"Sticky, foaming blood gushed in hot pulses onto my wrist and forearm, and I knew in the depths of my being that I had just killed my newborn child."

I am a killer. With a sharp knife I have taken the lives of both friends and strangers. I think this is a major reason so many people tell me they feel completely safe with me.

One particularly vivid murder occured in the fall after Benjamin, my first child, was born. I laid a yearling lamb upon a table in the sheep corral, and pinned him down with my forearm. He stared up at me with a steady, open gaze identical to the way in which my newborn son locked eyes with me. The lamb knew I was his killer. Although he didn't struggle, he didn't break eye contact. I leaned over and kissed him on the nose, and rubbed my face affectionately against his cheek. On his breath I smelled the pungent sweetness of pasture grass fermenting in his belly. I felt his terror, and his surrender to me and to his fate. I gently spoke a prayer for him in the soothing voice I had developed for bedtime stories:

Then I poised the point of my knife at the most vulnerable part of his neck. I took and released a breath, attempting to steady my intention for a quick and graceful stroke. As I did so, I fell again into his gaze, the same infinite openness of Benjamin, the same preconscious connection to life. I became momentarily disoriented. As my field of focus narrowed into the dark depths of his eyes, I lost my ability to differentiate between the baby sheep and the baby human.

I plunged the knife all the way through his neck, severing arteries on both sides, then pulled the sharp edge toward me to open a yawning, pulpy red cavern. In a fluid motion I broke the neck bones apart with my other hand, then flipped the knife around to sever the spinal cord. With that abrupt interruption to the nervous system, the body for the first time bucked and flailed in the throes of death. With another tug I finished breaking the neck, and with another smooth slash of the knife I stood holding the severed head in my hand. Sticky, foaming blood gushed in hot pulses onto my wrist and forearm, and I knew in the depths of my being that I had just killed my newborn child. The blood that I spilled was not like his, it was his. I had murdered my son. All life truly is one.

In our culture, the three biggest taboo subjects are sex, money and death: arguably the three most consuming aspects of our lives. Much of our revulsion around death arises because pop culture portrays only the violent sides of death, sex and wealth. Rarely does one see a movie portraying a healthy relationship with satisfying physical intimacy. Seldom is a person of wealth developed as a compassionate servant of the common good. Even more unlikely would be a popular treatment celebrating the community-building aspects and life-affirming nature of the graceful death of a loved one.

I frequently offer to include other people's children in the slaughters I execute here on the ranch. Parents' responses to this invitation generally range from discomfort to horror. Yet the children who do witness the reverent process of this life-defining event are fascinated, and barrage me with a cascade of excellent questions about how the body works. They are amazed that such a slight interruption to the rhythms of a body by the thin edge of a knife can result in such sudden finality. Death shows life to be a fragile miracle. One is never more exquisitely aware of life than when in the immediate presence of death.

From their infancy, our four children have watched animals and plants come into being and leave their being. For them, these events are inseparable. Once, when Ben was about four years old, we went to dinner at a friend's house and they served lamb. Ben excitedly asked, "What was your lamb's name? Was it a white lamb or a black one?" To him, eating meat meant eating a good friend. After helping an animal to be born into the world, and playing with it on the pasture hills, and watching it eat grass for the first time, and trimming its hooves and cutting its hair, then one has a personal relationship with food. To me it feels distasteful and unseemly, as well as indiscreet, to take a total stranger into one's body. I've seen bumper stickers that say, "Love animals, don't eat them." Isn't the relationship more integrated when one both loves them and eats them?

This past Thanksgiving, Benjamin and Jeffrey were the first people awake on the ranch. They rose before dawn and dressed quickly. It takes an entire day to cook a large turkey, and they knew we'd be slaughtering our meal at daybreak. They were determined not to miss this event. Although these two boys have participated in countless slaughters, helped pluck an untold number of birds, seen many sheep and goats slump into death, and even though the experience is deeply familiar to them, still the power transpiring in that moment profoundly moves their spirits. Death makes sense to them.

Margaret, my father's mother, died nearly four years ago in the same house in which she was born. On her last day she went dancing at the senior center, then strapped on her fanny pack and took a long walk through the streets of Berkeley, revisiting routes imprinted over a lifetime. She cooked dinner for her daughter, Gail, and the two of them enjoyed a friendly argument over which of them would do the dishes. At one point Margaret was telling Gail about her day, and spoke of how much Berkeley had changed in the course of eighty-three years. She said, "Now if I go and die sometime, I don't want you to cry about it. I've lived a good life, and nobody is happier than I am." She went to bed that night and never woke up. The next morning Jeffrey came into the bedroom with me, and watched me light sage in an abalone shell and say a prayer honoring her good spirit and graceful crossing. Then I tenderly stroked her hair, and kissed her cold cheek, and cuddled with her for one last time. Benjamin waited in the living room until the undertakers came. The three of us returned home. Margaret was herself a twin, and three days later our twins were conceived.

