The Illumination Blog

Love and Farewell

2012-02-08T12:54:00.015-05:00

When my dog-world friend Sandy died, I left her a very tearful message thanking her for gracing my life and teaching me, and I gave her final messages from her dogs, which was her own last request. It was the first time in 54 years I felt like an adult, confronting death and loss without fear. We're so often afraid say goodbye, to accept grief. We fear saying the wrong thing, we fear seeing something ugly, we fear confronting finality, and we fear losing control. I bundled all of that as I spoke my farewell message with the breathless gasps of a child who has cried for hours....yet ironically I consider it my most intimate and mature relationship encounter. By then Sandy had been unconscious for about three days, but because hearing is the last sense we lose as we exit, I wanted to give voice to my love and gratitude in a way that would reach her. Imagine -- so great a friend was brought to me through dogs.

I asked her husband to play the message to her on the day she died (January 11, my birthday). My final words to her were (in between sobs), "When you get to the other side, let me know you arrived." He played it for her that evening. She took her last breath shortly after, at 11:22 p.m.

A day or so later, just as I was waking up or seconds before-- you know that state of half sleep and half consciousness-- straddling two planes of existence -- I literally saw a typed note across the screen of my drowsy vision: It read, "Dear Lisa, I made it through to the Light, Love Sandy."

A couple of months ago I saw her husband running agility at the Eukaneuba dog show in Orlando. He came to visit us at the Irish Water Spaniel Meet the Breed booth. It was the first time I'd seen him since her funeral in Alabama. He said he had something for me and gave me a vial of her ashes. Yes. This is not a custom with which I am familar and not the custom of anyone I know, but he reserved them for me and kept the rest to give to the ocean. She wanted me to have them. I'm honored -- and I suspect that she laughed harder than she ever did in life when she saw me accept what was left of her in an old plastic prescription bottle.

She went through my life like a bullet -- a concentrated and potent energy, and I can say that in so many ways, she changed my life. Her last request was that I do a reading for her dogs, Skyler and Nicky, polar opposites. Sky was a calm boy who loved Reiki, and I've written before about Nicky, whose teeth would chatter whenever I entered the room. She wanted to know not that they would be OK without her (because she knew they would be in her husband's care), but she wanted THEM to know that they'd be fine without her physical presence. I asked Skyler, who certainly knew where "mom" was going, and his only question was who would be taking them to the vet once she was gone. I know she waited for this report so she could die peacefully.

Anyway, when I saw Ken in December, he shared with me how Sandy responded when he played my last message for her that January evening. He said although she was no longer conscious, as he held the phone to her ear, tears rolled down her cheeks. Just like they are staining mine now.

I talk to her almost every day. What's the message here? Love.

VIRTUAL REIKI CIRCLE FOR ANIMALS

2012-01-23T08:28:00.006-05:00

Just a quick January note to all of you and to those who might be visiting the blog for the first time.

Every Sunday at 9 a.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. Pacific time we hold a distance Reiki circle for animals (and their people). Follow the link and ask to join, and I'll extend membership.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/152536941490184/

This is a chance for all of us to sit wherever we are and tune in for 15 - 30 minutes while I send Reiki energy through the ethers and you and your animals receive it and send positive healing thoughts to the rest of the circle. It is a time when we slow down and open up to the Light. Feel free to write during the week and ask for special healing for those animals you know are in need.

What must you do? Nothing but breathe deeply and feel the good vibrations.

If you are unfamiliar with Reiki, please check out my web page that explains Reiki, especially as it is received by animals.
http://reikidogs.com/reiki.html

I hope to see you there. Remember, if you're in the South Florida vicinity, have Reiki, will travel. We can have a live animal Reiki circle in any one of our beautiful dog parks. Let me know!

"Oh My God. This is Amazing!"

2011-12-05T07:02:00.015-05:00

I seem to have gotten over myself and the emotional wrangling that has preoccupied me since my divorce. In the six or seven months since the untangling of a very unbalanced relationship, I've taken accidental hiatus, and even with the best of intentions, have been too distracted and depressed to return calls, respond to requests for readings, and set up appointments. I did teach a two hour class on animal communication in October, but I have not been operating at full psychic speed as my body chose to absorb the shock of my ex's unparalleled selfishness and unpexpected meanness by developing Graves disease, which left me rather unsettled and yes, more than a little bit angry, not the greatest conditions for intuitive work.

All that changed yesterday.

My father's physical therapist called me a couple of weeks ago to check my availability for a dog birthday party on Dec. 4th. I said I was available and she and her partner booked me for two hours to help celebrate the first birthday of an adorable little poodle mix who hosted the gala dressed in a pink coat fastened by a very blingy rhinestone brooch. I was esorted into an office where I remained while about 20 canine guests entered individually at five minute intervals. The idea was to do a mini reading for each, the "event" of the party. Most of the people had never encountered an animal communicator before and were rather receptive, figuring they'd do what most people do with a psychic, either accept the informaton they received if it seemed helpful and discard what felt unreasonable. Five minutes is not usually enough time to provide deep inights, but I surrounded myself in light before I entered the house and asked the Universe for accuracy and clarity, extreme clarity.

I read clairvoyantly. Once in a while I hear words. My technique is to stroke or hold the animal and enter a meditative state where I receive the information through visions. If the human companion has specific questions, I actually ask the animal and wait for an answer, but often, as was the case during most of yesterday's readings, the people just wanted to hear what their dogs wanted to reveal. And eager to finally be heard in this way, dogs almost always leap at the opporunity to share this usually hidden part of themselves.

Holding a yellow lab in my hands, I closed my eyes and saw growths or lumps, but when I opened them, didn't see these on him. It's always difficult to prepare the owner for an upcoming health issue and I select my words carefully as I am not a medical consultant and don't venture into unlicensed veterinary territory. "He is concerned about growths or lumps that may be bothering him, so check him carefully as something may be emerging," I told her. She turned over both of his ears, exposing very large and hard bumps in both. "Hematomas. He's having surgery tomorrow." If any of you reading this have any doubt that our animals are aware of everything happening to them and us, dissolve them. The poor boy was just as worried as we are when we face a medical procedure.

On more than one occassion -- and this is a regular occurance -- the dog entered the room, sat in front of me, and began kissing me, upon which the owner said,"Now that is incredible. He never does that. Never." It's common with me. The animals operate on a higher frequency and understand vibrational energy, responding accordingly. We see this all the time when our animals immediately distrust someone and display apppropriate physical reactions like growling or barking. This is the same principle, only its positive opposite. The other reaction I see occasionally is the dog being startled by the rush of higher energy and not quite understanding it, creating distance between us. My late friend Sandy had two dogs who reacted this way. Skylyr would sit very close to me and put his paw in my hand and ask for his reading. Nicky would cower in a corner while his teeth chattered. Yesterday one little black dog went the Nicky route while his sibling was eager to share.

The day's highlight came from a friendly woman who sat beside me with an adorable shih tzu. I held her dog for about 20 seconds, closed my eyes and said, "You did or do have another small one at home? A Peke" and she almost fell off the couch. "Yes! I have a Peke! Oh my God,this is amazing!" was her mantra for the rest of the afternoon. She listened very attentively to the rest of the reading.

At the end of the party, the host entered and said, "This was great! You converted the one skeptic we had. All day, she was telling everyone, 'This is b.s. I don't believe in this stuff ,' and then you told her about the Pekingese she left at home."

And this,blog readers, is the most significant anecdote because people like her -- even people who love their dogs -- are reluctant to accept them as spiritual creatures who have missions to guide and teach us. When we (communicators) hit so accurately, it changes their perception about spiritual life, about who we are and about who they are, and that is really our purpose.

Moving Past Yourself

2011-10-28T07:34:00.009-04:00

Self absorption is a character trait we don't like to acknowledge but unfortunately, in a society where individualism reigns supreme it presents a universal pitfall that's hard to avoid. I remember how much of my life was compressed into an insular capsule simply because I responded to the external world the way a sexually abused child/girl/woman naturally does and without any apology: How will this affect me? Not how, but WHEN will this hurt me? (because surely it will, as everything and everyone does). I always envied people who actually had a visible life outside themselves,who didn't turn the hostile mirror of the world inward.

Then something happened. Call it crisis, emotional breakdown, dark night of the soul, five of pentacles, psychological raku, crack-up. Call it shamanic breakdown. Call it healing. This is when the wise women showed me that hyphenating the word emergenc - y adds a higher dimension. It is when we heal in this frightening and painful way, like the cracking of an egg, that our authentic selves can emerge. So I emerged.

I have no children, but women tell me that the moment they give birth, their lives transform, and they are no longer the center of their own universe, that they live to love, shelter, and nurture this other being who is now of greater import they. My only reference point has been my dogs. These are the other beings to whom I am responsible and whose welfare I place before my own.

Twleve years ago, out of the blue, I watched my dog Seamus suffer his first grand mal seizure. I had never seen one before. We were watching t.v. and I noticed him looking up in the air at nothing, his right paw involuntarily scratching something imaginary. Long strings of spittle began growing on either side of his mouth. I said to my then s.o. "Oh my God,he's having a seizure," to which he said, "No he's not; he's fine" (I should have known then that this man was not marriage material). I said, "Yes, he's having a seizure," to which Mr. I Me Mine responded,"No he isn't; leave him alone, he's fine." At that moment I leaped off the couch, which was the instant Seamus started jerking his head back and moaning a painful cry from some unholy place I'd never seen. If this were another me, the old me, I'd have panicked and rUn into the kitchen, covering my eyes and praying for it to be over, but I ran to him, sat before him, and probably did the wrong thing medically but acted out of spiritual spontanaeity. I embraced him as the seizure continued, talking to him, just talking and talking and talking and calling his name. It lasted five minutes. Afterward, he was petrified, walking backwards as he tried to regain composure, and for the rest of the night, he sat planted at my hip.

As a child and as a young woman, I ran from such terrifying situations. Here I ran into it. I pushed myself aside and have continued to do this since.

Yesterday in my college cafeteria, a tall, healthy looking student collapsed into a grand mal seizure. I walked in just as the jerking began. There he was, flat on his back on this cold, hard floor, his arms and legs flailing. It lasted quite a long time. The cafeteria staff, two security guards, a few students, and I stood around trying to block students from entering and leaving. Some students actually stepped over this struggling epileptic because quickly paying for their soda was more important than respecting his condition. Once the jerking stopped, bubbles of white foam poured -- and I mean poured -- from his lips. He did not regain consciousness for a good 20 minutes.

I stood there, called the paramedics a second time, and looked at how fragile and alone he could feel, how humiliated he might feel if he knew he was the center of such attention, how uncomfortable that a very unpleasant and private ailment would morph into public event. I stood there, almost praying, really wanting to hold his hand and repeat, "it's O.K., it's O.K." until he returned to us, but did so in visualization only. As the paramedics took him away on the stretcher, he kept asking, "Why am I going to the hospital? What happened?"

I used to ask my therapist how it was possible for her to listen to her clients' deep grief and remain so still in the face of their torment, so unmaimed. I couldn't quite get it, especially considering what a basket case I was at the time. How could she remain composed and detached yet loving at the same time?

I'm learning how. I think I can do it. I get it.

Harvest the Good

2011-10-12T06:39:00.008-04:00

It's October, the time of year that for me stirs the nest that is my subconsious, moving sediments of memory into full blown consciousness as the autumn deepens and swells with flavor. Because I live in Florida, I can visit this season only as visualization, but religiously, every year as Halloween approaches, images of the past begin whirling before me, a most joyful and sensual dance.

At P.S. 203 in Brooklyn, each fall we'd create "art" with red and gold autumn leaves, study pictures of the harvest, eagerly buy paperback books of ghost stories at the Scholastic book fair in the school cafeteria. I also felt a physical excitement at the first sight of Halloween decorations for sale in the stationery store: cardboard cutouts of witches on brooms, black cats, and full moons with guardian owls. The smell of chewy orange wax harmonicas and red wax lips remains with me. In those urban masquerade days, harvest meant grabbing handfuls of candy corn and sticky popcorn balls.

As an adult, I still thrill at getting my house Halloween ready: the window goblins and ghosts, the scent of a cinnamon broom in a closed room, and the purchase of the season's first pomegranates. It may not have the original charm of vampires and flying witches flying on the bay windows of OldMill Basin houses, but I do feed an internal fire as I pumpkin shop and string orange lights around my sub-tropical bushes. Yes, I do that.

Wiccans and earth religions respectthe beauty and mystery of this season. The Celtic holiday of Samhain, Oct.31- Nov. 1 honors the harvest and central to this day is the recognition of shifting time, of past and future, beginning and end. Etymologically, the Gaelic word Samhain combines the words for "summer" and "end." It's the tao of life. As we receive earth's abundance this time of year, we also mourn the passing of a season. Our lives flow this way. Learning to balance the end of some part of our life with the promise of new life remains challenging.

This weekend I spoke with at least three unrelated, geographically distant people who, linked by the collective unconscious, began clearing and discarding, decluttering and rearranging space. Some Divine wisdom propels us to release accumulated debris, both physical and psychic, external and internal. It's not spring cleaning as we have always known it; it's autumnal shedding and gathering. I cleaned out my garage, throwing away bags of items that just collected dust: old paint, multiple canvas bags picked up at this convention and that workshop, cans of hurricane foods that expired three years ago. Simultaneously, my emotions took a bumpy October hayride as well and I found myself almost breaking with each new toss into the dumpster. The one item that opened the floodgate was a verdigris garden stake in the shape of a mallard below a sign reading, "Duck Crossing." I was a Muscovy duck rescue volunteer, the neighborhood "duck lady," and upon moving into my new house just months before my marriage, I planted that stake in the front yard to designate my house as an animal sanctuary. I can't recall when I plucked it from the yard, years ago, just as I can't recall the moment my marriage crossed into hurtful landscape, years ago, but finding it swept me up in a wind I had not expected. I found myself jockeying between relief and grief, the kind that comes when you stare at your own decay.

Embracing this ritualistic neopagan cleansing, I retrieved some early photographs of my husband and me, and dug a well in the yard into which I placed them, prayed, and lit a candle. It rained more than half the weekend, and as I reconstructed my own thoughts, I speculated that I had not buried my old life but perhaps planted it. Maybe planting the hurt will transmute it and yield ...something.
I straddle the border of hopeful, and in that welcoming space offer you a seasonal message:
clear the darkness from your life anyway that feels right, ritualize it, believe in promise. Then when the time is right, harvest only good things.

Home is Where the Dog Is

2011-09-17T23:28:00.012-04:00

For the past ten years, I have been using The Wizard of Oz to teach mythology, fairy tales, and Eastern philosophies to my college Literature students, sometimes three classes per semester, three semesters per year. In recent years, rather than paying attention to the plot and effects, I have been taking greater note of my students' responses to the Oz journey. Once Dorothy hooks up with her companions and skips along the yellow brick road (surely a symbol of the third chakra, the "I am" of individual existence), we see how each character mistakenly seeks an object like a heart or a brain, thinking it will render him complete. Actually it is not the object but a chakra, an integral part of the whole that the character thinks he's missing. Of course we know that no parts are missing; the chakras are there but the characters have not been fully awakened to them. This pretty much parallels the way so many of us live our lives in the mundane world which dulls the senses with extraneous noise and frivolous concerns. Sadly, it often takes a tragedy -- in this case, Dorothy's isolation from home and desperate need for familiarity -- to awaken us to what is truly important in our short lives. Enter the four-legged angel.

In this film, who leads us to and through that awakening? TOTO, the dog. The dog, the same creature that unites us in this blogosphere. Toto is the emissary of the Divine who propels us into higher consciousness . What prompts Dorothy's escape from home in the first place? It was Toto's mischievous exploration of Elmira Gulch's garden. When Dorothy is captured and imprisoned by the Wicked Witch of the West, who leads the trio of her companions fearlessly to the tower of her confinement (a symbol of her subconscious self)? Who ultimately unmasks the Wizard as a shameful fraud? And who prevents Dorothy from taking the slacker's way home in a hot air balloon? Toto, who leaps out as the balloon ascends, forcing Dorothy out after him, so she must use her third eye (brow chakra) and visualization skills to will herself home, learning the lesson that there are no fields greener than our own and no wizards greater than ourselves. Toto as the animal guide transports her to higher planes, her spiritual teacher in every regard.

Over the years, I've been monitoring students' responses to the characters and notice that they differ markedly from mine. Overwhelmingly, they identify the Cowardly Lion as their favorite character, relating, perhaps, to his humorous expression of anxiety. I, however, get drippy as a toilet every time Dorothy bids a sad farewell to the Scarecrow, her first and completely unselfish, loyal protector (and I've seen this film over a hundred times). OK, go ahead, point out how this translates into my own life, or more accurately, my deepest wishes for such devotion in my own life.

This is exactly what I invite you to do for yourself at the Crystal Garden in Boynton Beach on October 22. I will be conducting a Wizard of Oz workshop to explore mythology, symbolism, and the archetypes that teach us where we most need to heal. We will discuss the chakra system, Joseph Campbell, then watch the film and analyze why we resonate with particular characters and scenes. This will be a fun and enlightening way to spend an afternoon.
I hope to see you there. Feel free to call me at 954-680-5759 or the Crystal Garden at 561-369-2836 for more information.

Surviving the Loss of a Pet: Tips to Get Through the Grief

2011-09-01T07:00:00.018-04:00

Your animal has died and you are distraught. You have never felt such deep and prolonged loss and are afraid to share this with others who will minimize and perhaps dismiss your pain as misplaced or trivial. Wrong. All of us who have shared life with (not "owned") animals have entered and emerged from this unavoidable black hole, and we'll likely revisit it as long as we live with animals whose life spans do not equal ours in measure. What can you do with this grief?

1. Give yourself permission to grieve, and give your self permission to grieve hard. Experience it. Embrace it, even. It's real and it's potent. Avoiding grief, burying it, masking it, will guarantee its future re-emergence as a larger and more devastating threat to your well being.

2. Remember. Remember the joy and mischief, the silly songs and the serious training, the intimacy and the frustration, the quiet support and cuddles your dog gave you when he sensed you needed them most.

3. Talk about your memories, especially with other dog people who understand and with those who knew your dog. Invite them to share their memories as well.

4. Make the memories visual. Place photographs of your dog or cat around the house so you connect with him or her consiously at ever turn. Our animals want us to remember them this way. Keep in mind that in their consciousness, they have not left us. They have simply changed form. They're still with us. We need to focus on the reality that their energy continues.

5. Create a memorial, a photo collage, an altar, a scrapbook chronicling your dog's life.

6. Avoid people who do not understand your grief, who tell you, "It was just a cat (or dog or bird). You can always buy another one. " As my grandmother would have said, "Feh!"

7. Do something to connect with your animal in spirit through dreams, where our spiritual selves roam unencumbered by bodies. Before falling asleep, you can look at photographs of your dog or cat or meditate briefly on your relationship. SEE yourselves together. Hold this as your last mental image as you shut the light.

8. Carry an object with your animal's energy: a photo, a toy, even a "baby" tooth. It will comfort you and connect you to your animal in spirit in a very psychic way. When I lost my soul mate dog, Seamus, I slept with his collar inside my pillowcase for months.

9. Create a memorial service. I've seen quite a few of these and have written some for clients.
Invite friends and family -- even other dogs -- to your home or to a park or favorite outdoor place where you can share stories, read a poem or prayer, and give this loss the sacred dimension it deserves. Honor your animal's soul. It is just as Divine as your own.

10. Create. If you paint, paint your dog's portrait. If you write, write a story or memoir. Sew. Quilt. Dance.

11. READ about other people's animals for entertainment, to return you to the joy you shared rather than the grief that sems to impale you. Look for stories about antics and misadventures. Please -- read James Thurber! You'll relate and and laugh from the belly doing it.

12 . Consider getting another dog or cat, not to replace the one who has died but to HONOR him . The one thing dogs enjoy most is other dogs. They are pack animals and having loved you as their pack leader, they don't want to see you alone. The want you to cherish their memory and grieve without losing yourself to that grief. They do not want you to suffer but to recover. Welcoming another animal, whether it is a puppy/kitten from a breeder or an older rescue, is your chance to shower a new friend with the calibre of love with gave your old friend. Consider the circularity of life and love: the multiple blessings your animal gave to you will continue as you bless the new one in your life with your love. Bringing in a new pet by no means eclipses the relationship you had with your animal. In fact, it does just the opposite; it strengthens it.

When my first schnauzer, Kasha, died, I was reluctant to consider another one until a secretary in my department gave me this essay to read. When I finished it, I found a breeder in St. Petersburg, FL and excitedly readied my home for the entry of a new pup in HONOR of the one I'd just released to spirit. This essay will certainly help you, too. It's Eugene O'Neill (actually, it was written by Eugene O'Neill's dog), The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill:
www.eoneill.com/texts/blemie/contents.htm

REIKI AND CANCER by guest blogger Emily Walsh

2011-08-30T07:26:00.004-04:00

I'm pleased to persent this wonderful assessment of Reiki as a complement to medical treatments. Thank you to Emily Walsh for so successfully capturing the essence of this divine healing tool.

Studies Show Reiki Helps Humans and Animals Cope with Cancer

With the endorsement of medical professionals,such as Dr. Mehmet Oz, Reiki is becomine an increasingly well-known form of energy medicine. Developed by Mikao Usui in 1914 afater a mystical encounter, Reiki was first practiced by Usui and has been passed down through a lineage that continues to the present day. A form of healing and relaxation that balances the body's life force, Reiki strengthens the immune system, reduces stress, and helps the body heal itself. Its spiritual energy affects the body mentally, physically, and emotionally.

