One winter, shrieking lullabies punctuated the long, cold nights. Sometimes the eerie abruptness jolted me awake in the darkest hours. Other times the jagged high notes landed in the middle of a quiet evening task.

A desire to identify the vocalist drew me to an upstairs window. I leaned close to the glass, scanning the nearby poles and bushes for a recognizable form. My own reflection blinded my view of the darkness outside, so I leaned still closer.

A white, heart-shaped face bloomed from the darkness. I was nose-to-beak with a barn owl, nothing but the glass between us. I shrieked and jumped back. She remained perched on the electrical wire.

Her black eyes, filled with recognition, looked on calmly. Was that compassion in her gaze?

It’s easy for us humans to become enamored with our intelligence, setting it as the gold standard of what it is to know and to learn, even to be. Like our own reflected face in a darkened window, we struggle to see beyond a human-centric view.

Have you heard the assertion that “everything farms”? Ants protect their expansive aphid dairies from predators in exchange for the sticky sweetness aphids leave behind.

Though I can’t see all the players without my microscope, the earth under my feet holds trade in the product of photosynthesis for the product of decomposition — plants trading sugar for soil biology’s nutrient. Reciprocity. Communal good.

Like the ants and plants, I farm, too. I try to care well for these acres in exchange for enough profit to try again next year. Slightly more than a mile brings me within reach of my family, with whom I frequently work. This proximity softens but does not erase the fact that I am the sole human occupant of this 87-acre ecosystem.

I am an atypical farmer — with a slight, not quite 5-foot-tall female body, a slower natural pace and an increasingly significant sun ­allergy. These often-frustrating realities prompt me to listen and collaborate rather than compete and control.

When I can see this as a gift that I hold in one hand — with my peacebuilding education and faith-based commitment to nonviolence in the other — my own reflection thins a little, allowing me to catch glimpses of another way of seeing.

I can rest in the awareness that we are all connected. Every created being bears the Creator’s fingerprints. Cultivating a life that honors the intelligence and wisdom of all my neighbors has become the bedrock of my spiritual practice as well as my farm-management decisions.

When I entered a relationship with these acres, they seemed desolate — wide expanses of unkempt lawn around a few big evergreens, weedy ditch banks filled with windblown trash and very few birds. The tenants at the time told me they shot at the ravens who nested in a tumbled-down shed because they didn’t want the birds near the children.

The red-tailed hawks flew low and shrieked insults as I walked the fields and lanes. The swallows wouldn’t come near.

Knowing I couldn’t live in such a place, I started picking up trash, pulling weeds and planting: trees, fruit-bearing plants, flowers, thousands of bulbs, grass seed along the ditches.

The feathered neighbors seemed to notice first, followed by other inhabitants of this ecosystem: the first brave bulbs that bloomed in the garden and the bees that found them, the frogs who struck up their evensong, the trees who sank their young roots in the waiting earth.

Within 24 hours of the tenants’ last departure, the ravens came back. I suspect they didn’t want those humans so near the chicks either. Now, when my daily pattern changes, my human neighbors don’t conduct a wellness check, but the ravens fly low and slow past my largest windows with necks craned to look inside.

After years of mutual respect, the red-tailed hawks and I trust each ­other. They preen as I walk beneath their nest high in the stately elm. The swallows are back too, swarms of them.

I often feel overwhelmed with the magnitude of tasks in this life. I’m learning I do not need to mediate all relationships. For example, I’ve learned Jersey cattle prefer to walk alongside rather than be herded, called instead of chased.

Still, I thought that task solely mine. For years I reprimanded faithful farm dog Lottie for barking at the cattle. One day I became aware that they answered to her call, not mine. Sixty-five pounds of rough Collie in blue-merle with copper trim — what could possibly be more striking than her beauty? Her voice.

Noticing that the cattle couldn’t hear my call, she began to translate. She saves me so much time and energy by self-appointing for this job. I don’t need to run through the pasture ­shouting and waving my arms. I don’t need to call until I’m hoarse. “Call them please, Lottie,” almost always does the trick.

I wonder if listening to the still small voice of the Spirit feels something like listening to the intelligence of creation. What if our expectation of what we will hear, and how, blocks our awareness as effectively as one’s face blocks the view through a darkened window?

Awareness dawns in a hard-to-articulate manner, but moving with the message brings greater relationship, even peace. The predator-prey cycle remains intact on my farm.

Disease and insect pressure exist. I’m still learning to listen.

Still, I catch glimmers of “God’s holy mountain” from Isaiah when the fox stands and stretches from the center of the warm cattle herd on a frosty winter morning.

I see compassion when Lottie Dog tends the injured feral kitten I can’t go near, offering her hard-won hunting.

I feel embraced in the web of God’s kingdom when Luna Cow trusts me enough to show her need for better access to water in order to be healthy and provide the milk I have come to expect.

I see generosity when my kitty friend Professor Bebs teaches cohorts of feral kittens how to safely get oneself out of a tree.

Amid the dawning awareness of wisdom around me, my work becomes to empower other living beings to thrive in their God-given gifts. To give what I can of what they need. To trust the autonomy of another: In this web of relationship, others will also care for me. To marvel at the gifts of the community, from the tiny ladybug at my feet to the pale form of a barn owl overhead.

Sarah Hooley, who attends Filer Mennonite Church, tends a patch of irrigated crop land in the desert of Southern Idaho. Inspired by glimpses of the Cosmic Christ in all her neighbors, she retreats to her studio when the sun gets high, cultivating creative practice with pen and paint.