This coming year my other grandmother, my wife's father, and my sister's husband may all die. All have impressed the medical experts with their tenacity. All three know for certain that they are perched on the narrow edge between life and death. Many of the others among us forget that we, too, balance on that same edge. We need miss only our next breath to make that crossing ourselves. It takes only the tiniest of interruptions to our rhythms to send us across.

I went hunting wild pigs yesterday. These feral animals were originally brought to this country by Russian fur traders hundreds of years ago, and they thrive on the acorns of oak grasslands. This introduced species wreaks havoc upon native ecosystems. Of their natural predators, only mountain lion remains, and the lions cannot keep up with the prolific pigs. At the request of researchers at a California Academy of Sciences biological preserve, my friend Henry invited me to join five hunters in reducing the carrying capacity of pigs on the land by introducing predatory pressure on their numbers.

Armed with maps, experience and rifles, we divided the land within the reserve into districts. Henry and I paired up on a central ridge, and as the sky brightened with dawn light we hiked uphill. Above a sea of fog, our hillside loomed as a large island of grassy slopes and wooded swales and ridges. Last year's dead grasses dropped dew onto the shoots of new winter grass. Under the oak trees the rooting of pigs looked as if a tractor had been disking over the sod, with expanses of deep trenches plowed through moist ground.

When day broke, a breeze blew the fog up and over us, enshrouding us and reducing visibility to a few yards. Pigs have hearing like deer, and a sensitive nose like a dog. Our eyes are sharper than theirs, however, so our hope had been to see them at a distance upwind and out of earshot before they spotted us, a strategy called spot and stalk. With the fog, though, the advantage was theirs.

Henry and I separated. He followed a power line and I traversed toward the road where we would rejoin. Almost immediately after separating I saw fresh spoor, rooting only hours old and fresh scat. I slowed my pace to listen better. The more I listened, the slower I stalked, and the stronger I felt their presence. I sat down to more fully listen. I took my water bottle out of my fanny pack and poured an offering onto the ground. With a pinch of tobacco I offered this prayer:

I tucked the tobacco into the ground at the base of last year's dead yarrow stalk, where this year's new feathers of green were sprouting. Not wanting to smoke tobacco and alarm the pigs, I instead placed a pinch of it in my cheek. Feeling complete with these observances, I placed the objects back into my fanny pack and was about to zip it up when I was rocked by the close concussion of a large caliber rifle, immediately followed by a second report. I slowly stood up and made my way to where Henry had cleanly shot two sows from the only pigs seen that day. All life is one. We are all connected.

The night before this hunt I was at a party honoring a retiring environmentalist, an event hosted at the Marin Rod and Gun Club. Standing with three influential women who are dedicated to preserving the natural world, our conversation turned to the stuffed elk and deer heads mounted on the walls. They could not fathom how or why a person would shoot a wild animal. It was a heartfelt and candid discussion, from which I drew the conclusion that hunting, especially the killing, cannot be explained. The experiences of a person's life either render hunting to be a confirmation of human participation in nature or of human estrangement from nature.

I believe we must embrace the imminence of death to be fully alive. Unfortunately, we as a culture attempt to deny the implications of death. I confess to an impatience with people who claim moral reasons to eat chicken but not beef, or fish but not chicken, or vegetables but not fish. I wholeheartedly support people choosing to eat low on the food chain, but I don't want to hear a rationalization that one form of life is superior to another. Decapitating a head of cabbage and cutting the head off a steer interrupts both lives. To say that one death is different from another death denies that all life is one, and belies one's discomfort with death.

Individuals who do choose to face the interconnection of life and inevitability of death take one of two approaches: a doctrine of non-harming or an immersion in gratitude. To do no harm, in the Jain practice in India, includes sweeping one's path so as to not step on insects, covering one's mouth so as to not inhale airborne yeasts, eating only fruit and nuts that have already fallen from trees, and filtering microorganisms from water before drinking. This vivid practice in mindfulness is, of course, futile. In every moment our bodily processes kill millions of the microflora and fauna that live symbiotically and parasitically within our bodies. There is no way to literally do no harm while alive. The other approach is to accept that our existence causes others to die, and so to immerse ourselves in gratitude for this incessant passing of the life force through us.

Thus, I say that as a killer I am a safer companion than most. As a killer with a conscience I know the sanctity of life. As one who confronts the question, "Who am I to decide that another will now die?" I am humbled by the profound debt that I owe for all the lives sacrificed by my very presence in the world. The awesome responsibility of death weighs on me every day, so I have no need to sublimate this primal task into culturally sanctioned diversions: no urge to compete against coworkers, to satisfy bloodlust by watching professional gladiators, or to abuse those with less power as a confirmation of my own potency. My killing is clean. It's a reason I can be so gentle.

Let's make room for death in our families and in our hearts.