How Does Reiki Work?
The life force enrgy that flows in and around the physical body supports its cells and organs. When this subtle energy is blocked, the area that is obstructed functions less effectively and is prone to illness. These blockages can be caused by trauma or by negative thoughts and beliefs. Reiki not only restores the flow of energy, but it also raisesthe vibration of the energy field and infuses it with positive energy. This process removes toxins, promotes relaxation, and encourages healing. Reiki may be administered bith the hands slightly above the body , or it may be send by long distance.

How is Reiki Used?

Reiki is an effective way of keepng the body whole and healthy, thereby preventing disease and stress-related ailments. It can be used on everyone from infants to the elderly, and some practitioners specialize in giving Reiki treatments to animals. It may also reduce stressin caregivers and help to prevent stres-related illnesses.

Reiki has recently gained popularity as a complement to traditional medical protocol and has shown promise in reducing the side effects of cancer and chemotherapy. Recommended by the Amerian Cancer Society as an adjunct to standard care,Reiki is now being used to treat difficult cancers, such as mesothelioma (www.mesothelioma.com) -- an aggressive disease caused by asbestos exposure. Although not proven to extend meosthelioma life expectancy, it has shown promise in making patients more comfortable.

What Are the Results?

According to the law os physics, energy vibrates at different frequencis, emitting white light. The higher the frequency of vibration, the brighter the th elight is. When this energy is channeled with intetnion and intuition by trained practitioners, the subtle energy field around the body can be changed, releasing blockages and making it easier for the body to deal with trauma. As a result,the folloinwg benefits are frequently observed:
Improved sleep
Reduced fatigue
Overall sense of welll-being
Decrease in level of pain
Less anxiety and depressons
Sense of connection
Faster recovery from surgery or infections
Better circulation
Stronger immune system

Although Reiki is a spiritual practice,it requires no believe onthe part of the recipient. In fac,t even those who are skeptical may benefit from the one-on-onecontat with a caring practitioner. The power of stouch has already been shown to be an effective ingredient of good physical and mental health. Since Reiki treamtnts have virtually no negative side effects, it offers great potential with very little risk.

Emily Walsh is a native of Syracuse, N.Y. and spends much of her time advocating for cancer patients and writing about manyu topics that affect those suffering from this disease. She is
the Outreach Dirctor for the Mesothelioma Cancer Aliance and is dedicated to raising awareness about this rare, aggressive form of cancer.

Visual and Visionary Part 2: The Images

2011-08-17T09:42:00.016-04:00

The Grief of the Pasha

by Jean Leone Gerome

The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau

The Bear Dance by
William Holbrook Beard

Spirit Wolf
by Susan Seddon Boulet

Calico Kitty by Georg Williams

Blue Dog (the original)
by George Rodrigue

Bodo Flying through the Night
by Martin LaBorde

Visual and Visionary: Animals in Art

2011-08-17T07:53:00.016-04:00

We know the power of the concrete image, which is why poets in particular rely so strongly on metaphor to convey their message. When we read a quality literary piece, we retain the verbally constructed image forever, linking us to the words. For me, as a writer, the words never came first; the image did. Then I entered an almost trance-like state to retrieve the language that interpreted the picture. Forever embedded in my visual memory is a young and hunger-afflicted illiterate Colonel Sartoris Snopes whose stomach read the red devil labels on cans on the general store shelf. We rely on pictures to symbolize a moment, a movement, a philosophy. Returning to my early days in academia, I felt someone had injected me with propellant when I first encountered the sad, mad exposed heart in the self portraits of Vincent Van Gogh.....and thirty years later, I experience a similar rush when I get lost in the work of Rembrandt, as heart and soul radiate through the dim canvas centuries after he first immortalized his subjects.

I have never been able to afford fine art collections, but over the years, I have collected prints to soften the walls of my house and promote a specifically warm energy, and of course those prints are all animal centered. Because I suffer from cat allergy, I could never live with a cat, so to compensate for a lack of feline energy in the house, I have placed a piece of cat art in every room of the house. When I travel, I visit galleries and museums and have mentally collected a few favorite pieces which I'd like to share with the animal lovers out there.

The Grief of the Pasha by Jean-Leon Gerome: For those who have lost animals, this painting expresses the depth of grief when an interspecies bond is broken by death...so moving.

The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau: What a mythological statement. This has kept me shamanic company for 15 years.

The BearDance by William Holbrook Beard: I light up whenever I see this.

Spirit Wolf by Susan Seddon Boulet: I had the pleasure of meeting Susan Seddon Boutlet before she died. I sat in on her mask-making workshop at the Omega Institute. What a privelege.

Calico Kitten by Georg Williams: Williams does whimsical caricatures of people's pets. His work is showcased at Gallery Rinard on my favoarite street, Royal Street, in New Orleans. I have a few of his prints, which keep my laughing. The last image I see at night and the first when I awake is his Calcio Kitten. This is a way for me to start every day with laughter.

Georg Rodrigue's Blue Dog. His original bkue dog pain is frought with mystery and soul

Martin LeBorde: This visionary and mythological artists speaks to those of us who rely on both dream and animal messengers to soar beyond the mundane world. Go to beegalleries.com and click on artists to view his extraordinary work.

I'd be interested in hearing from you to see which animal images keep you comforted or intrigued. Please share!

I'll be posting the images in the next post. (Technology interferes with proper placement in this one.)

No Death, No Guilt, Just Spirit : End of Life Issues and Animals

2011-07-19T08:15:00.022-04:00

Many people who have lost animals to “death” want to communicate with them through a channel or medium, which is essentially the work I do. When an animal has passed on, I connect through a photo in what is truly the most sacred part of my work. Relaying the messages of an animal in spirit provides comfort to the human companion who remains behind in a maze of grief and self-doubt. Animals tell me repeatedly that they hurt when we suffer this way. In every one of my afterlife consultations, for over 21 years, they deliver this primary message: release guilt and realign with Spirit.

Almost all of my clients ask these questions, exposing their conflicted emotions :

Does he know we did everything we could for him when he was alive?

Please tell him we didn’t even see the tumor. We didn't know he was suffering.

Is she upset with me because I had her put down?

Did she know how much I loved her?

Tell him I put him to sleep to ease his pain, not mine.

Please tell her I'm sorry.

Please tell him why I couldn't stay in the room during the euthanasia.

It took me years to learn how to neutralize these misguided feelings myself.

Our animals know how much we love them, and they understand our difficulty in consciously deciding to part with them. They understand that from the totality of multi-dimensional existence, earthly life is fractional. They accept their temporal roles in in our lives while we waste time berating ourselves with guilt, micro-examining our decisions in hindsight.

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche attributes our discomfort with death to our sanitzed western approach to life, which is essentially an ongoing denial of death. By neglecting to give equal attention to the end of this life, we reinforce our unprepareness for death and thus deny ouselves full appreciation of the life cycle. Tibetan culture – most Asian culture -- regards death as part of life and as such is treated reverently, not fearfully. Speaking to us from Spirit, our animals teach this same lesson.

I didn't choose to work with death and dying. When I tell people the area of my concentrated traditional study, their facial expressions reveal this discomfort. I didn't begin this process of accompanying souls in pre and post death communication; the animals did. About ten years ago I noticed an increasing trend in my readings; clients were calling me to help them determine whether it was time to release their animal to spirit. Naturally I don't make that determination. "Let's ask your dog," I'd say, and always, without exception, the animal would answer. They were usually not ready to go despite clearly failing health, and the veterinarians would offer corroboration. Animals know the right time for surrender, and they tell us without panic. They don't seek escape.

I took this pattern seriously and decided to return to school to study death and dying, which involved not only course work but practical experience as well. I chose to volunteer with Hospice and never felt more an instrument of God than when I stood bedside, delivering Reiki energy to patients just hours from their final breath. In that sacred silence we create a tunnel of Light and become enveloped by Spirit. I feel this way always giving Reiki to terminally ill animals. A couple of weeks ago I met a nurse, also a spiritual healer and medium , who does this same work on a regular basis. We agreed on this as the greatest and most humbling honor the Universe grants us.

What I have learned, and what I want to teach, is that frightening as it is initially, we must not run from death (as I did when I was young) but understand it as the entry to the Divine, more permanent root of this life. We, and our animals, do not exit. We return.

Wounded Healers, Healing Wounds

2011-07-10T13:44:00.029-04:00

I have no kind way to say this, and I argue there should never be a kind way to say this:

My name is Lisa. I am an incest survivor .

I was orally raped in early childhood by my paternal grandfather.

There. Said. But not done. Never done.

I am thinking right now of my former writing student, M., who experienced her own emotional, unprecedented, and unexpected self and public disclosure about her childhood sexual abuse, spontaneously responding to the first half page of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I stayed with her after class and after many more classes subsequent to that. I think we both cried though I can't quite remember. What I do remember is that in what was a blessing, I drew from my own painful experience an understanding that can be felt by only two types of people: another who has stewed in the belly of this beast or a therapist trained to work with that person. Of course I am the former.

I signed on to Amazon.com and ordered for her the book The Courage to Heal, the consummate guide for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It wasn't the first time I had to do this for a student. Two years prior, after watching Cider House Rules, I vigorously -- and I mean VIGOROUSLY -- answered questions from skeptical students who questioned how much reality was embedded in the story's incest thread. An hour later, a student from that class entered my office and said, " I need to talk to you about what happened in class," sat down, and cried through her story of repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, a nightmare she'd kept secret until that moment. I was five. M. was eight. E. was thirteen. I bought her the book,too.

It's a book to hold onto forever after you read it. It's like an airplane floatation device. I kept one in the trunk of my car for fifteen years for the solace of knowing it would be there in case of emotional emergency; it gives the reassurance of community. When I was about to get married, I urged my soon-to-be husband to read the book, explaining that it would clarify and prepare him for the kinds of moods I was thrown into by seemingly innocuous triggers: a smell, a song, a taste, even a temperature or a breeze blowing the wrong way. He refused my offer. When we first lived together, he would sometimes find me sitting alone, suspended in an unidentified dimension where there exists no feeling, no thought. I remember one time he shook me out of it and another he raised his voice in concern: "Where are you? Come back!" Every time I watch The Joy Luck Club, I recognize the fog that devours Auntie Ying Ying, a thick, trauma-borne stupor from which she is released only by her daugher's forceful nudging. I checked in and out of there for many years, and while I rarely visit these days, recent experience reminds me how every new hurt flings me back to that space of original pain and betrayal.

So please, do not ask me why I still feel the bloodletting of a divorce not quite three months old.

What does this have to do with animals? Everything, absolutely everything.

I am talking about a wound with so strong a vibration that those who share it are magnetized toward each other, and those who can heal our grief -- our animal companions -- are brought to us as higher energies by higher energies. People suffering from trauma, whether it's abuse, war, or terror -- escape to planes of consciousness that cause them to develop an insulated inner life. The technical term would be dissociation, quite a protective mechanism. Very few humans can break through that insulation, but animals possess the natural ability to plunge through the fat into the lean heart. Studies have found that autistic children unresponsive to their surroundings do, in fact, come alive in relationship with an animal. More and more incidents are reported documenting a visible physical response to animals from long time comatose patients. Prisoners with rage issues have been learning loving and compassionate action by raising and caring for animals in innovative jail programs. Now veterans returning from Iraq with PTSD (the same diagnosis the abuse survivor usually gets) are being treated with "pet therapy." And Jaycee Dugard, an abductee who who endured 18 years of imprisonment, sexual abuse, and torture, just told Dianne Sawyer that she could mentally escape her situation only when she shared temporary company with kittens.

Animals design their entry into our lives at very particular times on the spiritual calendar. If you think that you picked out your dog or cat from a breeder or a shelter, think again -- you were led to and by that animal for a much higher purpose. A widowed friend of mine began seeing random butterflies after her husband's death, and then realized that they were not random at all but heaven-sent. My friend's German Shepherd supported her through her husband's addiction,violence, disappearance, and ultimate divorce. Three of my dogs literally gave me life at a time when I feared suicide or homicide as my incest memories resurfaced. Angelo the standard poodle brought me to it and died early as his work was completed; Seamus the Irish Water Spaniel led me through it with loving frenzy; and Gracie the Schnauzer lifted me above it with intensity and will. In a telepathic conversation in which she wanted to ascertain her position in our three-dog household, she said firmly, "You must know that I am your angel. I came to you when you thought you would not survive." No human being....no human being has ever loved me like this.

It doesn't upset me when people regard a dog or cat as "just an animal;" it infuriates me. (Yes spiritual people are indeed human and prone to anger and rage, a place too familiar to the wounded healer. ) Who forgives us our anger? Who overlooks our ignorance and blindness? Who embraces us when we feel empty and unloveable? You might say God. I would ask who sends us the animals, from which plane did they embark on their journey to heal us? Who are the instruments of Divine healing and emissaries of Grace? Feathered and furry ones. Think about the significance of our physical placement among the animals: they are not level with us. We need to stretch, to move out of stagnation, bending down or reaching up to touch the dog or bird. It's a metaphoric exercise that raises us from an assumed human chauvinism to heart-centered expansion that promotes healing.

Homework for the day: hold your animal companion and close your eyes. Ask what its purpose is in your life beyond the obvious. Be prepared for the answer.

ADDENDUM: Today, E. is a psychologist and M. is a teacher. This is how the wounded become healers. And yes, they both read the blog, commenting privately, and yes, we're all smiling.

LINK to page 1 of The Color Purple: www.harcourtbooks.com/ColorPurple/excerpt.asp

PROGRESS!!!!

2011-07-05T16:16:00.014-04:00

I am not the only one in this household who got divorced -- the animals are also adjusting to a new dynamic. During the first few days of our altered space, upon waking, Luinigh would dash to the spare room seeking my ex-husband (whom I displaced after I learned he was dating a woman he'd recently met and was "falling in love with" while still occupying the western spot in the bed next to me as if this were a forgivable arrangement even though the divorce had been finalized, whew!). I was also not the only one shaken and shocked. Dumbfounded, all poor Luinigh saw was a room distinguished by purses hanging from an unused Tony Little Gazelle. He stopped looking on day 4. Frankie the Crested Puff has become king of the house (or so he thinks), demonstrating an unpleasant resource guarding behavior in the bed at night (we are working on modification). Ingrid remains Her Regal Highness, the one whose path no other animal may cross without permission. Me? I'm still plumbing my way through alternating anger and hurt, but objective acquaintances have shared unsolicited critiques about my face looking refreshed, relaxed, and --dare I believe it? -- younger.

Now Baby! If you read my previous posts, you will recall my theory of a link between his feather picking intensity and his rocky relationship with my ex.

WELL, LOOK AT THIS!! After two months, my naked and downy gray macaw is getting greener still. I'm sharing a photo, evidence of this new era of peaceful domesticity.

Does this mean that I have lost love for this man? God help me if I ever get to the point where someone else's foolish and selfish actions reduce my capacity for love.

I also want to announce that on August 15th from 5-7 p.m. , I wll be teaching a two hour animal communication class at the Metaphysical Chapel of South Florida; hope some of you locals will be interested. Contact me and I'll get you the particulars. Namaste!

Wafting Orbs of Light, or There's No Place Like Home

2011-06-27T20:59:00.027-04:00

Last night I had one of my semi-annual tornado dreams. In this one, as usual, people were running from the approaching storm. I locked myself safely in a house I didn't recognize and I tried to hide in an interior room but realized I had left one window open about four inches. A gray swirl of smoke ominously entered through the window and strengthened in the middle of the room, picked up my little Chinese Crested boy, and began to suck him out into the funnel. I tried furiously to fight the storm and grab Frankie, screaming, as in mid-air, he was slammed again and again against the wall. Then the dissipating mist retreated as silently as it had entered, moving to the next house. I awoke this morning with serious lower back/hip pain, barely able to walk. I feel somehow like Jacob, afflicted.

(What's my argument with Judaism? I never wanted to be Rachel or Leah or Rebeccah. I wanted to be Elijah or Joseph or even the dreaming Pharoah.)

Back to waking reality, where these days I struggle to rise above engulfing loneliness. I know and appreciate the distinction between aloneness and loneliness. The former is spiritually impossible and the latter temporary and conditional. I know I am not really ever alone. None of us is.

When I close my eyes , the spirits present Divine community. I see no darkness and am greeted instead by varying degrees of light, wafting orbs in soft, muted hues. They surround me like an embrace, one after the other, gently, lovingly. There exists no earthly partnership so sweet. During emotionally distressing times, their visitations are soul-mending.

We know our animals experience these same spiritual gatherings. More than a few cat owners have told me they find their cats staring into space the same time every night, seemingly communicating with an etheric presence. Many of us have enjoyed meditating with our dogs and returning to waking consciousness much more quickly than they do, as they like lingering in the spiritual forest.

For the past eighteen years I've focused on a professional track that allowed me to grow as an educator, creating innovative curriculum in the college classroom while advancing my sideline work as an animal communicator. Six years ago I began traditional graduate study in theology to enhance my "real world" credentials and learn more about organized religion. I have been the only unaffiliated minister in a program populated by serious Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians AME, and even MCC (a GLBT church) ministers. I have responded to regular questions about my denomination with "interfaith, metaphysical" but had no central meeting place other than the celebration that takes place when I close my eyes.

Recognizing the onset of loneliness, I determined it was time to open my eyes and find a physical center, so I located a metaphysical chapel whose web page invited practitioners and ministers to attend and serve. I answered the call and spoke with the pastor.

"Can you do a meditation?," she asked.

"I could," I said.

"Can you talk for more than 5 minutes?," she asked. "Some people have trouble speaking for longer periods."

"No problem there. My students wish I would stop at 5 minutes."

"Do you give messages?," she asked.

"I can; I've done it before," I answered.

But I was nervous. For over a decade I laid these gifts aside and instead worked on maintaining employment with a pension and attending to a marriage with diminishing potential.

So I went to the church on Sunday, where I comfortably led a healing meditation and spoke for twenty minutes on spiritual communion with animals. We sang hymns and recited some beautiful prayers, one of my favorites attributed (questionably) to St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy...

It is no coincidence that St. Francis of Assisi is hailed as the first known animal communicator in western religion.

Then I gave messages. Well, I didn't give them. I delivered them. I closed my eyes and there they were, ready for articulaton.

In my meditation today, I approached an opening door and answered the call to enter. I knew I would not and could not be alone either en route or on the other side. The room was a womb of palpable love, a homecoming of Dorothy Gale proportions.

It took me 55 years to get here. Can't wait to see the miracles of the next 30.

Seeing: How I Came to Read Animals

2011-06-11T09:45:00.023-04:00

When we are attuned to the call of the Universe, Spirit gives us gifts in various forms and dimensions from knowing to seeing to feeling to hearing. When I started this journey 24 years ago and began uncovering and exercising my intuitive abilities, I was advised by a teacher to make clear to the Universe (a widely used metaphysical word for God) which methods of information gathering I was willing to accept. At the time, I felt that hearing would be too threatening to my emotional well being and requested a gentler medium. "Please give me messages visually, " I said. " I do not want to start hearing things and complicate my already delicate balance." And so it came, gradually, strengthening through consistent and earnest meditation, through a series of grand earthly teachers and mentors. I remember the most profound awakening after a group meditation/hypnsosis session led by my friend, Rev. Carol Romine. After the 15 minute session, I emerged with a clarity of vision I could not have imagined. Shortly after, a woman entered the Crystal Garden with a broken metal sheet about a foot long. She put it in my hand and asked if I could provide any information about it. I closed my eyes, and gripping the metal, revealed what came to me in pictures: this was remnant of an aircraft that had crashed sometime during WWII. She was astounded and told me the sketchy story of its origins. I was right. Carol then nodded , giving me the spiritual license to fly. Before this I had been reading cards and teaching intuitive Tarot, receiving impressions along with the card meanings. After this night, I gently wrapped these external tools and stored them on a sacred altar. I no longer needed them to counsel others. I needed only to hold the object, close my eyes, and receive direct informaton from then on. This method is called psychometry.

Eventually, pictures began appearing to me without my deliberate request. One afternoon while I was meditating, amid the calming blackness, a telescopic circle appeared, the kind you see in early 1930s Hollywood films, and in the middle of that circle I saw a photographic image -- not an impression, not an outline, not a fuzzy imaginary rendition -- a pure image of photographic quality -- of my parents' Schnauzer. It happened on a Thursday. I called my mother and told her she needed to check on Wendell. Dismissively, she said, "Why? He's fine." I explained that my vision was likely a warning and she needed to check the dog. She did and said he was fine. That Saturday, two days later, she called me at 2 p.m. to tell me earlier that morning, she brought a limp Wendell to the vet, who diagnosed irreversible kidney failure. He died. That quickly.

I took his message as a loving warning. He was cushioning us for his swift departure. In some measure, my words to my mother lessened the shock of the loss. Wendell was 9 years old and in apparent perfect health.

The same unsolicited warning came years later from a friend's Basenji. Becky had eaten a blanket whose threads wound around her intestines; she required extensive emergency surgery. She came through the surgery fine, although she remained at the animal hospital for a few days as precaution. Two days after the surgery my friend went to visit her, and she was playing outside the kennel, happy to see him. That night Becky visited me in a dream. She didn't say anything; she just appeared and spent some time with me. I called my friend at 7 a.m. to tell him this. He called me back around 9 to say the vet called him as soon as she arrived in her office. In the middle of the night, Becky had unexpectedly died. There was no explanation.

