We let the donkeys out for a few hours and they struggled to make their own paths through the deep snow. They are in the barn tonight.

There are so many ways to look at the world.

My own is evolving rapidly, perhaps for the first time in my life, although that is an odd thing for a writer to say. My writings on fear and storms touched a deeper chord than I might have expected. Many people e-mailed messages of thanks and some were upset with what they thought of as my insensitivity to the suffering big storms bring. “More than 100 million people suffered in this storm,” wrote one man,” and some were probably killed and it was an awful thing that disrupted work and lives and cost money and accidents.”  A woman wrote that I was insensitive and ungrateful, and that the forecasters are providing a great service by timely warnings about severe weather.

These dust-ups always surprise me, as I only write from my own perspective and I do not argue my feelings nor do I tell other people what they should be thinking. If people don’t like what I say, then I assume they would go elsewhere rather than be bothered by my mad notions. For sure, I am not in sync with the world. But every day I am more at ease with mine.

This latest  storm, described for days by weather sites as “life-threatening,” “apocalyptic,” “historic” and “unprecedented” was none of those things here. Weather is not simple on the farm, or easy, and I am well aware that people die and struggle every day in all sorts of way. How could I not be? Our very air is stuffed with tragedies and warnings.

I see the world differently than some people.

There is not a day when millions of people don’t suffer or die, kill one another, or suffer from disease, natural disasters, wars, accidents, disease or genocide or illness. In the history of the earth, it has always been thus. Some people choose to live with that suffering foremost in their consciousness. I don’t wish to live that way. I have my notion of good deeds, and they are private. But in my daily life and writing I do not wish to carry Storm Center or the suffering of the world around in my soul. I’ve lived that life, don’t want it.I hate to think what I would write that way or how I would live.

I think in our time – a world filled with arguments – an elemental part of a spiritual life is the willingness to hold one’s beliefs, and forego the need to argue with others or persuade anyone else of their correctness.

I happen to share Wendell Berry’s notions that our urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife,  marriage and community, community and the earth. People who live in cities and suburbs choose a life in which weather – surely winter – is a potentially dangerous and commercially expensive disruption. It closes schools, cancels flights,  triggers supermarket panic, sparks waves of accidents on overcrowded concrete roads, and disrupts contemporary notions of money-moving, office-driven commerce. In my community, weather is different. If people can’t get to offices, then weather is considered alarming and destructive.

But my perspective is different, perhaps because of my life on the farm. We choose our way of life. And one of the most awful disconnections is that our society separates people from the natural world, and from weather. More than 90 per cent of Americans live in cities and suburbs, and they are disconnected from the natural and animal world. It’s a major reason they love dogs and cats so much. They are a connection to our past, among other things.

Increasingly, they are being made to fear the natural world as a disturbing disruption of this already elementally disruptive way of life.

Where I live, winter is a part of life, something to be expected. It is sometimes a pain in the ass, but we never think it will destroy us or our way of life.We don’t fear storms. Few people I know listen to Storm Center.  In a way it is our way of life. We plan for it all year, ordering up hay, signing up good plow men, checking insulation, ordering firewood and oil.

Except in the most major storms, schools don’t close, people go about their business. Dairy farmers don’t close barns. You get a plow guy, four-wheel drive if you can afford it, and go to work if you’re lucky enough to have a job. It’s just a winter storm. Eventually the snow melts, and you prepare for another winter.

That is not the reality for many people. Our economy is based upon a kind of disease, this disconnection. It’s aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources  of life – material, social, spiritual – and to put these sources of life under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.  This, says Berry, fragments the Creation and sets us against one another. For the relief of suffering, our economy proposes not health but vast “cures” that prolong life, often meaningless and engender endless testing and expensive medications, and further centralize power and increase profits. Insurance is one system, so, in my mind, is health care and politics. And weather.

When we listen to Storm Center, we are led to believe that the people creating such a monstrous entity care about us and our safety, and thus are warning us about “severe” weather for our own well-being. The man who was quoting the 100 million people suffering figure was reading it off of a popular weather site, and I saw it there myself. He used the same words, and bought every one of them. It did not occur to him that Storm Center is a profit-making corporation, not a public service. Their profits depend on alarming people and getting them to watch the site obsessively for days so that they can sell ads, which they do, and raise the rates during storms, which they do. Why anyone would trust such a system, or it’s horrific characterizations of winter and weather, is a bit beyond me. I don’t. I don’t believe anyone who worries about me for profit is genuine, or that I am obliged to accept everything they say as the gospel truth. It is tainted for me.

People who live on farms know better than anyone that storm can be rough. Maria and I have spent nearly 24 hours dealing with this one and caring for the animals. But people make choices, and one choice many have made is to construct their personal and work lives around places where storms disrupt their normal recreation, work and commerce. A nation which relentlessly creates and expands an economic system that destroys the nature and commerce of rural life and family farming is not going to like winter storms.

There are other choices. One in which winter and its attendant storms (I’m not even getting into Global Warming) are as integral a part of life as blisters and headaches. They are not something to be feared and agonized about for days. We can’t do anything about them, other than greet them and prepare for them and accept them as the wondrous and challenging gifts that they are. When my chores are done, I challenge myself to capture the experience in photos, and from my e-mail, that is a good way of handling it. I’m not surprised it isn’t always popular.

A number of people have shared with me the fact that they don’t like this way of thinking.

That is not a problem for me.