November 17, 2008 – Animals change, something I’ve learned on the farm. Luna came several years ago as a companion for Elvis, my gargantuan Swiss Steer and eating machine. Luna is, well, she is not likeable. She is grumpy, pushy, smelly and ugy. But she is changing. She takes apples now, and comes up to me and to Annie to have her ears rubbed and her back scratched. She watches me and comes up to the barn door when I come out to visit. Is she changing, or am I? Is she doing something differently, or am I experiencing the world differently.
 Honestly, I think the change is in me. I am learning about myself, struggling to be more human, more open, to deepen my spiritual life. I am surprised, always, at the cycles of life. At the parade of growth, gain, loss and joy, disappointment and fear. In recent weeks, I had occasion to consider fear in a particular way, and I noted again, and not for the first time, how fear has its own reality, and that it is often disconnected from the reality of our lives.
  I have come to see the animals as a mirror of our own humanity. Animals, I think, are not capable of conscious change, are not really self-aware in the ways we often wish them to be. I think they do reflect changes in us, notice them, react to them. Animals are sensitive to us, and if Luna is friendlier, more accessible, then it might be that she is seeing something different in me. I hope so.