The gift of vision also helped me release my most profound companion, the 11 year old notorious Seamus. Ever the adolescent rebel , he relished his own mischief; he repeatedly unlocked the back door and escaped onto the golf course to terrorize innocent senior citizens and leap into crowds of ducks just to see them squawk and scatter. He ate whole turkey carcasses. When we locked the trash in the cabinet with childproof locks, he ate the hinges so he could remove the entire door. Seamus survived multiple surgeries for unusual conditions and at 9 went blind and became afflicted with megaesophagus, an ugly condition that prevents normal digestion and leads to aspiraton and pneumonia. I hand fed and guided him for 2 years; he used his outstanding sense of smell to navigate his way around the house and create more havoc, but in December 2003, at age 11, he was stunned by sudden deafness. I found him shaking and barking in the hallway, not knowing where he was, not hearing, not seeing, in a state of panic, a horrific and heart wrenching scene.

I led him upstairs and held his face in my hands. Closing my eyes, I asked him what he wanted, what I should do. The photographic images he sent me were indesputable and agonizing: I saw him surrounded by my other animals who had passed into spirit, and in the middle of their compassionate circle, Seamus lowered his head, offering me his collar. He had given up and he asked me to give him up. I sobbed as I accepted his wishes. The next morning,with the vet's blessing, I gently let him go. I slept with that collar under my pillow for weeks afterward. OK, months. OK, for two nights I slept on the floor in his spot until I was sure he made a full transition.

How ironic is it that our most unbearable heartbreak lies in our most selfless gesture? We understand the meaning of sacrifice only when we release what we love most passionately.

So this is how my animal readings transpire: I hold the animal (or a photograph), close my eyes, and receive vivid images, which I then interpret with the help of the human companion. While it is certainly a psychic reading, it also requires genuine collaboration if we are to understand and use the information for the highest good. My readings are never vague or generalized. In every session, the animal gives me something so clear and personal that the client cannot possibly question the authenticity of the messages.

As I have learned to do this, so can everyone else. All it takes it trust, intention, and meditative practice. If you are interested in learning how to communicate with animals, please contact me, and if you belong to an animal welfare group or AKC breed group, consider me as a speaker and workshop presenter. I love sharing the gift!

Animals, Divorce, Picador: Living in the Moment

2011-06-02T16:44:00.025-04:00

I once heard George Carlin say dogs can't tell time; they don't differentiate between one minute and one day, so when we leave them, upon our return we get the same exuberant greeting whether we were gone for three hours or three seconds. This merits some thought. Is it that animals don't recognize time or that they don't worship time the way we do? We obsess over time lost and time coming; we struggle to retrieve the past, seeking some previously missed key to consequences we endure in our ongoing life sagas. Or we project and fantasize about the future, what will be, what could be, what we want. Doing so, we miss the present moment, the essence of a happy life. The Buddhists teach us that by living in the moment, we have no expectations and feel neither sorrow nor disappointment. So sensible. So difficult. Do our animals experience disappointment and resentment? If they do, such states are momentary.

I am still winding through my fresh divorce, which I know in my heart was inevitable despite loving my husband. Yet I sit here and dissect the last 12 years of my life looking for mistakes I may have made, and finding few, look again, deeper, because there must be some wrong I committed to have placed here, but instead I land in a pit of sensory images. I see our early years. I smell optimism, excitement: the night he proposed, visiting his parents that Christmas and singing oldies during the entire two hour drive, taking pictures on our wedding cruise, eating oysters on the balcony at KPaul's, unpacking Farberware in the new house, his kissing the Blarney stone, his kissing me all of 3,188 mornings with an "I love you, Munchkin, see you later," all scenes dripping with the hope of a joy-filled, "normal" life. I am pained physically by my loss of hope, this well of disappointment, of failed expectations. Without exposing the demons in my ex-husband's closet and publicizing the details of his final month-long hateful treatment of me, I -- and every person who watched this union disintegrate-- can say that I worked harder to preserve the "us" than most people would have, that I bore more figurative cuts and jabs than most sane women would have. In assessing the last month, I find only one word: picador. And I ache. Because I took it.

I never understood what hope meant until now, and really, it's an almost terrible word to me.

So where are the animals in the midst of my reflective meltdown and our newly quiet space? A couple of them seemed to love my ex-husband. But they're not moping. They don't wait wistfully by the door until midnight. They act no less happy than they ever have been before. Except for Baby, the macaw -- the creature whose temperament and emotion parallel a human's. For years, he has been battling feather picking, making himself bleed and leaving his pink, dimpled chicken skin chest exposed. He's been e-collared, medicated, fed a natural diet, and isolated from scented and toxic household substances, but he has continued picking himself raw.

My ex-husband did not like the bird. He's actually told people he hated "that (*#$&(*&$#(*& bird." Deeply. ( Both my vet and I still want to know how Baby mysteriously broke his leg while I was out, a break repaired by an $1800 microsurgery ) But in his absence I see promise. In three weeks, I see healing. Today I examined Baby, finding a patch of new green feathers, the first in over a year. I cried. How little we know. How much the animals do. We should listen.

Messages from the Light: Reading Molly

2011-05-18T06:57:00.015-04:00

I am often called upon to communicate with an animal who is no longer on the earth plane. I never use the word death in this context since I know intuitively and experientially that there is no death, just transformation. A client sends or hands me a photo, and using psychometry, I easily contact the animal's spirit and am always greeted joyfully. In the book Opening to Channel, Sonaya Roman's guides Oren and DaBen make this pronouncement (a paraphrase): We rejoice when you make contact. So it is with the animals, who as indigenous peoples know, are spiritually pure transmitters of higher wisdom and unconditional love.

Sometimes the animals appear to me in a physical form but more often I see energy. This morning I did a reading for a departed spaniel, on earth a regal girl with a commanding posture. In spirit, she was more than just a floating orb of light: she appeared as a star, very deliberately sending healing energy and love to the human companion and dogs she left behind. Her former owner is ill and often without strength, missing her canine love terribly. I was asked to speak with Molly but when I saw her, no words were necessary. More precisely, no words were adequate. She is literally a guiding light offering the unparalleled gift of Divine presence. When a distraught client asks me to make contact with the animal in spirit, a communion takes place on an etheric level. That communion -- that beingness -- engenders a peace that spreads through the soul and down through the body. That energetic communion, Spirit's way of assuring us "I am here, I hear you and I am here with you" ignites the healing process. This is often all it takes for the human client to release the grief. That release is contagious. Although I had not known the animal in life, I cry along with the client as soon as that gentle, loving contact happens. All it takes is the presence.

So often when we seek guidance from higher realms, we want -- and expect -- words of wisdom, suggestion, direction. We pump that left brain for the linear, practical advice we think will to transport us to a place called Relief. Once again, the animals teach us otherwise through their silent, penetrating Divine Light. It matters not whether we accept this job or leave that job, file for the inevitable divorce or circumvent our partner's abuse with a flurry of earthly diversions, masking the hurt. We have no earthly Band-Aids. The ultimate healing comes through the gifts of the Spirit -- unadulterated , concentrated love that overcomes human frailty and diffuses human pain, leaving us speechless.

Go hug your dog.

Drasticity

2011-02-04T09:31:00.014-05:00

23 years ago, in therapy with a truly miraculous psychologist and holistic healer, Joan Lieberman, I asked how to keep my footing on a road mined with unexpected depressions. She used the symbol of series of single hills, each followed by a steep, seemingly treacherous valley. We stand on the hill and look straight out, not anticipating the space about to swallow us as we drop. Then after we regain composure, we find ourselves planted in the valley, looking straight out at another seemingly impenetrable mass of hill and we begin, like mountain goats, another arduous climb. Sometimes I feel such a physical heaviness that I can't lift my eyes to see even a sliver of sky.

I remember asking her, Will it end?

No, she said. But as we move forward, the difference between peak and valley feels less drastic.

I hereby create a new word: drasticity. The drasticity of our lives lessens even as our circumstances assume new complications.

What a series of begets is our contract to live! Love begets loss, loss begets grief, grief begets healing, healing begets renewal, renewal begets hope, hope begets love, love begets loss, loss begets healing..... and if we want to live a meangingful life, we must agree to meet these challenges.

So I am not surprised when depression clutches me during or after a loss. Last year it was my friend Sandy's death from cancer at age 57. She and I met through our Irish Water Spaniels and cultured a seven year friendship which I never anticipated would be so abbreviated. This year it is my impending divorce. The papers have been filed yet my husband continues to live with me as if no detours menace his Trip Tik. I have accumulated enough grief for the both of us.

Sensing the household energy shift, the dogs have grown clingy in their support, the two Irishers now grabby in my alone time, petting me, claiming me with rested heads and wrapping their "arms" around me more than usual. A few weeks ago they held a midnight let's comfort-Mommy contest, catching my face in the middle of their match, and I emerged with a bloody lip courtesy of Ingrid's speedy tooth. (Ingrid always wins contests, by the way. It's the Law.) Many nights Luinigh desperately grips my husband, literally trying to sleep on top of him, his tail wagging a percussive expression of midnight joy that he's still there. Frankie, the Crested Puff rescue, has suddenly become housebroken. Baby, the macaw, literally asks for more cheek-to-cheek cuddles.Animal sensitivity to human emotion is common experience.

But more than this, the manifestation of animals in our lives, however we come to life with them, is a pre-ordained, Divine gift. I hear from so many of my clients that their animals pulled them through a divorce, a death, a trauma they would not have otherwise survived. Animals willingly come to us in this life with a purpose, much the same way we agree to incarnate to learn significant lessons. I named my last Schnauzer Grazia (Gracie) to honor her healing presence in my life. Every time I called her name it was a reminder to be grateful.I could not endure this current sadness without the love of my animal companions, who are most certainly spiritual visitors, familiars, making tangible the ethereal.

This blog has no satisfactory conclusion. It's just going to continue, to be, like me, navigating the dips in the earthly landscape, dogs in tow.

The Spiritual Lives of Animals

2011-01-25T11:22:00.010-05:00

A few months ago my friend Geoffrey sent me a link to an MSNBC report highlighting new academic research indicating that animals have a spiritual side. One hypothesis it offered was the fact that in human beings, the spiritual center lies in the "most primitive part of the brain" so it would be likely that animals, being more primitive creatures than we are, share that primitive spot.

As pleased as I am to see the scientific world corroborate what shamans and metaphysicians have known through experience for thousands of years, I would disagree that animals are primitive. I would say primal, not primitive. We once clung to this notion in a human development context as well; as knowledge and technology have propelled us further into the electronic, industrial, and later cyber ages in the last few hundred years, our culture mislabeled as primitive indigenous peoples without the high powered gadgets and mass production. Does simplicity dictate primitiveness or does it free us from clutter and debris to engender an inner life that nurtures just the opposite? Films such as Baraka and The Gods Must Be Crazy easily poke holes through what is now a very arrogant world view.

But back to the animals.

It is my soul's work to communicate with them on that spiritual level and I, like all other serious animal communicators (mediums, psychics, intuitives), don't merely recognize but revere the spiritual lives of animals and the loving, sacred wisdom they transmit from those higher realms. Years ago at a Penelope Smith Workshop in Rhinebeck, New York, nearly 70 people sat in meditation with a large snake. Our task was to ask the snake to describe her daily life. What we all received en masse was an unexpected third eye detour. Snake had another agenda, a higher purpose. Coming out of the silent meditation, the entire group agreed the snake was not interested in sharing her mundane experience but instead delivered a spiritual message which we received individually but shared collectively: a call for humans to recognize the divinity of the snake. All life is divine. All creatures are sacred. The snake makes a home on the lowest and highest elevations on earth, easily and comes to us as God's living metaphor: we must recognize all life, all creatures, all people, as extensions of the Divine. We are no higher or lower or better or worse than those we too readily and wrongfully dismiss. When Penelope broke the silence recognizing that the snake clearly offered us deeper and higher level conversation, many of the workshop participants were surprised -- because each of them had received the same message silently, not recognizing the power of the snake to speak to each of us from angelic realms. What I saw that day in trance was the snake transforming her body slowly from a linear pose into a perfect circle. She reveled in her uniqueness as the only earthly creature with such physical capability and assertively but lovingly reminded us that as a symbol of eternity she must not be overlooked. Hardly primitive thoughts.

Top Ten Reasons I Love Luinigh

2010-12-10T12:48:00.003-05:00

I love my boy. I love everything he does which includes, in no special order:
1. Trying to sleep on top of me some time in the middle of the night every night
2. Doing the conga across the room every time I stand and he thinks I'm about to dance
3. His childlike fascination with what gets flushed down the toilet
4. His stealing the shirt I wore during the day and holding it in his mouth for an hour until he falls asleep
5. His bathroom escort service -- he has to run in ahead of me and touch with his nose whatever fixture I'm about to use, take a few steps back, and guide me in
6. His insistence at the dog park that every human being naturally wants to meet him
7. His never snapping at the macaw who tries to maim him
8. His making everything in life a game but being perfectly obedient when he needs to
9. His insistence on throwing stuffed animals into the bathtub full of water and when I don't respond, his balancing them on my shoulder, stepping back, and waiting for me to do something
10. Now that I think about it, everything

Selectively Sacred Lives: The Ethics of Institutional and Commercial Animal Use

2010-12-10T07:16:00.010-05:00

Selectively Sacred
The Ethics of Institutional and Commercial Animal Use

Lisa Shaw

Presented to Dr. Bryan Froehle

St. Thomas University

12/8/10

Observing:
The treatment of commercially and industrially used animals, held against their will and acted upon by human beings who wield power under the banner of biblically assigned dominion has perpetuated a society in which nearly all of us by virtue of our surface innocence are in fact complicit in their suffering by our blind consumption of products. Who has never taken a pharmaceutical drug to combat a physical condition? What woman has never used mascara? How many of us have indulge with delight in a Thanksgiving feast of tofurkey? In the past 25 years the public has been made more aware of our speciesism, negligence, and abuse of animals who are bred and held captive to serve human need by radical organizations such as PETA and the Humane Society of the United States, who often go to extremes and wind up inadvertently declaring war even on those people who love and care for animals. Pouring blood on a woman carelessly wearing a fox coat or freeing lab animals in the middle of the night or mandating vegetarianism for all people provides good shock effect but alienates the general populace and offers no alternatives for people motivated by both compassion and reason. Beyond this, many of the radical animal rights organizations view animals in a purely scientific way, as do their enemies, denying them not only reason and consciousness but compassion and soul. For this reason, it is incumbent upon more spiritually-directed animal advocates develop an ethic that incorporates a Divine message that should elevate us to higher moral standards in our treatment of the animal world.

Universal Complicity

When we examine the total picture and often dire consequences (to the animals)of human-animal relationships, we have to look beyond cruel industrialized farming conditions or casual sport hunting and to see that we are all complicit in the situation. It is our comfort with the utilitarian philosophy that permits us to use the earth for our gain, often without conscience or awareness of the results. Almost every pleasure and comfort we enjoy on a daily basis is somewhere rooted in the use of animal life. The scope of ways in which animals have been used without consent for human benefit and profit include
Medical research: The use of animals in the name of medical science ranges from mice and rats to domestic dogs. Animals are injected with chemicals, fed poisons,
raised in completely unnatural conditions, wired, surgically altered, severely restricted, all in the name of science. As a matter of fact, recent research indicates that despite growing public awareness of such conditions, while behavioral research with animals has declined in research(e.g. large scale clinical testing of animal organs, genetically engineered food products), which will require continuous dialogue and ethical approval of the public” psychology departments, it has increased in neuroscience departments. [1] What is commonly called vivisection in the name of scientific advance has pain and cruelty as part of its definition: 1. “the cutting of or operation on a living animal usually for physiological or pathological investigation; broadly : animal experimentation especially if considered to cause distress to the subject” and 2. pitiless examination or criticism.[2] Hagelin et al predict that “most likely the future will see animals used in new areas of[3]

Product testing: Household products and consumer cosmetics are routinely tested on animals despite the availability of alternative methods. The painful cosmetic test that pours chemicals into a rabbit’s eyes has been gradually abandoned by a few manufacturers but the consistent use in the industry has spurred natural cosmetic companies like “Beauty Without Cruelty,” Aubry, and Jason cosmetics. However availability is limited to natural food stores and not widely accessible in the typical grocery or drug store. One of the most obscene tests of household products involved animals drinking Drano to monitor their reaction. Despite the large number of companies that have suspended animal testing, a surprising number of prominent manufacturers still retain the practice, Clorox, Unilever, Clairol, Dial, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, Max Factor, Olay, Pantene, Ponds, and Arm & Hammer S.C. Johnson, makers of Pledge, Off, Glade, Raid, Windex, and Drano.[4]

Agriculture: Factory farming routinely involves a number of practices harmful to livestock but beneficial to the consumer because they produce tastier meat. Such practices include overfeeding, starvation, unnatural diet, chemical and hormonal injections, and severely restricted movement. When the method of raising calf for veal production was publicized in the early 1980s, a public outrage caused Burger King to drop its veal parmigiana sandwich from its menu. A disturbing scene in the film Baraka shows a modern factory whose works cull tiny yellow chicks as objects on a conveyor belt, burning off the tips of their beaks to prevent cannibalizing and then dropping the undesirables as refuse down a deep conical chute. Croney identifies the Orwellian doublespeak the industry uses: “The term euthanasia (literally translated as ‘‘good death’’), for instance, is used to describe the killing of piglets by slamming their heads against facility floors or walls (referred to within the animal industries as ‘‘blunt force trauma’’.[5] To combat growing public discomfort with the slaughterhouse the animal production industry “ has adopted the use of the term harvested) rather than murdered and
Dismembered.” [6]

Wildlife tracking and domesticated animal security: In the interests of preserving wildlife, scientists routinely tag and monitor samples of species such as wolves, whales, dolphins. This involves invading the animals’ natural habitat and traumatizing the animals. Electronic tagging is physically invasive and permanently alters the animals. In terms of using electronic tracking devises for the security of domestic animals, veterinarians have linked the common practice of micro-chipping pets to cancers at the insertion site with fatal metastasis. There have been many reports of the microchip itself found at the core of the cancerous tumor.

Commercial breeding: Puppy mills commodify dogs and bred them until they are left ragged and near death, forcing one breeding after another. Countless dog rescue organizations from around the country nurture, rehab, and then adopt both the physically compromised breeding stock and the often frail puppies resulting from inbreeding and over-breeding. Pet stores that sell puppies with AKC papers and verify that they are breeders are most often seeing enormous profit margins by drastically escalating prices of abused and substandard animals who never fully recover.

Territorial displacement: Even an activity as apparently harmless as choosing a place to live links us to domination over natural animals because in essence we have stolen their natural habitat. Clearing land, building roads, invading the wilderness to accommodate suburban sprawl leaves many species homeless and unable to survive. In other cases it produced feral populations that depend on human handouts. Palmer affirms that when she calls overlooking this problem an omission of “important issues about relationship and responsibility.”[7]

Entertainment: Zoos, circuses, sporting venues (paritcularly parimutuels) and theme parks such as Lion Country Safari, Sea World, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom contain animals in a manner contrary to their nature. Under the guise of species conservation or preservation, such facilities are not rob animals of habitat but of the natural characteristics, abilities, and behaviors that traditionally define them: the ability to roam and forage for food as is the way of their species. In their confinement and dependency on humans for living space and sustenance, they often become physically and psychologically disturbed. Two local examples are the white tiger in Metro Zoo, who, without the thick canopy of Asian jungle, developed eye cancer, and Tilikum, the orca at Sea World who aggressively drowned his trainer in 2010 and who had been involved in two previous deaths. [8]

In our innocence, and even more ironically, in spite of our best intentions to properly raise and care for animals whether as companions or preservationists, by participating in mass market trade and recreation we are complicit in their mistreatment. DeGrazia calls us all complicit to “some extent” by using “products that are connected with mistreatment of animals.” [9]

Reflecting:

Much attention is given to social, political, and economic oppression of marginalized groups. It is politically correct not only to be green but to enact global fair trade policies among nations to lift those marginalized populations out of poverty and oppression. Christian ethicism Miguel DeLaTorre devotes a powerful section in his book to this. Environmental activists have joined the international chorus of saving the planet for plant and human species. However, both agendas seem to overlook our four legged and winged counterparts. D. DeGrazia is stingingly precise in his declaration that if we take reflect on the enormity of animals used for human purpose and profit, “the degree of harm they undergo, and the triviality of some of the human interests for the sake of which animals are harmed, there is a good case that animals are the most oppressed group on the planet.”[10]
In fact, they are perhaps, along with infants and children, the most voiceless of all oppressed groups. They are acted upon without their consent and often by humans who perform such actions not for the animals’ benefit but for human benefit and more disturbingly, profit, often, as in the case with experimentation, resulting in suffering and ultimately death.[11] Medical experimentation causes suffering and pain to the animals. The conditions under which they are tested are confining, sterile and artificial, environments to which human beings under study would not be subjected . Levy, knowing that most people would strongly disapprove of medical experimentation on developmentally deficient human beings, understands that would not express the same disapproval if such research were imposed without consent upon higher order animals like primates. He poses a question that challenges our ethics: “ What ethically relevant difference is there to account for opposing using humans in a dangerous experiment, involving risk of life without informed consent, which also does not hold say for chimpanzees? Does their different legal status entail a morally relevant difference?” [12]
As we act upon animals without consent we become wielders of absolute power. We do this as we have been conditioned to believe – erroneously -- that the dominion given humans over animals in Genesis is synonymous with domination, a belief which until recently remained unchallenged. Contemporary animal rights activists have employed extreme methods to direct attention to the problem, and the more reasonable animal welfare advocates (who cite love of animals as their primary motivation) have drawn attention to the problem of institutionalized animal suffering. In fact, Croney and Reynolds report that such uncompassionate attitude is reinforced academically as “many introductory chapters of such texts characterize animals as existing solely to serve humans “ exposing the “The political nature of the relationship between humans and animals thus becomes clear—humans domesticated animals and subsequently maintain control over how they are used. Animals are therefore viewed as subordinate to humans.” [13]
This can be attributed as well to a “pervasive and hierarchical dualism dominates our perceptions: “either/or, self/Other, culture/nature, man/woman, human/animal which renders the “Other subordinate.[14]” According to Steeve, if we examine human history, we will see that at various points all oppressed others in have been denied the basic characteristics of life most humans claim for themselves. “Nature, animals, and women,”he continues, have been depicted as “ lacking mind or soul” and “stand as irrational Others to culture, human beings, and men.” [15] This illustrates an imbalance power analogous to other such struggles tackled by Miguel De La Torre shows us that in God’s realm, power structures are reversed: “i\It was not Rome, the most powerful city of the known world, where God chose to perform the miracle of the incarnation, nor was it Jerusalem, the center of Yahweh workshop; it was impoverished Galillee. He calls Jesus' hometown of Nazareth "insignificant." [16] Isn't a manger the most insignificant place in the most insignificant town? There’s a deep lesson here about power and authority that contradicts society’s perception of animal lives which are not assigned value equally to human lives. DeGrazia explains, “equal consideration implies that the presumption against causing animal suffering is as strong as that against causing human suffering. Very few animal-using practices currently meet this standard.” [17] Here we see an imbalance power analogous to other marginalization and disempowerment addressed by Miguel De La Torre, who emphasizes the fact that in God’s realm, power structures are reversed “it was not Rome, the most powerful city of the known world, where God chose to perform the miracle of the incarnation, nor was it Jerusalem, the center of Yahweh workshop; it was impoverished Galilee. He calls Jesus' hometown of Nazareth "insignificant."[18] Isn't a manger the most insignificant place in the most insignificant town? We learn an important lesson here regarding power and authority.

