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It’s early in the morning, it is the dead of winter, snow is on the way and the cold wind is sharp and angry. I can hear the whining with intermittent gusty howls. It will be an ugly day for animals and for people doing the work of feeding and sheltering them. It will likely take the life from some creatures, I just hope not from any of mine.

When I wrote and posted the last blog post Do We Love Nature I was conflicted as to whether or not to include the photo of the magpie on the dead sheep. Ever since I have been reflecting on why the conflict of showing a slightly offensive photo of mother nature at work is there at all. Why the feeling of treading a slippery slope when all I want to do is talk about and share the real deal of life and death that I see in this land and livestock life? Why didn’t I feel brave enough to post that photo and others like it as the first headline photo, or post it to social media? Instead I posted beautiful photos of the birds in flight. In public spotlight I too am caught in the trap of playing into nature as an entity to be worshiped for its glory sunrises and healing sunsets.

I find myself smack in the middle of a tug-o-war because I also find myself, if not loving every moment nature hands out, respecting every moment. That respect is what drove me to begin this topic in the first place. I know mother nature can take this rug right out from under me. I know she is kind AND cruel, she is peace AND war, she is calm AND she is chaos. She has a design crew, a detail crew, a killing crew, a clean up crew… Deciding how I will position myself amongst all of it is the key. But knowing and sharing what you know are two different things in todays animal worshiping world.

Those of us in a line a work that regularly presents such visceral occurrences of natures true identity develop an undeniable respect for mother nature. It’s one sided too share that in a worshipping viewpoint alone because while mother nature’s inescapable beauty certainly fills us up, her inescapable ugly just as certainly takes us down. So we are always seeing two sides. It’s very hard on us to deny and hide one side of the picture of our lives. I get that people do not want their days tampered by photos of the ugly side of real-life nature but I would venture to offer that it’s human ugliness we are most offended by, not Mother N’s.

What I am deeply bothered by is that we have become a people of all or none, a people of extremes and hence a people handing out ever more laws and regulations both spoken and, in the case of me dithering about a photo of a dead sheep, unspoken. Meanwhile Mother N goes on righting the balance for us, showing us the way. Sure enough, I don’t wish to see photos of extreme ugliness and cruelty either but the resulting protective shield we’ve thrown up for the 97+ percent of the population who live removed from land and livestock is removing us from the reality of mother nature’s brilliant balance. The very balance we need in order to get by in this world. She’s got this folks. We are not going to do a better job of this than mother nature, however with mother nature as an ally we’ll do a very truthful and purposeful job. We need to trust in this, all of it, good, bad and ugly, because within the trusting is where we find the nature of ourselves, and our land and environment certainly needs folks who are connected to nature, not just using her to further a propaganda agenda or a bottom line.