it all before it was gone, before it vanished – the history of a life she had not been allowed to have.

Agnes transformed under our very eyes. Her richly connected, communal life was now happening within. She had settled into the rhythms of her new life and had learned to navigate its terrain. She was no longer adrift in uncharted waters, she was home again. Her new home. Her new life. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't even good at times, but it was predictable, it was under her control, it was hers. And it was priceless.

And then the fire struck. It started with one stray spark and, before anyone could grab a fire extinguisher, it engulfed the entire barn and turned the hard-earned order of Agnes' life to ashes. It took 6 men and a tractor to pull her out of the burning barn, flailing and crying, and leave her stranded in the middle of the frozen field, terrified, hunched over, with nothing but the paper-thin shelter of a yellow blanket over her head, a strangely sunny spot in the desolate, arctic blue of her life. Her flesh-engulfed right eye, half buried in the flattened skin of her lid, was blind to the world, but her left eye opened in wild bewilderment. Once again, she had lost everything that had sustained her. And, once again, she embarked on the work of living without delay, without hesitation, still hopelessly in love with life even though it ebbed, and dimmed and dwindled. More so because it ebbed and dimmed and dwindled. After a week spent in a makeshift shelter, she returned to her barn and her life's rhythms, and her daydreaming, and her night wakes, and her strange communions with Petunia. But she also returned to the increasing pain in her body, that responded to medication less and less and left her trembling more and more frequently, until she lay trembling most of the time.

Her one remaining pleasure was breakfast with Chris. It circulated a current of life in her dying world. He brought her muffins, and sweet feed, and red apples and fresh water trapped in big gulps of soggy bread, and she greeted him with a wag of her chopped tail, and a twitch in her feet, like a dog dreaming of running, and a pointing of her ears to catch every sound of him, and a widening of her nostrils to catch every scent, and a shimmering in her body, trying to get up but only flailing around until he laid his palm on her ribs and she relaxed, opening her mouth and letting out a small sigh that can only be described as a smile, an audible smile, a smile from the core of her being, a smile whose sound waves flowed throughout her body, unfurling the tenseness in her muscles, steadying her heartbeat, deepening her breathing. She consumed the nourishment of her breakfasts with Chris through all five senses.

But soon she stopped eating and drinking. The pain worsened. It became intractable and unrelenting. There was no cure left and no relief.

She greeted us in her usual way that morning, with the faint wagging and dim twitching and smile in her body, not because she was eager for breakfast – she refused all food and water now – but because she was happy for the visit, anticipating the rush of soul it would bring. But we weren't bringing breakfast or tidings of joy that morning. Instead, we ushered in the vet who was going to kill her. We prefer to call it "euthanasia", or "mercy killing" because that's what it was to us, but that's not what it was to her. As anguished as her life had become, she didn't want to leave it. She still wanted to stay awake and aware in the thick of her painful life. She still wanted to live it to the last bitter breath.

And, despite being given 10 times the normal dose of pre-euthanasia sedative, she still fought and scraped to stay alive, even as the needle found her heart, crushing muscle and cartilage in its way, even as the drug entered her blood stream, promising no more pain, but no more life either, rest but also oblivion, not something better than what she had, but nothingness. She wanted to live, and we forced her out of her life, erased her out of her precious existence kicking and screaming and flailing to her last breath. There is no remedy for that. No way to erase the memory of her final moments on earth, or to ease the reality that WE, whose mercy she had trusted, and whose presence she had greeted with joy as we ushered in her killer, are responsible. Only the grim consolation of sorrow as you continue to hold her body – hold it as the life ebbs away from it, hold it so that life can ebb away – and you behold her in all her earthly beauty, one last time and you can't imagine anything more beautiful than her wrinkles, and warts and sags, her clouding eyes, the curve of her neck, the rough texture of her cheek, the flesh-engulfed eye, the suffering foam gathering in the corner of her mouth, the stubbornly asymmetrical turn of her nose, the legs tapered in the fork of her hooves, trembling fainter and fainter. You see, one last time, the pure and radiant beauty of the self-aware life within, still glittering with conscious awareness. You see it in her moles and her warts and lumps and lesions, and in the roughness and anguish of her being, in the choppiness of her breath, and in the incomprehensible (to us) language that issued forth from her throat, like strange music, one last time.

And you tell her how beautiful she is, and how loved, as if the very expression of love will ease her passing. And, finally, you say Good bye, dearest friend. What you don't say is Forgive us... Not because you don't want forgiveness, but because you know that, even as you will never forgive yourself, she, unbearably, undeservedly, already has.

Outside the barn, Petunia stood trembling lightly, shivering in the heat of the Spring day as if cold from within, shuffling her feet, stepping and swaying in place as if postponing the beginning of a journey, and sniffing the air intently, as if trying to identify a strange scent. Or remember it.