Our treatment of animals in the agriculture industry does violate the Christian ethics we have claimed for ourselves, the most obvious being a respect for natural law. “The chief ethical issue with regard to animal welfare is not so much the killing of animals for food,” writes Levy, “ but the horrible factory like methods that achieve this purpose by the most profitable means. Fattening and force-feeding (of geese, calves, turkeys, etc.) are in flagrant contradiction to their nature” in addition to causing them suffering .[19] The most oft-quoted animal rights theologian Rev. Andrew Linzey addresses this with striking imagery: “Confining a de-beaked hen in a battery cage is more than a moral crime; it is a living sign of our failure to recognize the blessing of God in creation."[20]

But we are all not industrial farmers or slaughterhouse managers controlling the lives of animals, are we? In real life, we confront more subtle situations that test our ethics regarding animal treatment. Consider how our ethics are challenged by the following scenarios suggested by DeGrazia.[i]
(A) A family dyes its white terrier green for the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
(B) Zoo visitors mimic and ridicule the gorillas, who are unable to see this behind one way mirrors.
(C) A captively bred research rat lives “a comfortable, healthy life with full access to his family” provided appropriate activity. He is given simple blood tests but he lives dies a natural death and is posthumously used for further research.
(D) Free range farm turkeys die naturally and if they are disease free are used for food.
(E) A large zoo constructs animal-friendly allow them to live peacefully and comfortably. However, the zoo’s mission is admittedly public education and entertainment. [21]

Most people would not experience a conflict of values with these issues since none of the animals in these situations are technically or intentionally harmed. However, a deeper consideration brings forth ethical questions that test our faith relative to sacred lives, God’s creation. Would we treat the Lamb of God this way? Joseph Campbell provides examples of how Western civilization has de-mystified the natural world, citing the greatest animal slaughter perpetrated against the buffalo, an animal sacred to the plains Native Americans. The offense isn’t the killing of the animal itself; the offense is the disrespect respect for what was to the Plains Indians holy. Littering the prairie with thousands of rotting buffalo carcasses and hoarding the just skins for profit was an act of irreverence that exceeded the parameters of careless greed and heralded the systematic destruction of a people. It brutally rendered the sacred ordinary and reduced the spiritually reverent to the earthly mundane. Understanding historical human-animal relationships, Thomas Berry called our treatment of the planet and its inhabitants a” destructive entrancement that has taken possession of the Western soul.” [22]

DeGrazia discusses the conflict between the utilitarian view, that animals are her for our use, and the rights view, which maintains that as living, feeling beings, animals have rights that must be respected and given equal consideration, which “implies that the presumption against causing animal suffering is as strong as that against causing human suffering. Very few animal-using practices currently meet this standard.” [23]
In a study examining attitudes toward animal use in research, Hagelin, Carlsson, and Hau found that respondents associated Christianity positively with the acceptance of the use of animals in research. Christians “differed significantly from Buddhists by being more supportive of animal research.”[24] What would account for these differences? Buddhism, like Native American spiritual beliefs, take very seriously the unity of all creation. Whether it’s the Buddhist acceptance of all sentient beings endowed with consciousness or the Native American philosophy that “we are all related,” it appears that the Judeo-Christian ethic has omitted from their traditional teachings those same principles. However, it is the selective teaching of thousands of years of Western religion that resulted in the human-animal divide. A closer investigation of our traditions brings us to a different reality that sits more comfortably amid the Eastern and Native traditions.

On the surface we have not given much attention to animals in religion, but not because our sacred relationship doesn’t exist in our Holy documents. The consensus among both theologians and secular environmentalists is that animals Western culture not been given animals high priority even recently as we consider our crucial roles as caretakers of the earth. De la Torre goes further: If the creation story describes humanity’s appointment as stewards of the earth's resources, then as caretakers" we must protect those resources .[25]

Palmer writes, “In much ecological theology, if animals appear at all, they are viewed as part of ‘earth’ or ‘the earth community’ and not given consideration as a separate entity relegating them to subspecies.[26] She calls them “relatively invisible.” [27] Levy calls for creating ethical codes that consider animals more equally. As we develop such codes for ourselves as human beings, he asks, “Is it not incumbent upon us to extend this ethics to other living beings as well, and thus to contribute to a better and more harmonious relationship with our surroundings?” [28] Such ethics would naturally entail elements of the virtuous circle as N.T. Wright advocates, the most applicable being Right Relationship with God, Transformation of the Mind and Heart, and Imago Dei.

Right Relationship with God: It is the governing utilitarian philosophy that interferes with a full relationship with God. If by our practice and attitude we do not show reverence to all God’s creation, then we in turn do not show complete reverence to God. Thomas Berry addresses the prevailing utilitarianism, writing, “The difficulty in out relation with the animals comes from the sense of use as our primary relationship with the world about us. Hardly any other attitude so betrays ourselves and the entire universe in which we live. [29] “By failing not only to live harmoniously with the animal kingdom but by not taking extra measures to strike that balance, we demean God’s universe and ourselves. Kemmerer adds that the world of which we are a part is a reflection of our Creator, Christians, in making their hearts “right,” , need to “ treat the world (and all its myriad creatures) with loving care, they acknowledge each creature as God’,…and thereby express reverence for God’s works, for God’s sovereignty.” De La Torre calls "our refusal to recognize the damage being committed to the environment constitutes the ultimate form of oppression , for it brings destruction to life." [30]

Willis reiterates how right action is dependent upon God: “God’s action claims, guides, and measures right human action with regard to other creatures” (Willis 81). Significant for the Christian , Wright reminds us, is to remember the at Jesus was well versed in Scripture and fully aware of the covenant between God and his people. [31]But the ecological theologian would made a correction to red “between God and his creation,” which includes animals. De La Torre, focusing on the marginalized in relation to the environment, makes it a point to say “all creatures” are have a right to enjoy the fruits of the earth. “"Creation as a gift means that all living creatures have a basic right to its products" [32]

Inaugurated Eschatology: Further, we must also consider the narrative of our human experience as we strive to be people of faith, applying theological ethics to all creation. This is the intention of the God’s reign on earth. It is through our virtue that God will reign, and we must learn to believe our own Biblical references to that earthly kingdom that relies heavily on animal imagery:
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobraAnd the weaned child will put his hand on the viper's den. (IS 11:6-8)

Paul Wadell relates this to our faithfulness to the story of God, linking Christian prudence with wisdom through good actions that make the reign of God “visible” and “consistent with the new way of life Jesus makes possible.”[33] Linzey points to Mark 1:13, when Jesus is “with the wild beasts He explains the use of the word “with” in almost Buddhist terms , simply being: “Jesus does not fight the wild beasts or seek to tame them. He is just ‘with’ them.” He references this as a “messianic” line that hearkens to the Isaiah passage heralding the coming of Jesus which entails “the eschatological possibility of living peaceably with animals.” [34]Wright shows us that the challenge is to begin to live “eschatological authenticity,” learning a “new way of being human."[35]

Imago Dei: We should strive to live our lives in the image of God. What God saw as good in his creation we should see as well. Northcutt discusses the created order and natural law in the Jewish and Christian traditions, both of which “affirm” creation as re flections of God’s “being.”[36] Wright uses the phrase “put on Jesus,” which requires enacting the virtues of Christ. This means we must not exercise power “ by oppression but by serving those who are weak.” [37](Palmer 165). Paul Wadell articulates the core of the Imago Dei teaching as recognizing the inherent dignity in all people, that “ the wealthy and the powerful have no more dignity than the poor and the weak” (77). Having established that animals are the most marginalized of the earth’s creatures, we can as Christians extend that dignity and respect to all living creatures. He goes further saying that “as God’s images, human beings are called to live in relationship with God, one another, and all life” (78). God loved God’s creation in its entirety. To live authentically in the image of God, then, so must we love.

Renewal of the Mind: Wright maintains that “the key to virtue lies precisely in the transformation of the mind,” [38] which certainly takes into account Paul’s call for transformation in Rom; 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Respecting the lives of animals, for many, requires a complete renewal of both the mind and heart. It is common experience for those are introduced to animal suffering to have a change of heart and create a new awareness of animal consciousness. Renewing the heart and mind also involves paying close attention to the word we read in Scripture rather than glossing over them. Whenever we read the words earth and creation we must make a conscious effort to move away from our anthropocentric understanding and widen the circle of inclusion. Wright assures us that “when the heart is renewed, it has a fresh set of tasks,” notably “the avoidance of all manner of wickedness.” [39] Imposing unnatural conditions that cause suffering on animals is a manifestation of wicked behavior that has become habit. We need to acquire new habits that more fully embrace non-human creation.

The Pauline call for renewal takes center stage in St. Basil’s prayer, “Oh, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us.”[40] Enlarge within us, he asks, open our hearts and minds to encompass God’s love for all creation. In “The Environment and Christian Ethics,” Northcutt the quest for depth and wisdom in their lives through “relations with the natural world, the animals world”[41] and sees this manifesting in the increasing number of vegetarians among today’s youth. Add to that the numbers of people who seek Eastern paths to enlightenment that embrace a spiritual union between human and non-human creation. Jenkins’ almost mournful assessment expresses Western culture’s failure to develop the unity of life principle: “When Christianity fails to recognize the triadic relationship among humanity writes, creation, and God’s presence,” he writes, “Christian experience loses its sense of the world.” [42]
Praying

Christian ethicists such Wright and Wadell caution against isolation in living the virtuous life. Wright calls for a community of like-minded people, and Wadell emphasizes seeking counsel from the Christian community, consulting” their “moral teachings and traditions .”[43] Where do we best find such counsel? In the central instrument through which God’s will becomes known to us: Scripture. From the very beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures, we see a Divine contradiction to the current utilitarian world view that governs our attitude toward animals. Kemmerer takes us to Genesis 1:24-15 to illustrate this. “ God makes the animals before man, and pronounces them good without man.” [44] Additionally, both man and animal are made from the earth: “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). Misinterpretations of earthly dominion given humans in Genesis have given false license to many who exercising unjust power over animals. As Hiers observes, perhaps in Genesis God was giving dominion over animals to Adam and Eve only, not to all future generations. He continues, proposing that this responsibility was given before the flood; after the flood, our relationship with animals was “radically altered.” [45] That relationship appears over and over throughout Old Testament as we bear witness to the covenant between God and creation, a covenant not limited to God and human. The story of Noah and the Ark is frequently referred to by animal activists as the first animal rescue on record. When the flood waters subsided, it was a dove who brought the message that land was near. After the flood, God enters into a covenant with Noah and all the inhabitants of the earth. “I am now establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you” (Gen. 9:10). Willis calls the ark a vehicle of “ecological salvation” which very clearly exemplifies God’s giving humankind an “ active preservationist responsibility.[46]” Levy points out that animals received equal punishment from God who saved only one pair of each species and one human family[47] .
God promises never to destroy the earth by water is clearly extended to the animals: “never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood” and repeats with the appearance of a rainbow, the triangular covenant that is “between me and you and all living beings.” In fact, between Genesis 9:8 and 9:17, God repeats his promise no fewer than six times. Hiersl writes, “Clearly this was not an anthropocentric covenant, rather it was made with and for the benefit of all kinds of living creatures” and” precedes the other covenants Abraham and his descendants.” [48]

In multiple instances in the Scriptures we see parity of animal and human life. For example, in Jonah 3:9, animals are instructed to mourn along with their human masters. "But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may )turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands.” In Psalms 36:7 animals and humans are addressed in one breath: "O Lord, thou preservest man and beast." In Isaiah 43:20, God also expects the "beast of the field, the dragons and the owls" to "honor me [...] because I give waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert" (Levy). Levy writes that animals in distress also appeal to God in Psalms 104:21-27, 147:9, and Job 38:4. He continues to identify passages that show equal expectations of humans and animals under God’s Law. EX 20:10 reveals the inclusion of animals in the law commanding Sabbath rest. Moses obtained water from the rock, so that "the congregation and their beasts drink" (Numbers 20:8) Also, both men and animals were forbidden from climbing Mount Sinai or touching its border; punishment for violating this law was death. (Exodus 19:12-13).[49]
In some Scriptural passages we see animals who act as protectors of human beings by either their very nature or by direct instructions from God. In Num. 22 we read us how Balaam’s donkey, seeing an angry angel standing in their way and knowing the angel is a physical threat, acts three times to block Balaam from moving up the road. Each time the donkey ran interference by blocked him, pinned him, and stepped him, he saved saving Balaam, but Balaam beat him for not moving forward.

The angel of the LORD said to him, "Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out as an adversary, because your way was .contrary to me. But the donkey saw me and turned aside from me these three times. If she had not turned aside from me, I would surely have killed you just now, and let her live. (Num 22:32-33)

God directs ravens to feed Elijah in the wilderness and we see Jonah safely delivered to shore delivered safely by a fish. Animals also petition God for mercy. Levy writes that animals in distress also appeal to God in Psalms 104:21-27, 147:9, and Job 38:4. Kimberly Patton cites animal prominence in the Scriptures “in the biblical eaglehood of the Lord… in the breath of the ox, donkey, and sheep who blew on the shivering Christ child in Bethlehem…in the Holy Spirit descending ‘like a dove.[50] Just look at the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth: a “king” born among barnyard animals in a manger. While the mass consciousness interpretation sees this as a lowly birth, perhaps the opposite is more of the truth. God choosing to deliver the Messiah among natural and innocent four-legged creatures is evidence that God considers animals sacred.

Linzey advocates living life through the model of Christ teaches us that power must be used “not by oppression but by serving those who are weak.”[51] This is the missing link in any practice we endeavor. Purely secular approaches will yield purely secular results, and the purpose of this discussion is to put God in the center of any discourse on human ethics. Theologians have addressed the significance of defending the voiceless creatures with whom we share the planet. In 1842, John Henry Newman delivered a sermon comparing Christ to "a lamb that is led to the slaughter. That metaphor, indeed, the entire passion of Christ, stirs people’s emotions and elicits a life changing compassion. It is precisely that compassion we hold for Christ as the slaughtered lamb, Linzey says, that we must transfer to all innocent and mistreated animals. [52] The lamb image repeats throughout New Testament, with Jesus telling his disciples to “feed my lambs” in John 21:15. Shepherd references abound in the New Testament, confirming power of metaphor as caretaker of the innocent and less powerful. In Luke we read of the shepherds tending their flocks when they are visited by an angel of the Lord announcing Christ’s birth:
In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night.

And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. But the angel said to them, "(Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ (the Lord. "This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger." (LK 2:8-12)

Praxis

At least a few times a year we read about a rampaging captive elephant who kills its trainer. The most recent cases were in a Pennsylvania circus in April when an elephant stomped and dragged its trainer to death, and in May of 2009, the same thing happened on a Bollywood movie set. We all remember the horror of the tiger attack during a Sigried and Roy show at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Such tragedies continue as consequences of human-designed oppression, of forcing animals to live contrary to their nature.

Writing about animals and ethics, Fraser, who appears more sympathetic to the agricultural industry than to the animals claims we have no resolution to the problem because we have not yet agreed on a “ genuine understanding of how animal agriculture affects animals, the environment, and the good of the public.” [53] It feels simplistic on any level, though, to call for understanding the effect of animal agriculture on animals. We know how it affects them. They live unnatural lives. They suffer. They die. We eat them. He is correct in attributing at least part of the problem to the polarization of both sides of the argument, however. In areas where passionate supporters of each don’t see negotiation room. While to animal rights activists that might seem conciliatory and to farmers, breeders, and researchers it appears compromising, no movement can be made in favor of animals unless both sets of extremists step closer to the center. Palmer suggests we abandon the black or white approach of “either they have rights or they don’t” and examine the specific relational contexts that call for ethical determination that take into account: recognition of the very different natures of different animals; sensitivity to the different kinds and origins of human-animal relations; engagement with a much wider range of aspects of the context in which any particular relation is located; consideration of human-animal power relations, including kinds of domination and the nature and possibility or animal actions, reactions, and resistance. [54]

Hagelin’s survey indicated a link between childhood pet ownership and compassion for non-domesticated pets as well as for human beings[55] (84) which corroborates the former studies that link disregard for animals with greater violence toward humans. We also know that prisoners who are provided pet visitations and taught animal husbandry develop deeper compassion for human life as well. Their study also showed that using use of dogs and cats as research subjects was more distressing to pet owners than to veterinarians and medical students, who are perhaps desensitized to the institutional use of animals. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell discusses the psychological shift we must make in order to wage war against a people. It is the duty of the media, he says, to turn a people into an it to make it conscionable to kill them. The same can be said for our contemporary mass culture attitudes toward animals. We shut our hearts and devalue the beingness of non-human creatures to justify their mistreatment, distancing ourselves from their suffering, saying “it’s only an animal.” How convenient for us to dismiss the reality that to God, all life is sacred. It is not a human prerogative to determine which lives are more sacred than others.

Reassessment

Among our ongoing challenges, Wadell writes, is to “enlarge our capacity for….compassion” [56] The more we grow in friendship with God, the more we enlarge our capacity to love others” [57] or, more appropriately in the context of animals, to love the other. This is distilled in DeLa Torres conclusion that “when the sacredness of profits replaces the sacredness of life, we must reassess.”[58]

We can begin with simple change of consciousness at the smallest levels.
Meditative breathing is a good example. We are first taught to cultivate an awareness of the breath. In deeper meditation, we are taught to control our thoughts not by ignoring them or pushing them aside but by acknowledging them. Awareness is the first significant step in changing one’s behavior. Recognizing and accepting our complicity is the first move away from that complicity. How small must an action be for it to effect change? Levy tells the story of Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria , who in teaching peace, instructed his students not to kill annoying insects, and relates the Albert Schwietzer’s deliberate choice to close windows lest an insect enter his house and meet death. [59]

Along with admitting our responsibility in the treatment of animals, we must assume responsibility for the devastating consequences of our actions. Northcott holds up Jeremiah as an example connecting “ ecological devastation and the abandonment of the worship and commands of the Lord. Because Israel had turned from the Lord their land, its mountains and streams, animals and crops would be laid waste, polluted and destroyed.”[60] We need to reexamine and redefine our relationship with the earth and honor that triad of God, human and animal. DeLaTorre warns us that “the abundant life of Christ came to give cannot be accomplished within a depleted earth.” [61] Berry calls forth a reference to Exodus as we leave an era of destruction and enter what he has named the “Ecozoic” era.[62] We stand at a critical threshold and must view the animal world as part of the earth, lest we fall victim to the same ends as those against whom we wage violence. The Bible tells us for every action there is a reaction. The Buddhists and Hindus know and honor the power of karma, which has some manifestation in many cultures. Chief Seattle warned us that whatever happens to the beasts happens to man. All things are connected.” Berry shares with us the Chinese concept of “Jen,” a word difficult to translate in isolation but which in different contexts means “ love, goodness, human-heartedness, and affection.” He shows its compatibility with Paul’s teaching that “all things are held together in Christ.” [63] When we can live with compassion toward all living things, we will have truly renewed our minds and transformed our hearts. When we act in compassion with all living things, we must honor and respect “the least of these” the animals. Only then will we be aligned with the spirit of Christ.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” ( Mat. 25:40).

