A member of my church invited me to bring the children down to her farm this spring to see the baby lambs.  We set out on a sunny Sunday afternoon near the end of March and had only a short drive on unpaved roads to reach her home, with beautiful views of the neighboring hills.  In Vermont, you are never far from the countryside.

There were seventeen lambs, and three of the ewes were still pregnant.  A shaggy ram with massive curling horns was tethered safely in the yard, regarding us with a proprietary stare from his great yellow eyes as we entered the animals' enclosure.  None of the lambs was more than three weeks old, but all were exuberant: climbing up the small mountains of hay that had been placed there to nourish them, sliding down or being shoved aside by their brothers and sisters, then bounding once again toward the summit in an apparent effort to defy the laws of gravity.  Their capers were contagious and made the children skip.  Although there was still a foot of snow on the ground and we were soon heading indoors to get warm, the season of rebirth had clearly arrived.

One of the lambs was named "Hope."  The little creature had been delivered strong and healthy shortly after another, less fortunate, that arrived stillborn.  While sad, such casualties are part of the landscape for country people, who understand that death is a part of life, as much as gestation, growth, and aging.  It is only in modern, technological societies that death appears as a stranger, fearsome because so unfamiliar in our controlled and humanly contrived environment.

For many of us who live in cities and suburbs, a family pet may be our closest living link to the cycles of nature.  We may no longer be able to see lambing in the spring; we may have to strain to hear the chorus of geese flying south in the fall, but through the creatures who share our homes we can still experience some of the wonderment of living.  Our animal companions remain part of natural order where beginnings and endings are woven inextricably in a single garment of creation.

Whether we are seeing a kitten opening its eyes for the very first time or watching the last breath slowly leaving the frame of an old and trusted dog, we are witnessing two sides of the same marvelous event.  From out of the infinite realm of possibility, a never-to-be repeated creature comes into being, looks our briefly on the universe, passes its life force along to coming generations, then rejoins the undifferentiated vastness from which it emerged.  For millions of years, this has been the pattern of life as it perpetuates itself and evolves.

Birth and Death: could any of us invent a more beautiful way to enter this world or devise a more natural route for leaving it at the end?  Animals enrich our lives in countless ways, with their playfulness, their tranquility, their constancy, and their love.  If they can help us remember that death is not our enemy but simply one more moment in the world's endless process of becoming, dissolution, and renewal, they will have imparted a final gift.