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After Agnes' death, Petunia declined rapidly, as if a sustaining force was suddenly sucked from her being. Today, 14 months later, Petunia is a different person. She moves differently, she acts differently, she looks differently – thin, frail, brittle, pale, nothing like the red haired, red eyed, red toothed, red hoofed force she used to be. She has a different expression, gentler, sadder, bent to the earth, her skin hanging on her weakened frame, creasing and folding onto itself, thinned to paper. She has moved into Agnes' old hospice room where, on most days, she seems content to just rest in the deep straw and the quiet shade. But there are also days when, after she gets up with Chris' help, she teeters all over the sanctuary till 3 in the morning, moving with a new flutter in her body and a new joy in her voice, and greeting everyone she sees with the soft, tender, ecstatic "Wha! Ahwa! Ack!" sound that used to be reserved for Chris alone – mouth open wide in an alligator smile, the better to let out the soul change – and she does this with such sweetness, such benevolence, such generosity that it's hard to believe she is the same Petunia who sneered and scowled and spat at everyone she met.

Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Ack, she says at the rowdy goats, even though they rush past her.

Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Ack at Beetle Bailey, the young pot bellied pig who follows her around like a satellite and who would have been rejected as a nuisance not too long ago.

Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aah Aaaah at Juliette, the cow, who barely acknowledges her presence.

Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaaah at the slumbering pigs, as she boldly staggers straight into the middle of their house and stands there on rickety legs, swaying unsteadily from side to side like a bridge about to collapse.

Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Aaaah even at her former rival, Iris, who gets up and walks towards her. But Petunia doesn't scurry away any more. She stands there and they touch noses and then they simply, amazingly, start tottering around the barn together, shoulder to shoulder, as Petunia caresses one and all with the benediction of her greeting – Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Aaaah. And they walk together, tentatively, Iris, stepping gingerly in her shrunken frame, Petunia, advancing with short, sharp shrugs as if rearranging her skeleton with each new step. If there is any animosity left between them, it doesn't enter their movements. At least, not today. Today, they walk together, shoulder to shoulder, almost leaning on each other, like sisters, like old friends.Round and round the barn they go, two old rivals strolling together with a mixture of pleasure at the gift of a beautiful day, and frustration at the creaks and complaints of their crumbling bodies, while young Beetle Bailey, who followed Petunia into the yard, wreaks havoc in the pig bran, running all over the hills of their sleeping bodies, jumping from peak to peak, rolling down the valleys, throwing himself at life with squeals of great delight.

Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Aaaah, Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, prophesies Petunia as she dodders out of the pig yard and back into the big world, teetering from beautiful boy to beautiful boy – Tolstoy the goat, Rowdy the sheep, Bumper the calf, even Lucas the wunderpig, who is now middle aged and softened in his ways, and fuller of sleep than adventure. Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Aah, she rattles gently, throatily at them, almost like laughter.

Aah Aah, Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah at Misha the llama, and Hillary the ewe, and Clarence the turkey who cocks his head as if trying to remember a strangely familiar sound. Then she takes her prophesy farther, all the way to the compost hill where Justice the steer suns himself, and she kills herself trying to climb all the way to the top only to breathe the music of her benediction directly into his ear: Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Aaaah, aaahh aah aah, mouth open in an utterance of love let loose, grinning ear to ear.

Aah Aah, Aah Aah Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Ack Aah Aah to anyone who happens to be there, fluttering in their fur or skin or feathers, even Goosifer who is still voicing his unending protests, threats and ultimatums against imaginary trespassers.

Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, she sings at everyone with a soul – a breathy, open-mouthed whisper issued forth straight from the core of her being, deeper, from the bottom of the world's soul, like a sigh, like a sob of delight at the astonishing world in its every glistening detail. There is such benevolence, such generosity in her greeting, and she exhausts herself to deliver it directly to the face of each and every living soul, even though she expects absolutely no response, acknowledgment or reward.

There is a quietness about her these days, a joy, an equanimity. She seems to hover just above her physical self, above the strife and the struggle of her body's laboring systems – the heaving heart, the enfeebled muscles, the frail bones, the dimming vision, the muffled hearing, the vanishing appetite – walking around with her hanging skin so loose around her diminished body that she seems to be carrying it around like an old garment about to be shed and release the new life within.At the end of the day, she comes banging on the door with her hoof, asking for Chris to come out. It's 3 in the morning and she waits patiently between knocks, sitting on her haunches like a dog. Finally, Chris gets up and almost sleepwalks out the door where she greets him with her Ack, ack ecstatic sound. He answers back in the best imitation he can muster, and she accepts it gladly, graciously, with a shimmer in her person that starts at the tip of her ears, flows down her back, tingles in her hooves, and electrifies her into moving. They both know it's time to go back to the barn and they walk together, Petunia clanking and creaking like a quaking metal shed, Chris stepping sleepily next to her, hand on her back to let her know he's still there. It takes them forever to cover the short distance between the house and the barn but they eventually get there and he helps her lie down which she does with difficulty, heaving under the burden of age.

As she quiets down and drifts off, her Wha! Ahwa! Ack! Aaah Aah, Aaah Aah, Aah Ack greeting gradually trails into a soft, steady hum that is so eerily reminiscent of Agnes' lullaby, that it stops your heart. Not because, in Petunia's song, you hear Agnes' voice through time. Not because, in it, you hear Petunia's own soul gushing its grace to the beings of all others, even her tormentors' kin. But because, in its music, you hear, faintly, finally, the heartbeat of your own silenced humanity and you know beyond reason not only what Petunia's inarticulate uttering means – I am so many! – but what it dictates. Let live.