Works Cited
Berry, Thomas. “The Ecozoic Era” Eleventh Annual E.F.Schumacher Lectures, Oct. 1991,
Ed by Hildegarde Hannum.
Berry, Thomas. Prologue,”Loneliness and Presence.” In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in
Religion Science, & Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly PattonColumbia
University Press: 2006.
Berry, Thomas. “The Spirituality of the Earth.” In Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches in
Ecological Theology, edited by William Eaken and Jay B. McDaniel.
http://www.religiononline.com/
Croney, Candace C. “Words Matter: Implications of Semantics and Imagery in Framing Animal-
Welfare Issues. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 37:1 (2010), 101-106.
Croney, C.C. and R.D. Reynnells. “Bioethics—Livestock and Poultry: The Ethics of Food
The Ethics of Semantics: Do We Clarify or Obfuscate Reality to Influence
Perceptions of Farm Animal Production?” Poultry Science 87:2 (2008) 387-391.
Degrazia, D. “Animal Ethics Around the turn of the 21st Century.” Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 11 (1999) 111–129.
De La Torre, Miguel. Doing Christian Ethics From the Margins. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004.
“Elephant Kills Trainer at Pennsylvania Circus.: CNN.com 10 Aril 2010.
Fraser, D. “The New Perception of Animal Agriculture: Legless Cows, Featherless, Chickens,
and a Need for Genuine Analysis.” Journal of Animal Science 79 (2001) 634-641.
Hagelin, Joakin, Hans-Erik Carlsson , and Jann Hau. “Factors that may influence the Outcome
An Overview of Surveys on How People View Animal Experimentation.” Public
Understanding of Science 2003; 12 (2003). 67-81.
Hiersl, Richard H. “Reverence for Life and Environmental Ethics in Biblical Law and
Covenant.” Forum on Religion and Ecology.
http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/christianity/essays/richard_hiers.pdf.
Hyland, J.R. God’s covenant with Animals: A Biblical Basis for the Humane Treatment of All
Creatures. New York: Lantern Books, 2000.
Holy Scriptures. NIV. www.biblegateway.com
Jenkins,Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. Oxford
University Press 2008.
Kemmerer, Lisa. “Christian Ethics and Nonhuman Animals.” TheandrosL An Online Journal of
Orthodox Christian Theology and Philosophy. 5:3 (2008). http://www.theandros.com/ethicsanimals.html
Levy, Ze’ev. “Ethical Issues of Animal Welfare in Jewish Thought.” In Judaism and
Environmental Ethics: A Reader edited by Martin D. Yaffee. Latham:Lexington Books, 2001. 321-330.
Linzey, Andrew. “Brute creatures and the Passion: Why Christians Should Care About Animals.” The London Times. 2 Sept. 2009. 102.
Linzey, Andrew. “Living Peaceably.” The Oxford Center for Animal Ethics. 6 Oct. 2009.
http://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/what-we-do/commentary/living-peaceably/
Palmer, Clare. “Animals in Christian Ethics: Developing a Relational Approach. Ecotheology 7.2
(2003) 163-185.
Patton,Kimberly. “Caught with Ourselves in ithe Net of Life and Time: Traditional Views of
Animals in Religion. In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in
Religion Science, & Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly PattonColumbia
University Press: 2006, 27-3.
Northcott, Michael S., The Environment and Christian Ethics. Cambridge University Press.
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/76314/frontmatter/9780521576314_frontmatter.pdf
“Sea World: Trainer Dragged Into Water.” http://www.wesh.com/r/22659996/detail.html. 24
Feb. 2010.
Steeve, H. Peter. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. State University of
New York Press, 1999.
“Vivisection.” Merriam-Webster. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vivisection).
Wadell, Paul J. Happiness and the Chrisitan Moral Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 1991.
Waldau, Paul, and Kimberlry Patton, eds. A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion
Science, & Ethics. Columbia Unviersity Press: 2006.
“What Companies are Still Testing Products on Animals?” http://www.thegoodhuman.com/.
Wright, N.T. After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. New York: Harper Collins,
2010.

[1] Hagelin, Joakin, Hans-Erik Carlsson, and Jann Hau, “Factors That May Influence the Outcome: An Overview of Surveys on How People View Animal Experimentation, “ Public Understanding of Science (2003) 12: 67.
[2] “Vivisection. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
[3] Hagelin, Carlsson, and Hau 12
[4] “What Companies are Still Testing Products on Animals?” http://www.thegoodhuman.com/
[5] Croney, Candace C. “Words Matter: Implications of Semantics and Imagery in Framing Animal- Welfare Issues, Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 37:1 (2010), 102.
[6] Ibid, 105.
[7] Palmer,Clare, Animals in Christian Ethics: Developing a Relational Approach, Ecotheology 7.2 (2003), 173.
[8] “Sea World: Trainer Dragged Into Water.” http://www.wesh.com/r/22659996/detail.html. 24
Feb. 2010.
[9] Degrazia, D. “Animal Ethics Around the turn of the 21st Century.” Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 11 (1999), 17.
[10] Ibid, 12
[11] Levy, Ze’ev. “Ethical Issues of Animal Welfare in Jewish Thought.” In Judaism and
Environmental Ethics: A Reader edited by Martin D. Yaffee. Latham:Lexington Books, 2001, 329.
[12] Ibid, 330
[13] Croney, C.C. and R.D. Reynnells. “Bioethics—Livestock and Poultry: The Ethics of Food, The Ethics of Semantics: Do We Clarify or Obfuscate Reality to Influence Perceptions of Farm Animal Production?” Poultry Science 87:2 (2008) 388.
[14] Steeve, H. Peter. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. New York:State University of New York Press, 1999. 55.
[15] Ibid
[16] De La Torre, Miguel. Doing Christian Ethics From the Margins. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004, 93
[17] DeGrazia, 112
[18] De La Torre, 93
[19] Levy 329
[20] Linzey, Andrew. Christianity and the Rights of Animals
[21] DeGrazia, 18
[22] Berry, Thomas. “The Ecozoic Era” Eleventh Annual E.F.Schumacher Lectures, Ed by Hildegarde Hannum Oct. 1991.
Ed by Hildegarde Hannum, 5.
[23] DeGrazia 22
[24] Hagelin, Carlsson, and Hau, 73.
[25] DeLaTorre, 132
[26] Palmer 163
[27] Ibid 164
[28] Levy, 220.
[29] Berry, Thomas. Prologue,”Loneliness and Presence.” In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in
Religion Science, & Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton, Columbia
University Press: 2006, 8.
[30] DeLaTorre, 133
[31] Wright, N.T. After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. New York: Harper Collins,
2010, 133.
[32] DeLaTorre, 132
[33] Wadell, Paul J. Happiness and the Chrisitan Moral Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 1991, 190
[34] Linzey, Andrew. “Living Peaceably.” The Oxford Center for Animal Ethics. 6 Oct. 2009
[35] Wright, 102
[36] Northcott, Michael S., The Environment and Christian Ethics. Cambridge University Press.
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/76314/frontmatter/9780521576314_frontmatter.pdf
[37] Palmer, 165
[38] Wright, 259
[39] Ibid, 131
[40] Hyland, Hyland, J.R. God’s covenant with Animals: A Biblical Basis for the Humane Treatment of All
Creatures. New York: Lantern Books, 2000
[41] Northcutt 37
[42] Jenkins,Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. Oxford
University Press 2008, 17
[43] Wadell,177
[44] Kemmerer, Lisa. “Christian Ethics and Nonhuman Animals.” TheandrosL An Online Journal of Orthodox Christian Theology and Philosophy. 5:3 (2008).
[45] Hiersl, Richard H. “Reverence for Life and Environmental Ethics in Biblical Law and Covenant.” Forum on Religion and Ecology. http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/christianity/essays/richard_hiers.pdf. 2.

[46] Jenkins, 81
[47] Levy, 326
[48] Hiersl, Richard H. “Reverence for Life and Environmental Ethics in Biblical Law and Covenant.” Forum on Religion and Ecology. http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/christianity/essays/richard_hiers.pdf. 4-5
[49] Levy, 326
[50] Patton, Kimberly. Caught with Ourselves in the Net of Life and Time: Traditional Views of Animals in ReligionIn A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion Science, & Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton, Columbia
University Press: 2006, 34.
[51] Palmer, 165
[52] Linzey, Andrew, “Brute creatures and the Passion: Why Christians Should Care About Animals.” The London Times. 2 Sept. 2009. 102.

[53] Fraser, D. “The New Perception of Animal Agriculture: Legless Cows, Featherless, Chickens,
and a Need for Genuine Analysis.” Journal of Animal Science 79 (2001) 640.
[54] Palmer 171-172
[55] Haglein, Carlsson, and Hau, 84
[56] Wadell, 29
[57] Ibid, 36
[58] DeLaTorre, 123
[59] Levy 331
[60] Northcott, 170
[61] DeLaTorre,134
[62] Berry, Thomas. “The Ecozoic Era” Eleventh Annual E.F.Schumacher Lectures, Oct. 1991, 8.
[63] Berry, Thomas. “The Spirituality of the Earth.” In Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches in
Ecological Theology, edited by William Eaken and Jay B. McDaniel.
http://www.religiononline.com/
[i] DeGrazia provides similar models. I have modified his examples while retaining the ethical questions.

The Spiritual Lives of Animals

2010-11-05T13:02:00.010-04:00

A few months ago my friend Geoffrey sent me a link to an MSNBC report highlighting new academic research indicating that animals have a spiritual side. One hypothesis it offered was the fact that in human beings, the spiritual center lies in the "most primitive part of the brain" so it would be likely that animals, being more primitive creatures than we are, share that primitive spot.

As pleased as I am to see the scientific world corroborate what shamans and metaphysicians have known through experience for thousands of years, I would disagree that animals are primitive. I would say primal, not primitive.

We used to cling to this concept in a human development context as well; as knowledge and technology have propelled us further into the electronic, industrial, and later cyber ages in the last few hundred years, our culture mislabeled as primitive indigenous peoples without the high powered gadgets and mass production. Does simplicity dictate primitiveness or does it free us lives from clutter and debris to engender an inner life that nurtures just the opposite? Films such as Baraka and The Gods Must Be Crazy easily poke holes through what is now a very arrogant world view.

But back to the animals.

It is my soul's work to communicate with them on that spiritual level and I, like all other serious animal communicators (mediums, psychics, intuitives), don't merely recognize but revere the spiritual lives of animals and the loving, sacred wisdom they transmit from those higher realms. Years ago at a Penelope Smith Workshop in Rhinebeck, New York, nearly 70 people sat in meditation with a large snake. Our task was to ask the snake to describe her daily life. What we all received was strikingly different. Snake had another agenda, a higher purpose. Coming out out of the silent meditation, the entire group agreed the snake was not interested in sharing her mundane experience but instead delivered a spiritual message which we received individually but shared collectively: a call for humans to recognize the divinity of the snake. All life is divine. All creatures are sacred. The snake makes a home on the lowest and highest elevations on earth, easily and comes to us as God's living metaphor. Recognize all live, all creatures, all people, as extentions of the Divine. We are no higher or lower or better or worse than those we too readily and wrongfully dismiss. When Penelope broke the silence noting that the snake clearly had a higher agenda, many of the workshop participants were surprised -- because each of them had received the same message silently, not recognizing the power of the snake to speak to each of us on higher levels. What I saw that day in trance was the snake transforming her body slowly from a linear pose into a perfect circle. She reveled in her uniqueness as the only earthly creature capable of such physical arrangement and assertively but lovingly reminded us that as a symbol of eternity she must not be overlooked. Hardly primitive thoughts.

Home is Where the Dog Is

2010-09-20T09:16:00.007-04:00

In the past ten years I have been teaching The Wizard of Oz to my college LIT students, sometimes three classes per semester, two or three semesters a year, and in recent years,instead of paying attention to the film itself (a film whose dialogue is etched in my memory), I pay more attention to student reactions and responses. Once Dorothy hooks up with her companions along the yellow brick road (a symbol of the third chakra, our core self), we see that each character is not searching for an object like a heart or a brain but is searching for an integral part of himself: chakra he thinks he is missing. Of course we know that no chakras are missing; they just have not been activated in the characters' consciousness. This pretty much parallels the way we live our lives in a mundane world polluted by noise that keeps us from our spiritual selves. Who leads us to our spiritual selves in this film? The same creature who leads all us sharing this blog: Toto, the dog. He is the propeller of the Divine.

Who causes Dorothy to leave home in the first place? A naughty Toto exploring Elmira Gulch's garden. Who leads the trio of her companions to the tower (symbol of the unconsious) where she is kept prisoner? A fearless Toto. Who ultimately unmasks the wizard as a fraud? An all-knowing Toto. And who prevents Dorothy from taking the easy route home in a hot air balloon? Toto, who leaps out of the balloon as it ascends, forcing Dorothy out after him, where she must learn her ultimate lesson: that there are no gurus, there are no greener pastures, that all she ever needs to survive is what she already possesses. Toto is her spiritual teacher in every regard.

Over the years, I've been monitoring student response to these characters and find, surprisingly, that my student reactions differ greatly from mine. They overwhelmingly identify the Cowardly Lion as their favorite character. I, however, water like a fountain every time (and I've seen this more more than 100 times) Dorothy has to part ways with the Scarecrow, her first, completely unselfish, and most loyal companion. Go ahead. Point out how this translates in my own life.

That's exactly what I invite you to do on October 22 at the Crystal Garden in Boynton Beach, where I'll be facilitating a worskshop on this very subject. We will talk about shamanism, mythology, and the chakra system, watch the film, and then see where in our own lives we most identify with the characters so we can fix what we think may be broken. I hope to see you there! Feel free to call me at 954-680-5759 with questions, or call The Crystal Garden at 561-369-2836.

www.thecrystalgarden.com

Splinters

2010-08-17T09:39:00.030-04:00

I’m thinking of a splinter, how a minute foreign object embedded in a finger or foot can cause enough discomfort to slow or completely halt our normal flow of activity, its size disproportionate to the rest of our bodies. So it is with a tiny pebble in a shoe or microscopic remnant of the roast beef between two teeth or a sticky burr stabbing the dog’s pad. At first we feel a little tic or snag…and then either its effect grows or our awareness of it sharpens, becoming extra-focused until the pain exaggerates and what we feel is no longer our finger anymore but the splinter itself. We once loved sliding our hand down the banister that bore the splinter. We relished the walk on the wooded path that yielded the pebble…and that roast beef tasted scrumptious the first time around.

I meditated on Sunday, asking for clarity and cleansing. When we rid ourselves of that which causes discomfort, like pulling a splinter, we endure an acute, temporary pain. I once had to euthanize a dog, a standard poodle, with severe behavior and temperament problems. His third owner , I purchased him from a deceptive groomer who cited as the reason for his rehoming a brown spot on his tooth which prevented him from AKC showing (we all know this could have been altered). Wanting only a pet, I was unconcerned with cosmetic perfection.
With me, Max was loving and obedient. In the street, with other people and other dogs, he was insane. We couldn’t walk in public when a person or another dog came into view. He would bark ferociously and lunge at them aggressively in what was really an uncontrollable fit . We tried group obedience classes. During the “down” lesson, Max’s misbehavior prompted the smug instructor to make an example of me by taking the leash from my hand to show the class of 20 or so “how to do it right.” I enjoyed watching him sweat and huff until he thought he had the dog in the down position, but I saw Max about one inch from being flat on the concrete. The arrogant instructor, himself squatting, turned his head sideways and upward toward me and said, “See? This is how it’s done,” at which point Max leaped up and wrestled with him angrily. We were asked not to return to class.
Next we tried private instruction with a well respected trainer my schnauzer and I had used earlier. After an hour with Max, she recommended I give him away as he was beyond repair. This thought appalled me. I was already his third owner and he was as attached to me as I was to him. And how fair would that be to another person or to this poor dog? How unethical. He would be mine or he just would not be.

He was certainly a problem. I loved him even as he became more destructive physically and socially. I couldn’t trust him with other dogs or people and feared the consequences of having company, particularly my toddler niece. He was too ornery and loud to be crated, barking incessantly and disturbing the neighbors in the building. When I left him alone, he opened drawers and removed sharp instruments. I once came home to find him in the living room with a large butcher knife. Thank God he had stolen it by the handle. Every time I turned the key to enter my apartment I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer.

In a pleading consultation with my vet, Dr. Grubb, I asked for a treatment I’d read about to temper aggression in male dogs: female hormone injections. He cautiously agreed. After a few months with no improvement, we tried another round of hormone therapy. One afternoon while I was out t he swiped his angry paw across the kitchen counter and sent a lead crystal bowl crashing to the floor. It splintered into a what looked like a geometric pattern of deadly blades on the tile. I had inescsapeable visions of my schnauzer stepping into that room and cutting an artery. Not quite a day after this as I opened my door, he bolted out, and unprovoked, attacked a leashed dog walking upstairs, biting him just above the eye. I offered to pay the vet bill and immediately called Dr.Grubb, probably the kindest scientist in Delray Beach. He said gravely, “I think you have done everything you could possibly do for this dog.” The next morning I brought him in to be euthanized.

Did I love him? Absolutely. Did I understand that at least a year of neglect or possible mistreatment had created his problems? Yes, with much compassion. Did I have to let him go? Without question. Was it the hardest decision I ever had to make? Yes.

Natural law presents this lesson to us repeatedly with our companion animals, whether they suffer psychologically or physically. We must sometimes make the decision to release those we love overlooking feelings of guilt and overcoming selfishness, even when we know that loss demands much recovery time. And we do recover, learning to cherish memory as much as presence.

Our human-animal bond rests on higher planes that honor spiritual commitment . With human –human relationships– and the disagreements, correctly or incorrectly perceived slights, values differences, and imbalances we accumulate-- it’s not so clear-cut . What’s worse? Pulling out the splinter keeps us awake at night or leaving it in, trying to convince ourselves, “Well, doesn’t hurt all the time..."?

To the Sea, to the Sea

2010-08-13T11:12:00.003-04:00

A video is worth 560 words.

These are sea turtle hatchlings leaving the nest and meeting their ocean for the first time.

Crying, Compassion, and Divinity

2010-05-07T09:46:00.017-04:00

I've spent the past two or three months working in bereavement support groups observing and learning as part of a Hospice practicum and even after completing the "Loss and Healing" certificate from St. Thomas University, I am still profoundly moved during each session. When I first began confronting death and dying issues in class, whether it was through films or guest speakers (like representatives of Compassionate Friends, a grief support group for parents who have lost children), I couldn't contain my tears and would ask my professors, who are grief counselors and therapists, "Will I ever stop crying?" and they assured me that eventually I would. Well, it's been about five years, and I am still asking that question. My own father, now facing life threatening illness, laughs at me, "I think you should find a different line of work," but a couple of the tearfully grieving octagenarian widowers in my support group say otherwise. "It's good if you cry because we see your compassion." Of course, I haven't been able to watch a Disney movie to completion ever since I was eight and barely survived the emotional assault of Dumbo.

And so it is with the animals. When I read for an ailing animal or one that has passed, the instant I make contact, my eyes involuntariy water and I apologize to the human client who usually cries along with me. The intensity with which information comes to me in a reading is not so much awe inspiring as it is awakening, not in the sense of suddenly knowing we are escorted through hardship by spiritual energies but as a very poignant and experiential recognition that defies the earthly construct of words. It's as if the Universe rings a doorbell you didn't know you wore smack in the center of your chest. When the button is pressed, instead of hearing ascending chimes, you are shaken at soul level by a truly overwhelming love that is at once Divine and intimate, ethereal and physical, ancient and fresh.

This past week at the Irish Water Spaniel National Specialty a friend asked me to read for her ten and a half year old dog who had mysteriously died in her sleep. The vet didn't perform an autopsy, and my friend and her breeder needed to hear the dog's explanation. As soon as I felt Tuli's energy in spirit, my tears began; the dog very calmly explained that she had either a hole or a tear in her heart, which gave out, and that all was as it should be. She was calm in the Light and would be sending a replacement very shortly. All three of us needed Kleenex. A day later I was sharing loss stories with a woman from New York and told her that ten days after my schnauzer died, I went to the mailbox and found not only a sympathy card from her vet but a clay imprint of her paw with her name encircled by a heart on the back. Of course I bawled at this unexpected "piece" of my girl. When I shared this story with Evie, she broke into tears -- not getting marginally misty-eyed but releasing a bonafide rainfall. Why?

Empathy? Trigger? Compassion again. I believe compassion is a Divine well spring and each time we are able to feel so deeply for another being, we are tapping into an infinite source of love: call it Universe, God, Mystery, Divine Consciousness.

Saturday evening another woman recognized me at a banquet when she heard someone call my name. She rushed to my table and introduced herself as a the woman from Seattle whose lost dog I helped locate 8 months earlier. I had been contacted along with four or five other animal communicators to telepathically reach him and steer him home. We were successful. My contribution was to see through her dog's eyes and provide landmarks identifying his whereabouts, which proved accurate. When she sat down next to me she hugged me, saying, "thank you" and burst into tears. She didn't need to say anything else. I understood their origin.

As a child when I began to sound weepy, my mother would wield a threatening (and likely familiar) bat-like mantra, attempting to modify my behavior: "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about."

Good thing I didn't.

Teaching the Bird to Meditate

2010-04-11T10:30:00.008-04:00

When people ask what it's like living with a macaw I tell them that no one -- no reading, no research, no professional with experience driven advice -- could have prepared me for such a companion animal. It's like living with a clever and manipulative five year old. Yes, he screams all the time, especially when I talk on the phone,which reduces his me time. Yes, he makes a mess, shredding everything from W-2 forms to thrice-replaced vertical blinds to the wooden headboard and footboard on my bed. And yes, he decorates my clothing with abstract poop designs at the most inopportune times and in the most undetected places (often when I arrive at work, people ask me about the unusual embroidery between my shoulder blades). Oh, Yes, he's smart. Full of joy and laughter, he not only threads together words to create grammatially correct sentences but actually composes music as both melody maker and lyricist. But nothing could have prepared me for a bird's level of compassion and sensitivity.

Years ago at a speaking engagment on animal communication, some smart aleck skeptic read my business card and asked if I could really hypnotize dogs. I don't remember whether I answered him seriously.

My response, is now, of course, "absolutely! " Animal hypnosis can be verified by any metaphysician who regularly meditates alongside animals. Hypnosis and meditation, though named differently, bring us to the same higher state of consciousness. Not only do animals respond to the elevated energy shift , they often travel deeper into their meditations, evidenced by the difficulty we have in waking them up when we return to normal waking consciousness. Animals instinctively recognize delicious and naturally want to absorb it just a little while longer! We see how readily animals respond to Reiki -- even when battling devastating and terminal diseases, they find respite from pain, harsh medication, and anxiety within a minute of Reiki energy permeating their auras as they drift into deep breathing and welcome sleep. This applies to the bird, too.

Watching the visible connectivity as the bird joins me in slow, rhythmic breathing yields awe. Birds are extra sensitive and compassionate creatures who detect and react to to the slightest nuance or mood change. When I'm upset, the bird will nuzzle me and say "awwww, cuddle." When I'm angry at him for biting me, he attempts deflection by asking for a "GOOD kiss." If I'm startled by an unexpected mishap like breaking a glass or skidding across a dark room on unpected dog pee, breaking my toe, the bird whispers, "It's OK.....it's OK" to reassure me.

One morning after our shower ( he has a perch in my shower where, by the way, he sings -- look for his You-Tube videos), he was particularly ornery, screaming steadily just to make unpleasant noise. Rather than screaming back at him (which does halt him temporarily), I decided to teach him meditation.

He stood on the towel bar and I faced him so that we were nose to nose. I began breathing in deeply in proper meditative fashion, filling my lungs with air so my stomach expanded like a balloon, holding it, then releasing the breath slowly through my mouth. I repeated this three or four times, then closed my eyes and continued the pattern, still nose to nose with him. After about four minutes, I opened my eyes to find him standing with his eyes closed and his feathers ruffled into a fluffy green ball from his body all the way up to thye top of his head. He was still out there in the ethers, communing with the Spirits who welcome our visits. When he eventually opened his eyes, he cocked his head and stared at me with surprise and delight. He had tasted bliss.

We have continued this practice. It's healing for us both.

Just a Little After 11: Sandy Loree

2010-01-13T14:34:00.018-05:00

"The song ends; the voices quaver away with a rich and dying fall."
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Sandra Loree left us on January 11, 2010 shortly after 11 p.m. wresting her soul from the demon cancer that strangled her. What a brave and loving energy she remains. I am heartbroken that she struggled so long and wish that in this circumstance I did not possess such potent imagination.

Numerologically 11 is a master number. I was born on January 11th and somehow I knew she would die on that day, a bold presence in life making a bold entry to be reckoned with in the spirit realm. Two nights before she died, her daughter called me with Sandy's final request: to talk to her Irish Water Spaniel, the beloved Skylyr to tell him everything would be all right without her. I did.

When Sky came through in my meditation, he did not approach me alone but with his "brother," or more accurately "house mate," Nicky, a boy who has feared me his entire life. When I first went to Sandy's house almost seven years ago, I sat in the living room with Skylyr and Sandy's German Shepherd and Rat Terrier, but Nicky hid behind the club chair and wouldn't come out. Occasionally he would stretch his neck around the side and when he glimpsed me still there in the room, like a spring, he fell back behind the chair. Another time at a big Irish Water Spaniel party in Covington, Georgia, Sandy asked me to come to her RV and read Nicky, who was having some behavioral issues. I climbed into the RV and made a left into the bedroom (which was actually the bed!). Sitting upright but leaning backward was a terrified Nicky, his whole body shaking and his teeth chattering like high speed clinking champagne glasses. When I left the room, his shaking stopped. When I returned, it resumed. "He knows there's something different about you, " she explained. Of course. No dog wants an uninvited stranger peering into him so intimately.

Skylyr, on the other hand, always gave me permission, sitting princely, directing me in the ways he wanted me to read him. Sometimes I pet or hold the dog but Skylyr always placed his paw in my hand and kept it there as long as it took us to exchange information.

At the Irish Water Spaniel National Specialty in Georgia two years ago, Skylyr was one of the
"middle aged" dogs honored in the ring during the parade of veterans. Before the event, Sandy called me and said, not asked, but said, "I would like you to be the one to take Skylyr into the ring." I see myself as clumsy and unsure in the ring (ask anyone whose seen me try to show a dog! -- something I did twice). "All you have to do is hold his lead. He'll do the rest; he knows what to do." I was honored -- and grateful -- that she valued me enough to offer this, doing so not because she felt ill ill but because she knew how much I love Skylyr.

I learned from our friend Deborah at her funeral that by this time she'd already been diagnosed and had begun chemotherapy, but she didn't disclose it to any of us. I realized only as I wrote the blog this morning that she asked me to accompany him in the ring because she knew I may never see him again. I cannot explain adequately how great a gift that was.

Hiding her illness, Sandy ignored the telephone and sent very sporadic e-mails during her chemo and radiation treatments and repeated surgeries -- treatments that weakened her so severely that she needed hospitalization a few times for the residual effects. When it appeared she had been granted a reprieve from treatment, she called and said -- not asked, but said -- "how about I come down to Florida and spend a week with you and we'll go to Georgia to the SE Irish Water Spaniel shindig and maybe take a side trip." I was thrilled! We went to Helen's house in Covington once again, where the Southeast Irish Water Spaniels and their owners gathered, all warm, giving, fun-loving friends -- groomed and played with the dogs and fussed joyfully at seeing Sandy despite her considerable weight loss and her brand new short hair no longer red or blonde but white and her still smoking-- and we savored the day knowing it would be our last hoot. She and I returned to Fort Lauderdale the long way, touring Savannah, stopping at Jekyll Island and Daytona Beach to give my dogs some ocean time. She was weak and tired and unable to handle my dogs, a first for her. We did, though, have one unpleasant and scary detour to the E.R. She still wore a feeding tube and had painful issues with medication and low potassium.

Sandy never talked with us about her dying. Most of us knew she had limited time when we heard what type of cancer she had and how quickly it had metasticized. I read that once a squamous cell tumor invades the lymph nodes, predicted survival rates rarely exceed five years. She didn't make it through two. The doctors never found the original cancer site and could not get get clean margins. She arranged this summer jaunt as her farewell.

She hibernated after our trip, not answering phones or e-mails for over 6 months, and we sent periodic cards, jokes, and left phone messages; at Christmas the collective unconscious led her IWS friends Moe, Ginny, and me to each send her a music CD, suspecting she was too ill to sit at the computer or in front of the TV. I sent her "Angel Love" by Aeoliah.

On the last day of her life I recorded a tearful goodbye and blubbering thank-you-for-gracing my-life mesage on her cell phone, then asked her husband to play it for her, which he did that night on the 11th. I think she was holding on to know that the dogs would be OK with her leaving. I relayed the message I received from Skylyr and Nicky :

"Who is going to take us to the vet?"

I said, "Sandy, it seems that with all the traveling around the country to dog shows and specialties and all the conformation and agility competitions, the motel rooms and RV trips from Idaho to the Finger Lakes, their most special mommy time was your taking them to the vet."

Two nights ago, after her funeral, just before I awoke -- I was still asleep but in that half step toward waking consciousness -- before my eyes appeared a computer screen with this typed message in a word arrangement I wouldn't use:

"Lisa -- I have passed through my soul.

Love, Sandy."

So I know she's all right. I'm not so sure about the rest of us who mourn her deeply in a crescendoing silence.

Why I Chose Animals

2009-12-24T07:51:00.011-05:00

I suppose my mother had something to do with me loving animals. From the time I was five, she was bringing home creatures small enough to go undetected in our Brooklyn apartment: turtles, tortoises, and a half-moon parrot with whom I bonded so deeply that the memories of having to give him up (I had severe allergies) still fly at me like unwelcome shards of glass. I remember crying in the back seat of the car, my father double-parked with the engine running while my mother returned the bird to the pet shop. When she came back outside, she was holding a large tortoise, waving it at us, a permission seeking gesture for my father, who banged his hand on the steering wheel and yelled, "Goddamn it, Rhoda!" But we won. The tortoise came home with us.

The parrot story goes deeper than simple loss of an amusing companion (which is never simple, anyway). At the time, I was five and silently enduring molestation at the hands of my paternal grandfather. I won't delve into the psyche's way of insulating us from such memory as we plow through life, but I will profess mightily how the Universe graces us with love that outperforms the medicinal or therapeutic by bringing us winged, furry, and four-footed angels. The layers of divine love uniting a wounded child (or adult) and an always innocent animal is realm-of- God stuff, gauze for the soul.

So it was no accident that I have always lived with animals (dogs, lizards, birds) and that my mid-life metaphysical education brought me to recriprocation: as they were supreme healing agents for me, I chose to devote my practice to them. In the first ten years of my work I was reading tarot and doing psychic readings for people, and then I consciously shifted direction and clarified my purpose.

While I was guided by the command "find your bliss," other not-so-Godly reasons steered my decision, and I don't apologize for them. People are a pain. They get sharp and cranky. Animals play and nestle. People are critical. Animals accept us. People become selfish. Animals remain selfless. People manipulate and calculate and restrict Animals just are. They love without condition and as they teach us, they heal us.

I trust that all the time I spend with my own and other people's animals intensifies the Divine spark that lives inside me as it does in all of us. People who love and care for their animals float just a little higher than the rest of the mundane world. What great company to keep and how blessed I am!

Please watch the God and Dog video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY

Our Year in Pictures

2009-12-23T08:22:00.020-05:00

A couple of tearful farewells (Gracie and Frenchie), a grand welcoming (Luinigh), continued rollicking and frolicking (Ingrid and Baby), some souful dialogues with my four-footed clients, new personal frontiers, longer embraces with
Spirit, and a whole lotta love.

Steven & Luinigh

Baby Luinigh
My Little Frenchman

Ingrid

Gracie

What is That Black Cat with Wings?

2009-09-24T11:57:00.015-04:00

I am currently enrolled in a 16 hour Hospice volunteer training program with the intent to serve as a Reiki and pet therapy volunteer. The first six hours of training consisted of five units covering the dying process, volunteer parameters, caregiver roles, special populations, and legal and organizational procedures. In a session often punctuated by our own personal, sometimes emotional disclosures, Ann, the Volunteer Director, softened the clinical descriptions of "the death journey" with poignant patient anecdotes from her own experience and Hospice literature, revisiting the phenomenon of fading earthly consciousness teetering between worlds as we prepare to die. Patients, open eyed but not fully present, often enter audible conversation with loved ones who passed on before them. Debbie, my friend of 40 years, described her fascination watching her father just before he died; he stared into space and engaged in animated dialogue with his mother, who had died fifty years prior. Our seminar director shared many such stories, all of which validate Dr. Raymond Moody's findings in Life After Life: significant people from our past who made the journey before us retrieve us from the earthly plane at the end of this life. I know from my own meditations and readings that our animal companions return to escort us to the Light. But in this venue I was hardly prepared for her most astounding and exciting revelation: many Hospice patients, rapidly approaching their last breath, ask the same question:

"What was that black cat with wings I just saw pass by the room?"

A spirit cat as an agent of Light, delivering the "all aboard!" message to those about to enter the tunnel . Whether it's the collective unconscious perceiving a single Jungian symbol of death or an actual summoning by a feline angel doesn't matter. It validates our connection to animals on a soul level and makes real a theory of divine exchange: we are their guardians in this life; they becomes ours in the next. What greater love can there be?

About sixteen years ago, in a past life regeression, I was asked to let my consciousness drift to the end of a former life and allow my release into the void. I remember the darkness, the nothing; I had no fear or expectation but felt as if I were waiting, and when the therapist asked me who was coming for me, images of animals, one after the other, began to emerge, soft, blurry edged images of animals leading me from darkness. I know this expectation is held by many indigenous peoples.

For me , the notion of a winged cat passing my doorway to signal my imminent passage offers overwhelming comfort, reassurance that the Spirit never leaves us alone and fearful, a fulfillment of traditional tribal promises as well as God's repeated promise to us in Biblical contexts: "Fear not, for I am with you." What greater love can there be?

For an interesting real-time manifestation of this spiritual phenomenon, read the story of a Boston Hospice cat who accurately predicts the deaths of patients:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2007/07/26/with_a_purr_death_comes_on_little_cat_feet/

You can also read some interesting documented information about earthly cats with "wings."

http://www.messybeast.com/winged-cats.htm

Why Learn Reiki?

2009-07-31T12:01:00.009-04:00

I took my first Reiki class in 1989 at the urging of a nurse friend who had seen a Reiki demonstration and wouldn’t rest until we both went for training. She was enthralled with what she explained as a very stunning demonstration she'd seen. She said the practitioner held one hand in the air (much like the Magician in the Ride-Waite tarot deck) with one hand placed on his client and just commanded that Reiki energy. She was impressed by his showmanhip, which left me feeling a bit skeptical. However, because I was bored, I agreed to go to a Reiki training class. I didn’t know quite why I was going but trusted it would be one more metaphysical class that may have potential benefits. At the time, I didn't didn't see myself as a "healer" but as a "psychic" ( I have since learned that the latter is dreadfully incomplete without the former).

On a dismal Saturday afternoon, I took a deep breath and paid my hundred and fifty dollars and went to this class which consisted of me, my friend, and a Reiki master. We spent half the day reading about the origin of Reiki, got mysterious "attunements" with our eyes closed, went out to lunch, and then returned to learn some hand positions. The Reiki master was very impressed with my friend's healing abiltiies and honestly, I wondered why I had spent such money.

I saw no dramatic major arcana tarot poses. Nor did I see any instant miracles and or feel any great energetic surges during that day-long training: no magic, no instant transformation, no sprouting up of the coiled kundalini. But when I returned home to find my one year old standard poodle, Angelo, suffering through a bout of extreme intestinal distress, I knew differently.

He had suffered from colitis and bloody stools for his nearly two years on earth. A cacophany of screeching violins from his lower intestines provided a musical score for his distress. None of his vets had ever suggested anything beyond sensitive stomach or prescrbied anything serious for this almost daily occurance (which continued). My first reaction was to “test” the Reiki on him. He lay on his his back and I cupped my hands gently over his abdomen. Almost immediately, he let go his tension and legs fell open, his head fell to the side, and he gently allowed this new and comforting sensation to fill him. I was astounded. Within minutes, the gastric noises subsided and he slept in my arms. Aloud, I said,"Now I know why I learned Reiki"and from then on, until his death from bloat one year later, his Reiki sessions were routine. Did the Reiki “cure? Him. No. What it did do, without any doubt, was help him live comfortably while he suffered from the auto immune disease that eventually took his life. He died in my arms -from bloat -- on the vet’s table.

Since then I have devoted my Reiki practice to animals and have been blessed to work with many creatures enduring serious and terminal illnesses, providing adjunct care through their difficult chemo or steroidal treatment, helping to ease their physical and emotional stress until they chose to exit this plane. My clients have sworn that their dogs have improved after Reiki treatments, understanding that even the slightest and temporary improvement during a long term crisis is a gift of Divine light. I worked with two terminally ill Dalmatians, years apart, one a cancer patient on chemo and corticosteroids, the other suffering from advanced stages of Cushing’s Syndrome. For the week after a Reiki treatment, both regained appetite and mobility. Reiki makes it easier for animals to deal with illnesses by balancing their energy and letting them release the anxiety and stress that accompanies illness. My clients are always amazed at how their pets, visibly uncomfortable, fall asleep peacefully immediately following their Reiki session. I always advise my clients to learn Reiki as the greatest gift they can give their own animals; it's the gift that truly keeps on giving. I am offering REIKI I FOR ANIMAL LOVERS AND WORKERS on October 3 at the Crystal Garden. Fee is $170 with an additional $30 discount for shelter and rescue workers. For more information, visit my web site http://www.reikidogs.com/ Namaste!

The Little Frenchman

2009-07-24T11:24:00.009-04:00

He came to me unexpectedly at a time when I already lived with two dogs in a development that allowed only two dogs. In her capacity as the Broward County Animal Control veterinaray technician who had to euthanize those too weak for adoption, my neighbor would bring home borderline cases . She would nurse them back to adoptable health and in the late afternoons would sit on her front lawn with anywhere from two to five kittens or puppies, hoping passersby would stop, fall in love, and bring one home. This was the case when I came home from work one spring 1998 afternoon. I looked down the street (she lived about ten houses away) for her usual menagerie romping around her German Shepherds but this time, it was different. Bat ears and a squat body cast a spell that levitated me.

"Whatcha got there?"I yelled. "Boston?" Her reply changed my life for the next ten years.

"No, FRENCHIE!"

I mystically flew to her front yard .
A Frenchie!

"Look at his chest. This is no Boston Terrier!," she said. He was a wide, barrel-chested "fully hooded pied" boy with abnormally bulging eyes, a hint of a tail and a tush that wagged his whole body.

"He's got heartworm," she said. " He just had a treatment."

My whole adult life I'd wanted a French bulldog but couldn't quite afford the breders' $1500 =-plus asking price. . "Take him home," Trish requested.

"I can't," I said. "I already have two."

"Take him for an hour. Look at me. I've got 8 here . Try him for an hour."

I stared at her,. saying "no, no, no" even as I picked up the dog and carried him home. I tried him for an hour. We watched t.v., he drank some water, he coughed a lot, he peed. He seemed to like the house though he never drfited far from my side.

After an hour, Trish said, "Keep him overnight."
I said. "I can't have three dogs."

"Just overnight."

OK, just overnight.

He found his place at the foot of the bed. Gracie the schnauzer ignored him completely but let me know she didn't particularly enjoy sleepovers (what? he's staying?????) , and Seamus, my Irish Water Spaniel, polished his macho armor and every hour on the hour from midnight to 7 a.m. jostled me and hung his head over the bed right above where the Frenchie slept, growling menacingly, baring glow in the dark teeth just to let him know who was boss. It was tear-jerking to watch that poor little orphan, so lonely and sick, be so humiliated.

The next day, Trish begged me to keep him "just a bit longer. " She didn't have to. By morning, I wasn't giving him back to Animal Control. I'd find something better for him. The truth is, by 8 p.m. the night before he had already dug a well in my heart.

But the prospect of the condo commandos raiding my home and confiscating my extra dog terrified me. I thought of placing him with my parents who had just lost their Boston Terrier to cancer. They didn't want him. I asked my brothers and a few other people who didn't want him. Then I contacted the French Bulldog Rescue Network, which runs an "underground railroad" by which volunteer rescuers pick up the dog and drive them to the next rescuer and the next location until the dog reaches its foster home in preparation for a future permanent adoption. I arranged for a man in the Keys to pick him up on Monday and drive him to Orlando, where someone else would take him and drive him out of state, and so on , and so on.

Just try him for an hour. By Saturday I had decided he would not leave my home at all and cancelled the plan. We sat in the kitchen where I fed him snausages and tried every name I remembered from junior high school French class (Jaques? Philippe? Jean-Claude?) He stared at me blankly until I said, "Frenchie," and his bat ears twitched, so Frenchie he became. I also called him "Little One," which he seemed to adore.

He and Seamus grew into the best of friends, mismatched bookends at my heels whenever I left the room, both of them sleeping alongside me, both of them sharing my affection without incident; however even years later Frenchie moved in deference to Seamus, never entering a room that Seamus was in unless I assured him, "You're safe" and physically escorted him in. That first night of Seamus's beastly threats stayed with him for life. Gracie ignored him for weeks until the day Frenchie attempted to play with her in that half-down sprinting position and she realized how much more fun it would be to rumble and tumble with a dog her own size. From that day on she left a heartbroken Seamus without a playmate.

When Seamus became ill, about a year and a half before he died, I contacted another animal communicator through the Distant Healing Network for Pets, a free service for whom I also work. She was someone I didn't know who responded to my inquiry from England or Australia. She told me Seamus wasn't ready to leave us, but he had one major concern and request when that time came: "take care of the little one."

So I did. For ten years, as he became crippled, incontinent, immobile, as his dignity faded, as he couldn't get up, as he couldn't sit down. For the last two years he and Gracie were my major focus. When I realized he didn't have much time left, I asked him what he wanted more than anything else and he told me he wanted free run of the house. He wanted to greet me at the door when I came home instead of waiting for me to run into the family room and open his crate. Of course I honored his wish. The very next day when I came home from work, the little Frenchman, even with his crippled and crossed rear legs, was first dog at the door, doing his twirly dance and jumping...and so it remained that way for the next eight months or so.

Every day when I came home I had to mop the floor, clean the sofa, sometimes clean Frenchie himself. When Gracie died, he didn't seem upset but grew quiet. He followed her exit about two months later. It was a Sunday and he collapsed when one rear leg could no longer support him. He couldn't even find a comfortable way to sit.

He is the one dog I have not mourned, that I have not until now allowed myself to mourn, because the pain is too great when I even think of reaching in and acknowledging it. He was pure sweetness and without any doubt a gift from the universe that just ended up in my lap (which is where he was most of the time). Sure, we struggled with 9 years of copraphagia and almost as many of incontinence. Sure, lots of people said "EWWWWW" when his scent reached them before he did. But to me, snoring and snorting in my ear every night, he was a sacred luulabye.

So I am trying hard to avoid mourning and instead celebrating my ten years with a remarkably loving companion who survived cancer, severe heartworm infestation, the wrath of Seamus, and the piercing and sneaky peckings of my mischievous macaw, and who remained unrattled and quiet through his end. He is the only dog I could not pull myself away from. After he died I remained with him and held his body for a long time, sobbing. And even though I did have to let go, I still cannot release that image: his eyes closed, his thick little bulldog body so, so still, his tongue, hanging from his mouth, amost frozen on the exam table.

Frenchie, for the many blessings I received from you and for what you have given me, I wish so many more blessings to you.

That Lucid Moment

2009-06-14T10:16:00.020-04:00

I was in PetsMart the other day browsing collars for my dogs, two pretty strong Irish Water Spaniels. As I was looking for heavier nylon martingale collars, a pink flash yanked me upward to a delicate ribbon of a collar perhaps half an inch wide decorated with sewed-on multicolor rosettes. I touched the collar and thought, " I'd have bought Gracie this one" and surrendered to insistent tears. Gracie left us a few months ago and still, nightly when I shut the overhead kitchen light, I turn on the small utility stove light for her, as I did every night when she was alive, and announce to the spaniels, "Let's leave the light on for Gracie." Then the three of us exit the dimly lit room and go upstairs.

I once bought her a pink rhinestone collar and told her they were diamonds. She believed me. Then about four years ago the great folks at Bark Avenue Mall gifted us with a beautiful crocheted pink collar and leash set adorned with large plastic "gemstones." Everyone who saw her "twin set" remarked on how special it was. She loved that, too. It still hangs at the front door.

When Gracie first showed signs of cognitive impairment -- early Alzheimer's -- she did so by refusing to join us upstairs, this after twelve years of sleeping in, alongside, or beneath my bed. She suddenly stopped socializing with us, and it was not for fear of the steps. Occasionally I'd find her sitting at the top of the stairs or on the second to the top step, and if I verbally acknowledged her, she'd speed downstairs, horrified that she was "caught." In her illness she sought invisibility. My challenge was to detach and grant her that wish. Reluctantly, I allowed her to be who she was becoming and missed her terribly in the years even before her death.

Early in her dementia, she conducted secret late-night espionage missions. I'd hear her nails tap tap tapping on the laminate floor at different pitches, back and forth, back and forth, somehow looking for some hidden treasure. At the time, our new macaw (who now sleeps with us, too), spent the night in a wheeled cage in the living room . One of Gracie's first midnight maneuvers involved relocating him. When I heard the tap tap tapping with an accompanying unidentifiable rattle and roll, I tiptoed halfway down the stairs to witness Gracie walking upright, pushing the bird cage into the dining room like a toddler with a baby carriage. I still love this image of her.

I crated at night after that for her own safety, and she rarely ventured out of the crate. She conducted her sporadic spy missions during prime time (scurrying back and forth, back and forth from the crate to the living room window, looking for this mystery object). Because I wanted her to be more comfortable in her preferred confinement, I set up a 36 X 36 plastic pen, open at the top, and placed inside it two beds, a mat, and water and food dishes for her. We called it Gracie's "apartment." She loved it, and every so often redecorated it herself, rearranging the beds and dishes. I left the door open for her to come and go as she pleased during the day, but as she descended deeper into her condition, she left less often. The last thing I'd do for her each night was turn on the range hood light and kiss her round Schnauzer head with a "Goodnight, Grace."

She eventually grew unaware of her surroundings and more than once stood immobilized in the dining room, panicked, unable to navigate an exit. On her last day with me, when I brought her in to the animal hospital, a place she'd been many times for fourteen years, she was anxious, unsettled, disturbed. She'd been the only one of my dogs who didn't succumb to nervousness at the vet's office; she'd eat treats before, during, and after an exam, unfazed by prodding, injections, blood draws. This time she ran in frantic circles around the exam table legs, under the chair, doing a high speed figure eight around the furniture, panting rapidly and heavily, running and in and out, t his way and that, unable to settle down. The vet tech said, "I'd never know this is the same Gracie I saw two months ago." When Dr. Kuhn sat on the floor with us and watched Gracie's nonstop laps around room, she assured me that the Gracie I loved for almost fifteen years no longer existed. We talked on the floor for about fifteen minutes while Gracie panted and scooted, panted and scooted, uninterested our conversation, in the blanket on the floor, in the hypodermic needles protruding from Dr. Kuhn's pocket. Then unexpectedly, as if party to some other-wordly intervention, Gracie had her lucid moment. As in a Flannery O'Connor revelation, she became her name and we touched souls in a most Divine instant. She stopped running and stood still, staring at me, holding the gaze for what seemed like minute, giving me not permission but conviction. Then she stepped onto the blanket and we gave her back to the Universe.

God's Covenant with Animals in the Old Testament

2009-05-24T07:48:00.005-04:00

What is our human responsibility to the earth and its non-human inhabitants? Traditional Biblical scholars would say one of master-servant and ecologists would say one of caretaker. However, using either frame, neither movement has responded in full view of the evidence presented throughout the Bible that God clearly included animals in covenantal relationships with Biblical scholars neglecting the sanctity of animals and secular environmentalists neglecting God. A closer look at the Old Testament reveals that God designed humankind’s role in relation to the animals as one of stewardship rather than domination. Traditionally religious people often cite Scripure justify a master/servant relationship between humans and animals rather than one of partnership, but deeper investigation invites us to see texts rich with references, both literal and figurative, to the partnership between humankind and the animal world. From Genesis through Prophets and Wisdom Literature, the writers of the Old Testament expose God’s instructions for this relationship and the responsibilities inherent therein through clearly stated covenants beginning in Genesis and reverberating elsewhere in the Old Testament.
Understanding this relationship requires an initial analysis of the word covenant. While modern secular usage restricts covenant to a “bilateral contract or agreement,” theological dictionaries add critical divine dimensions. The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology distinguishes between modern day contract and covenant. “From the Latin word, convenire (to come together or to agree)” covenant as currently used “ neglects the Biblical sacred context of the word berith and offers as analogy “the difference between prostitution (contract) and marriage (covenant). or between owning a slave (contract) and having a son (covenant).”
Secondly, theological commentaries underscore the unilateral nature of God’s covenants. Humans are not God’s equal; thus it is God, not man, who “ formulates all the conditions” and “stipulates all the results.” Theopedia provides further insight: ” …the inequality between the parties (Creator and creatures) is absolute. It is always made clear that the initiative is God's - that He makes covenants with his people and not vice versa. God initiates, confirms and even fulfills.” The argument extends beyond mere definition to incorporate the concept of relationship. Ralph Alan Smith implores us to lay down the argument differentiating between “agreement” and “relationship” since one is often a precursor of the other: “an agreement may establish a relationship and be considered an aspect of it.” Accepting God’s relationship with his creation, then, means accepting the intimacy of relationship. Terence Fretheim concurs with his assertion that Genesis lays the groundwork for our perspectives on “the relationships between God and the world, and human and non-human interrelationships” (71).
Translators tackle challenges when interpreting covenant, which has no accurate translation; as the St. Paul Center explains, its unknown origin requires contextual definition. Scholars actually translate two words, the Hebrew word berith and the Greek word diatheke, each with individual connotations. In fact, an appropriate etymological irony here is that, berith relates to a word meaning "to cut" and covenant is a metaphor for ‘cutting,’ refererring the ancient practice of “ dividing animals into two parts with the contracting parties passing between them, in making a covenant” (Theopedia). In Genesis15, God told Abraham to bring in a ram, a heifer, a goat, which he split “and placed each half opposite the other.” After a “terrible darkness” enveloped Abraham, a “flaming torch” passed through those pieces.” This is immediately followed by, “It was on that occasion that the Lord made a covenant.” The St. Paul Center points out that Abraham’s passivity signifies the “unilateral nature of this covenant…” Indeed, his slumber, as opposed to God’s deliberate activity, enforces this notion.
Animal Covenants throughout the Old Testament
Throughout the Old Testament, God proclaims his care for both humans and animals, which begins in Genesis beginning with, as Diane Bergant notes, our shared origins as both man and animals are created from “ the substance of the earth” (“The Bible Tells Me So”). Our shared creation is further evidenced by Greenway’s assessment of God’s dietary instructions: we were given plants and fruits for food, and so were all the other animals who have "the breath of life" in them… neither animals nor we are given other animals to eat.”
Terence Frethheim identifies significant passages in Genesis where the world, including the animals, are “caught up in God’s saving work (6:19 -7:3), God’s remembering (8:1), and God’s promising (9:10)” (44). In Genesis 6:19 God instructs Noah to bring two kinds of each of the “birds,” “beasts,” and all kinds of creeping things” into the ark “to stay alive.” In Genesis 8.1, as the rains continue, God’s remembrance of Noah and the animals compelled him to end the flood: God remembered Noah, and all the animals, wild and tame, that were with him in the ark. So God made a wind seep over th earth, and the waters began to subside.” After the flood, when God blessed Noah and his sons, he enters into a covenant with him and all the earth’s creatures. I t is written in the frequently cited Genesis 9:10, “See, I am now establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you.” God promises never to destroy the earth by water is clearly extended to the animals: “ never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood” and repeats with the appearance of a rainbow, the triangular covenant that is “between me and you and all living beings.” In fact, between Genesis 9:8 and 9:17, God repeats his promise no fewer than six times. Hiersl writes , “Clearly this was not an anthropocentric covenant, rather it was made with and for the benefit of all kinds of living creatures and calls covenant with the natural world the most significant of all the covenants because precedes the other covenants Abraham and his descendants and it covered all life (5).
Historical, Literary, and Theological Associations
The most debated element of our relationship with animals centers on the controversy over one word in the Old Testament: dominion. Theologians have treated it as synonymous with rule and subordination, but examination suggests otherwise. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language assigns its derivation from the Latin dominiom, meaning property, from dominus, meaning lord; also related to domain and dungeon. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary offers the synonyms sovereignty, control, rule, and authority. In Biblical contexts, the word has been linked to domination. Although radah/dominion is used most often to speak about kings and national rulings, James Limburg concluded that a study of the Old Testament yields evidence that “humane and compassionate rule that displays responsibility for others … results in peace and prosperity,” supporting the interpretation of dominion as caretakaing (Bunge).
In considering its application, theology professor Ellen Bernstein calls for primary attention to context. “You have to consider the derivation of the words under consideration the meaning of the neighboring words and verses, the message of the Bible as a whole, the context in which it was written, and how others have understood the verse throughout its 3000 year history”(2). She suggests that we often miss the sacred context of the word dominion as it was written in Genesis. “The concept of ‘dominion’ in this context is a blessing/bvracha, a divine act of love” (3). She explains the intricacies of Biblical Hebrew, a “more symbolic, multilayered and vague language than English – any single word root can have multiple meanings and often a word and its opposite will share the same root” (3) Bible scholar Norbers Samuelson demonstrates that the word kvs/master comes from the Aramaic “to tread down or make a path” and in Sechariah the root is interchangeable with akl, the word for each. This demonstrates that in one case it can be translated as master but in other cases “it appears to have agricultural implications” (3). “Have dominion over” –rdh, “generally refers to “rule of subjects.” If we are righteous and rule wisely and responsibly we are above animals, but if we misuse our power, we “sink below the level of animals and bring ruin to ourselves and the world”(4). The duality of meanings is at play here as it is in many Biblical passages. “graciousness and domination” (5).
Diane Bergant also supports the nurturing context of dominion, citing Gensis 2:15: ""The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. " Jeanne Kay relies on the benevolent monarchy – “good shepherd stewardship” rather than tyrannical rule (221), and noting the limitations of dominion, reminds us that “Adam cannot eat the animals” and God gives Noah the task of saving them. (222). Man cannot claim authority “to subjugate” animals. In Job 39:9-10, God asks, “Who has given the wild ass his freedom, and who has loosed him from his bonds?.” declaring, “ I have made the wilderness his home and the salt flats his dwelling.” He uses this line of questioning in lines 26-27 to demonstrate that he alone rules the earth: “Is it by your discernment that the hawk soars” and “Does the eagle fly up at your command to build his nest aloft?” Only God can dominate nature, Kay contends. “Humans may, on good behavior, serve as nature’s managers, but true dominion belongs only to God” (227). Bernstein speaks of “perpetuity” in defining the role of dominion: we cultivate the garden to ensure that its creatures continue. Likewise, only God can take a life. The dietary directions given to Noah after the flood are explicit in their prohibition of consuming an animal’s blood which Tubbs contends “ is presented not as a cultic ‘dietary law’ but as a universal ordinance: " Even when man slaughters and kills, he is to know that he is touching something, which, because it is life, is in a special manner God's property…” and as a sign of this he is to keep his hands off the blood." It was not God’s intention for humans to behave as "tyrants" in the natural world, “but rather to preserve and care for God's creation in the image of God's own providence.”
Theologians frequently justify the rulership model of dominion through Adam’s naming of the animals, a task given to him by God. However, Tubbs offers contrary evidence: “the Yahwist Adam names his human partner no less than the animals, and the Priestly account certainly does not indicate any human "dominion" over other humans.” Writing in the Theology Today, Tubbs shows us how God attends GOd's creation “quite apart from any human agency.” God sends rain to areas with no human inhabitants (Job 38:26-27) and provides habitation, food, and drink for animals in the wild (Job 39:5-6; Ps. 104:10-27).” “Clearly, such depictions of the natural (nonhuman) creation as subject to God's ownership and providence imply strongly that its proper value and status extend far beyond its utility to humankind.” Bunge interprets God’s speaking to Job through the storm in (Job 38 and 39) in a similar vein: “God's first speech from the whirlwind (Job 38,39), indicate that God takes great delight in non-human creatures and did not create them for human benefit alone:
Who puts wisdom in the heart,
And gives the cock its understanding?
Who provides nourishment for the ravens
When their young ones cry out to God,
And they rove abroad without food?
(Job 38:39-41)

Tubbs writes that it was not God’s intention for humans to behave as "tyrants" in the natural world, “but rather to preserve and care for God's creation in the image of God's own providence.” Greenway concurs, writing “True dominion lies not in us, but in God. If we are rightly to understand how to exercise our dominion, we must strive to imitate and understand God's dominion.”
How Covenant with Animals Contributes to the Wider Theology of the OT
The covenant between God and animals is referenced throughout the Old Testament with animals used in various capacities: as agents of God, messengers, and teachers. Hosea 2:20 the reiterates the covenant: “I will make a covenant for them on that day, with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the air, and with the things that crawl on the ground (Bergant). Animals also serve as teachers in many instances. Jean-Yves Lacoste writes that “Directives and reprimands may come to humans through animals” and Murray suggests that animals offer a Divine model for human behavior .
Ezekiel’s vision of a chariot (43) may illustrate (albeit metpahorically)how animals and humans will share a place in God’s heaven as "blended creatures." The characters within the chariot in Ezekiel 1:5-15 are presented as “living creatures” that possess both human and animal characteristics that include multiple wings rounded feet (“the souls of their feet were round”) “ but each had four faces and four wings” and “the soles of their feet were round.” Their animal faces are very specific: each of the four had the face of a man, but on the right side was the face of a lion, and on the left side the face of an ox, and finally each had the face of an eagle.”
Tova Forti explains that Old Testament literature, particularly Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, “embed empiric observations of animal’s [sic] behavior as well as illustrations of zoological characteristics as examples reinforcing various teachings about human behavior” (120). In Proverbs, “minute creatures, such as ants, badgers, locusts, and lizards, are considered to display some of the wisest models of behavior in spite ote their lack of physical strength. Proverbs 30:24-28 lists numerous creatures who have lessons for human beings:
Four things are among the smallest on the earth
And yet are exceedingly wise
Ants, a species not strong, yet the store sup their food in the summer.
Rock badgers – a species not mighty,
Yet they make their home in the crags
Locusts – they have no king,
Yet they migrate all in array;
Lizards – you can catch them with yoru hands,
Yet they find their way into kings’ palaces.

The locusts, usually seen as a destructive force are seen in Proverbs as admirable because of their “efficient organization” (Forti 121).
Throughout the Old Testament, God proclaims his care for both humans and animals. Addressing God’s care for all creation, Robert Murray notes, “Human beings share with animals the condition of being creatures” (42). This means also that they share the condition of mortality. Psalm 49 warns humans against valuing the “folly” of wealth, reminding us that our demise is contingent upon our lack of wisdom: “If mortals do not have wisdom, they perish like the beasts.” Bergant says we are interdependent with all creation and thus bond with the animals, even in our blessings as Psalm 103 indicates: “Bless the Lord, all creatures” (“The Bible Tells Me So”).
More than messengers and models, animals are often used to do God’s bidding, as Kay shows. It is written in Exodus 23:28-30 and Leviticus 26:22: that if the Israelites’ behave righteously,” hornets will drive out the Hebrews’ enemies and wild predators will not attack them as they escape from Egypt and head for Canaan (223). In 1 Kings 17:1-6, God directs Elijah to hide in a wadi in Jordan during a severe drought . God assures him, “You shall drink of the stream, and I have commanded ravens to feed you there….Ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening.” In 2 Kings 2:24, on the way to Bethel, the prophet Elisha is ridiculed by children and the wrath of nature is set upon them:“Go up, baldhead,” they shouted, “go up, baldhead!” The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore torty-two of the children to pieces.” Another instance of an animal carrying out the wishes of God appears in the story of Jonah, as the fish does God’s work of transporting Jonah safely to shore. “Out of my distress I called to the Lord…From the midst of the nether world I crid for help and you heard my voice,” Jonah says, and continues describing his life-threatening experience “enveloped” in the “abyss;” when he acknowledges that God has the power of deliverance. In Daniel 6:23, we see a similar scenario (226). Surviving the lion’s den, Daniel proclaims, “My God has sent his angel to close the lions’ mouths so that they have not hurt me.” A drastically different fate befalls Daniel’s accusers, their wives, and their children, who were killed by the lions even “before they reached the bottom of the den.” The most widely known instance of creatures doing God’s bidding is evident in Exodus, through the Plagues, “the role of the nonhuman as mediator in God’s delivering activity (Fretheim 44).
In nearly every book of the Old Testament, we witness the relationship with God and non-human creation. Even the genealogies in Genesis demonstrate more than historical lineage, according to Fretheim: “it shows that every person is kin to eveyr other; even more…human and nonhuman are linked together in one very large extended family” (68). The Book of Psalms concludes with a testament to God’s relationship with all life: ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!’ (Sharp).

Practical Ministerial Applications of the Theme

In “The Role of Nature in Natural Disasters,” Diane Bergant sees a causal relationship between “anthropocentric imperialism” and ecological destruction. “We, like every other creature of the natural world, are embedded in the realityof this world, we are not above it. Furthermore, like every other creature of the natural world, we are subject to its laws, laws established in the beginning by the Creator.” Greenway accuses traditional Biblical scholars of ignoring ”a pivotal theological teaching” “that we are to love all creatures. ” Bunge credits Fretheim with teaching us that through Psalms, we witness that “God is active in nature and intimately involved in every aspect of natural order” (2).
Furthermore, Bunge highlights an important connections between the environment and social injustice: how can we love our neighbors without considering their vulnerability to environmental hazards? (2). The Bible “points out the commonalities between human beings and other living things” and “provide powerful grounds for environmental responsibility” (webofcreation.org). Referring specifically to divine covenant, we receive blessings from our covenant with God, but such That receipt is contingent upon how we fulfill the duties assigned to us in our living relationship with non-human inhabitants of the earth. Relationship with God is not limited to humankind, as Yale Divinity Professor Carolyn Sharp reminds us that “every living creature hears God’s voice” .
This concept assumes new significance today because of our heightened sensitivity to the environment and earth’s creatures, both suffering devastating loss and destruction. It gives us a Biblical imperative for cultivating relationships with non-human elements of the earth and spiritually validates those of us who choose to share our lives with them and work for their benefit. It adds Divine impetus to “humane” living as we reassess ourselves in relation to the Bible, demonstrating that our moral standards – sadly, not shared by all – lead us to be activists for Divine justice. It invites us to rediscover purpose in our relationships with the non-human world we share. As a grief counselor specializing in the loss people's animal companions I see first hand how these insights validate their choices and can draw them into rather than away from organized religions that have traditionally neglected the potency of human-animal relationships and minimized the spiritual value of the natural world. People often experience discomfort when their religious leaders proclaim human superiority over animals because their experience shows them otherwise. They often become disenfranchised. This research elasticizes religion to embrace a more holistic spirituality reserving for them a place where they are not only welcome but blessed by God for their loving stewardship of the garden. As Bergant writes, “The human creature is placed in the garden to serve (the same verb as ‘till’) and guard it” (“The Bible Tells Me So”). Tubbs maintains that giving attention to our role in dominion and nature offers us opportunity through reflection to assess our values which may “deepen and broaden our appreciation and concern for the effects and consequences of human decisions upon nonhuman beings.

Works Cited
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Houghton
Mifflin, 2006.
Bergant, Dianne. "The Bible Tells Me So: The Good Book is Gull of Passages to Inspire
Environmental Action." U.S. Catholic 73.4 (April 1, 2008): 16(2). Academic OneFile. Gale. CCLA, Miami Dade Comm College. 19 Apr. 2009.
----. “The Role of Nature in Natural Disasters.” Listening: Journal of Religion and
Culture. 1998 (33).
Bernstein, Ellen. The Splendor of Creation, a Biblical Ecology. www. Ellenbernstein.org
www.religiononline.org/showchapter .
Bradshaw, Robert L. Covenant. http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_covenant.html
Bunge, Marcia. “Biblical Views of Nature: Foundations for an Environmental Ethic.”
www.webofcreation.org.
“Covenant.” Dictionary of Theology. http://www/.carm.org/christianity/dictionary-theology
Forti, Tova. “Who Teaches Us More Athan the Beasts of the Earth, and Makes us Wise than the
Birds of the Heavens. PECUS. Man and Animal in Antiquity. Proceedings of the Conference at the Swedish Institute in Rome, Sept. 9-12. 2002. Ed. Barbro Santillo
Frizell (The Swedish Insittute in Rome. Projects and Seminars , 1) Rome 2004. http://www.svenska-institutet-rom.org/pecus.v%20120-122.
Fretheim, Terence. The Pentateuch. Nashville: Abington Press 1996.
“God’s Covenant with Animals.” Humane Religion. July - August 1996
Greenway, William. “Animals and the Love of God.” Christian Century , 21 June 2000. Gale,
Cengage Learning. 1-4.
Hiersl, Richard H. “Reverence for Life and Environmental Ethics in Biblical Law and Covenant.
Covenant.”http://fore.research.yale.edu/religion/christianity/essays/chris_hiers_index.htm
Kay, Jeanne. “Human Dominion Over Nature in the Hebrew Bible.” Annals of the Association
American Geographers. (1989) 79: 2. 214-232.
LaCoste, John-Yves. “Animals.” Encyclopedia of Christian Theology.
www.books.googlebooks.com
Sharp, Carolyn. “Rereading Dominion in Scriptural Traditions.” Catholic Concern for Animals.
http://www.all-creatures.org/ca/art-rereading.htm .
Smith, Ralph Allan. “Defining the Covenant: What Consensus?”
http://www.berith.org/essays/defining_the_covenant_what_consensus.htm
St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
http://www.salvationhistory.com/studies/lesson/covenant_the_master_key_that_unlocks_the_bible
Tubbs, Jr., James B. “ Humble Dominion.” Theology Today. 50. 4 (1994.)
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/search/index-search.htm
“Covenant.” Theopedia. www.theopedia.com/covenant.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA,: 1996

Gracie Shaw, 5/21/94 - 2/25/09

2009-02-25T19:01:00.000-05:00

It was time. She knew so, the vet said so, I thought so. I drew Reiki symbols over her head, stroked her side as the valium lured her out of anxious pacing into peaceful slumber, willing and needing to depart (it was time, it was), and now I celebrate the life of this once feisty little Schnauzer who came to me like an angel 15 years ago and led me through crisis into clarity with her zest, her verve, her love. Ciao, Grazia. You were aptly named.

When?

2009-02-24T08:51:00.001-05:00

When?
I'm living with two ailing senior dogs for whom special care is routine. I cook bland, grain-free poultry dishes for Frenchie, whose deteriorating spinal malformation required serious weight loss -- under his vet's orders, I had to take him from 23 pounds to 19 (at last weigh in he was under that). His disorder has caused paresis, rendering him unable to walk without his rear legs sliding out from under him. The slightest stress causes frequent urinary and occasional fecal incontinence. He has always been my little sidekick, following me from room to room, and now I sometimes forget that he can't, so when I leave the room for more than a minute, he breaks into wild howls and yodels, what Frenchie people know as "the French bulldog scream." He has slept next to me for the ten years I have lived with him. Once a week or so I am awakened by a mess in the bed....a very unsavory mess with omission-worthy details. From the waist up he's joyful, hungry, alert, and appreciative, so grateful that I can actually feel his heart swell when I sit on the couch with my arm around him, his head lowered, pressing into my side. On the days his legs can't hold him up, on the days they crisscross behind him and he falls onto his side when hewalks, on the days he leaves three rivers of urine on the floor within 10 minutes, I think about bringing him to his vet and gently saying goodbye. Dignity is the determinant, people say.

My deaf and silent schnauzer, who will be 15 in May, has descended deeper into the abyss of dementia. Her vet's office displays a brochure advertising a medication that eases the progression of "doggie Alzheimer's disease," which asks: does your dog pace back and forth regularly? does your dog wander in the house or spend hours staring into space? does your dog seek isolation rather than your company? If so, .... We answered yes to all of the above with the added behavior of engaging in imaginary room-to-room missions, anxiously seeking an elusive something. But because Gracie has been happy in her loopy wonderland, I decided not to medicate her. She's on enough medication for petit mal seizures, kidney-related blood pressure problems, incontinence, and thyroid malfunction. Some days days she still hops like a jackrabbit through the yard, which was always her yard-- she patrolled it, she killed unfortunate feathered invaders in it, cleared two feet of bushes along the fence to chat with the neighbor's Cairn terrier, remained the last of the dogs to return to the house because she so loved being outside, watching the water, the trees, the sky. One day after circling the palm trees she greeted me, ecstatically crunching on something marble-like, rolling it against her teeth, her little stumpy tail wagging and her head held high and back, but she quickly twisted her neck, looked sideways and clenched her jaw when I tried to pry her mouth open. It was the skull of a baby bird who had fallen from its nest, its retrieval a measure of Gracie's prowess and dignity. My vet and I said, "Ewwww."

She survived cancer twice, and whenever I bring her to the vet to examine some new growth or behavioral peculiarity, I ask is it time? I lose my objectivity with my own dogs. Once, using a needle to extract fluid from a tumor for lab testing, Gracie turned and bit Dr. Kuhn, whom she's adored for ten years. "Not yet," Dr. Kuhn assured me. " She's still full of piss and vinegar." That was a year ago, before her recent malignancy, before she slowed down. She doesn't remember direction. She forgets how to walk through the open door. She stands immoblized in the dining room, not recognizing the walls. She reacted poorly to the narcotic the doctor administred during the tumor removal a few months ago and cried through the surgery, then screamed in the house for eight hours following -- wandered from room to room crying and howling and screaming. Finally at 9:00 p.m. I gave her 3/4 of a Xanax the vet recommended I get from a friend (thank God I have anxious friends). She settled down at midnight and slept next to my bed, which in senile isolation mode, she has avoided for the past three years. I thought we’d say farewell in the morning.She woke up at seven without so much as a whimper and bounced back from the surgery like a two year-old.

I heard two stories about dignity from dog people I greatly respect. Deborah, an Irish Water Spaniel breeder in Georgia, described her moment of recognition. Her dog also lived in LaLaLand, happily, until one afternoon, running in the yard on one of her imaginary missions, the dog stopped and froze and as Deborah described it, "a look of absolute terror overcame her." At that moment, seeing her dog so fearful because she couldn't recognize her surroundings, she knew it was time to let her go. Dr. Kuhn shared a similar story. Her "cognitively impaired" dog engaged in unexplainable night missions much like Gracie. In the morning she found furniture in odd places. One morning she discovered her dog stuck in a furniture configuration of her own making with that same fearful look that asked, "Where am I and how did I get here?" She euthanized her later that day. "They have to go with some dignity," she said.

Old dogs sleep deeply. Gracie hasn't responded to calls in years but lately sleeps longer than the rest of us and needs a vigorous shake to awaken. I bend into her pen, checking for breathing, and visualize her ending this life in such sleep, draped like a rug over her pawprint soiled pink "princess" bed, by her own calendar and consent, sparing me the anguish of watching her dignityevaporate before she does.

Blogability and Pass the Love, Please

2008-12-31T08:23:00.001-05:00

Six months ago, I sent my blog link to a very good friend of mine who didn't respond. Later that week, when I asked if he had received my e-mail, he said he had and deleted it without viewing the blog because "frankly, blogs don't interest me." I nodded and said nothing but felt incredibly insulted, and then felt -- and remained-- angry at myself for suppressing those emotions. Six months later, I'm carrying that conversation like stale crumbs in unlaundered pants and would like to empty my pockets .

What would make my written words"uninteresting?" Is it that writing requires more depth than cursory Friday night conversation at the Chinese buffet and is therefore too taxing to investigate? What makes me acceptable company in the flesh but rejection fodder in print? He didn't even question the blog's focus, suggesting that the blog as a very entity rather than its content justifies disrespect. If I'd presented a published article or a book to him, would he have discarded that, too? Does the unfiltered analysis of every cybersneeze render all blogs cliche or useless if the writer isn't a celebrity? Is it the word "blog" itself which designates bloggers unappealing? (I've addressed this one before.)

Now I'm wondering whether this is even a "bloggable" subject. Since it's New Year's Eve, shouldn't I instead strive for more reflection and prophecy?

Yes. I'm glad we're talking. I confine too many thoughts to headspace and am grateful for this vehicle of expression. Even more, I'm thankful for the interaction and engagement I've experienced here, grateful to those of you who have read and responded on this site and privately. I don't feel so uninteresting when you reciprocate with your stories and respond from the heart to mine. In fact, I feel honored and wanted tell you.

During this week and a half of vacation I've gathered and discarded the clutter from every room in the house and cleared more space -- crumbled receipts, losing jai alai tickets, empty shampoo bottles, cardboard boxes and unharmonious lipsticks, a little bit every day, preparing to end the year by opening space that the Universe will fill in with more goodness. That means no more pocketed crumbs and fewer emotional grumblings. I expect joy and abundance and not only thank the Universe in advance for its multi-faceted generosity but pass it on to you.

My macaw decorates my head , my Irish Water Spaniel rests at my feet, my crippled oldFrench bulldog snores contentedly in his cushioned bed behind me, and my silly, senile schnauzer smiles from the heart, soul, and her little remaining memory as she naps downstairs just the way she likes it. They think I'm interesting. I think this is bloggable. Happy New Year to you and yours. May the love spread around you and through you uncensored.

"If He's Not Worried, Neither Am I"

2008-11-18T20:38:00.000-05:00

I hate to admit that despite years of academic and metaphysical training in loss and healing, endings and beginnings, farewells and soon-to-be farewells, I still haven't learned to curb my tears in the face of someone else's sorrow. My degree of empathy exceeds usual boundaries, at least in a visual sense, although enough years of therapy have taught me not to internalize someone else's tsuris. The problem? I cry too readily, involuntarily, as I work with animals and people in sobering situations. I understand that the flowing tears during a communication session are a body/mind recognition that I have settled into in an elevated spiritual space, a poignant other-than-this-world reality. Once I asked my therapist why, whenever I entered a deep state of meditation, I began crying. She explained it as recognizing God, an emotional homecoming. I accepted this then and am used to it now, 20 years later.
But all emotional triggers make me cry. I drive around the Brooklyn of my childhood and see the ghost of my grandmother and cry. I study a photo of my father when he was 32 and healthy and cry. I give my deaf and fragile 14 year old schnauzer a bath in the kitchen sink, and looking down at her, see our 14 years together blurred by my tears. So I was not surprised that upon hearing of my friend's cancer diagnosis (a particularly sticky form of cancer), I reacted with tears. Of course I see the irony in this. I'm the one called upon as a professional to help others through crises, and my intial reaction to anything critical is weepy.
S. is one of my favorite people, a "dog-world" friend whose social and spiritual generosity has gifted me with great joy. I don't say that about many people. We met online through our interest in Irish Water Spaniels, corresponded, and met at a dog show in Charleston,South Carolina after my dog, Seamus had died, leaving me distraught. She suggested I fly up to meet all of the Irish Water Spaniels in the Southeast U.S., particularly her boy Skylyr, with whom I was smitten the first time I saw his photograph. I spent a week before my trip performing distance Reiki on him and sending him telepathic messages so that when I finally met him he would recognize my energy. He was as gifted and spiritual a dog as I imagined, showing me precisely how he wanted me to approach communication with him -- by holding his paw in my left hand. Only when I took the paw he extended would he open up to me. Over the next six years, I've had the opportunity to "read" him in Atlanta, Huntsville, Greenville, and Minneapolis, and although I see him only once a year, each time we sit in silence, he gently places his paw in my left hand and begins revealing himself. When my friend's mother-in-law suffered a stroke and came to live with her, Skylyr assumed the role of spiritual companion, sitting alongside her, his paw in her lap much of the time, knowing she needed company, resassurance, that presence we regard as the most potent healing tool. What a guru he is.
His "mom," my friend, kept her diagnosis quiet for the first couple of months. She underwent surgery, then chemotherapy and radiation, some of it more damaging than had been anticipated, resulting in complications, additional hospitalizations, and alternative therapies . She's been almost hiding out during her recuperation and has, I assumed, been confronting the psychological goons that terrorize people battling cancer. She rarely answers her phone, preferring to send an occasional e-mail assuring a small loop of us that she's improving. Some of us leave phone messages. Some send her weekly cards. I send periodic e-mails and leave shaky voice mails that say "Hope you are well, I love you," then get all choked up and hang up.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote and simply asked, "How is Skylyr handling your illness?"
She responded, saying he doesn't seem to care at all.
"And if he's not worried, neither am I," she wrote.
So I've stopped crying for now.

Thanks, All

2008-08-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm still unsure of protocal and technical skill regarding the blogosphere, but I'd like to thank all of you who have so graciously commented on my first few posts.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Schnauzer

2008-07-27T17:53:00.000-04:00

In communication sessions we animal communicators often receive stunning insights from our clients (the four-legged and winged clients, not the humans) about the temporary nature of life on earth, the power of higher energies that unite and direct us, the healing power of unconditional love....but often, the animals are simply learning to enjoy earthly life. Like young children, they honestly and spontaneously share what seems exciting to them.

By the time I acquired 5 month old Seamus, my first Irish Water Spaniel, I had been doing animal readings for a few years and had already completed my Reiki I and II courses. I decided to make one of our evenings a gadget-less evening -- no t.v., no computer, no telephone -- during which we would listen to New Age music and commune on a higher level. I just knew that when I tuned into this magnificent dog, I would be receiving the wisdom of the Masters.

I placed my hands on him, closed my eyes, and as is my practice, began slow, rhythmic breathing until I reached the corridor of gracefully swirling, muted blue and violet light, the zone where psychic images fade in and out, sometimes symbolically, usually literally, almost photographically. I allowed myself to bask in that energy a few moments before I formulated the question to ask this highly intelligent and undoubtedly heaven-sent dog:
"What is it you most want, Seamus?" I asked, and I received this very clear and quick answer:

Pizza.

Yes. Pizza.

It was actually a very logical response. Two nights prior, I had brought in a pizza, and being as undiscpilined with my dogs' diet as I was (O.K., am) with my own, I offered him a few bites. Obviously, he liked it...he liked it enough to have been thinking about it and didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second to blurt his response,which came as a picture (they most often do).
So I honored his request weekly for the next 11 years.

During a consultation, dog owners (even though I flinch at that word owners), eager to make their animals' lives more comfortable, ask that same question, and I am always entertained by the array of answers I've received over the years. Lynn, a Minnesota Irish Water Spaniel breeder, listened as I asked her girl Tonks what she most wanted. Tonks's response was also swift and unmistakable:

The bats, she said.

O.K., the bats. I've learned not to question or doubt what the dogs tell me. I looked at Lynn and said, "She says she wants the bats." L:ynn responded, "Tell her she can't have them. They're mine."
"You have bats?" I asked, and she said yes, she has a stuffed bat collection (not stuffed in the taxidermy sense, but as in plush toys), and Tonks would just to have to learn to live without them.

I've seen a standard poodle ask its owner about skiis in the closet, a lab mix confess a love affair with turtles and turtle replicas, a horse request ice cream more than once, and a cat demand her medication be buried in the same breakfast her owner eats, buttered toast. Animals have requested that their humans honor departed companion dogs by prominently displaying that dog's old collar in the house; I've listened to requests for sunglasses, sushi, rides in the convertible, and, believe it or not, a set of drums -- imagine my confidence level in telling a New Jersey chichuahua owner that her dog wants to play drums. It turned out that the woman was a kindergarten teacher who specialized in music and brought the dog to school periodically, where he'd seen the children play the instruments. The dog professed himself a natural drummer. (Are you laughing yet?) Two weeks later the woman called me to tell me she brought home bongos, which the chihuahua does, in fact, play quite well; he banged his paws on the skins as soon as he saw them. She has videotaped this for the skeptics.

Follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell said. Do what you love, advise the spiritual gurus. This is why I do animal readings; it's blissful. I revel in the laughter and silliness from animals in daily conversation, which serves to balance my tears during the more profound, end-of-life readings I do. The animals act upon their natural, childlike curiosity, their keen powers of observation, side-splitting humor and unabashed joy. This is the way I try to live my life. Too bad it took me almost 40 years to get here.

Scared to Death of Death

2008-06-18T13:38:00.002-04:00

In Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel," a tentative young rabbi explains his arrival at his professional station: " I came to God not because I loved him but because I did not."

Sometimes I read a line and pause to reflect a minute before continuing. Often I read without needing to register the words because they're either familiar
or insignificant. But occasionally words immobilize me, not because they possess extraordinary power in themselves but because they arrive at the precise time and place I need to receive their message. I came to God not because I loved him but because I did not. What a contrast-based, convoluted route to enlightenment. Aha! But this is how so many of us arrived here.

When I began studying loss and death, people questioned me, barely able to camouflage their distaste for the subject, which usually emerged as a sneaky grimace. Why on earth would you want to study death? I answer the way Malamud’s rabbi would have:

I came to death because I was scared of death.

Actually, I'm not afraid of death itself since I know our existence continues on another plane . I don't need to name it or navigate a particular highway that claims exclusive transport there (although I respect people who do). My experiences with death grew solely from my work with animals. Although I had been working as an animal communicator and Reiki practitioner for over fifteen years, I began answering a growing number of requests for help with end of life issues. Very few people called just for that “fun” session to find out where their dog wanted to go on vacation or why their cat tore holes in the toilet paper. I was most often called to guide people through their animals’ death and in the process, I learned that death, from the animals' perspective, is just a lighter avenue, a burden-free turned corner and in our lightness we are closer to the Source. How do I convey this to human beings who dread endings and crumble through their losses? Eventually, I undertook graduate study of loss and healing at a Catholic university to provide me with some traditional insights and "real world" credentials.

What is it about death that scares us?

1. Loss. We don't like giving up what we love.
2. Emptiness. We fear holes in our lives
3. Pain. We don't want to feel any
4. Change. We want to remain as we are.

I hid whenever death visited my neighborhood, afraid look into my friends’ eyes when they lost a parent, a brother, a child. It was so much easier to sign and send a card than to be present. I crouched around death with my own animals also, depositing my ailing dog with the vet, who administered euthanasia while I drove home, sobbing into an empty leash and collar. (There’s no deeper anguish than leaving your vet’s office with an empty leash and collar in your hand). I grew tired of this, and, I grew ashamed of it..

Our animals, whose joy it is to accompany us in life, request our presence alongside them as they depart, a challenging lesson for those living in fear. In an emergency , I carried and held my standard poodle, Angelo, during his euthanasia -- nothing less than a blessing as it released him from the excruciating pain of torsion. I wrapped myself completely around his body as it lay on the metal surgical table and held him until the doctor indicated his heart had stopped. Thank God, I said. After a lengthy and profound grief period, I felt brave and dutiful. My next experience was with Kasha, a miniature schnauzer who had been treated for heart disease during the last year of her life. In that year, I would ask her every night to tell me when she was ready to go. One afternoon she began coughing the heart failure cough, crawled from under the desk, walked to the front door and just stared at me. I knew. I held her as the vet administered the injection . As she closed her eyes for the last time, I took three steps back and watched her body collapse. In one fraction of a second, I saw the separation of her body and spirit. The vet was still listening through her stethoscope when I looked at her and said, “That’s it,” and she agreed, moving the instrument from her ears to her neck. Seamus, my soul mate Irish Water Spaniel -- well, Seamus is a chapter I will save for another time. Maybe.

Hospice literature reminds us of our entry into this world, when our parents, grandparents, and siblings eagerly waited our arrival, and in our first moments welcomed, loved, and cared for us so that we were not alone. Spiritual reciprocity dictates that we do the same by accompanying our loved ones (and who is more loved than our animals?) as they journey out of this life, despite the emotional discomfort it imposes upon us. Our animals want our presence. They walk alongside us in life and embrace us in all our fine and ugly moments and ask us to be equally present during their last breath.

In meditation I have glimpsed the relatives who will receive me when I walk through the Light into the next world: spaniels, schnauzers, poodles, iguanas, kangaroos, macaws, tortoises, horses, hamsters, anhingas, rats, rabbits, antelopes, bulldogs, mastiffs, weasels, crows, mandrills, whales, skinks, buzzards, bears,…

This Blog's For You

2008-06-06T17:56:00.003-04:00

I think I resisted blogging for so long because the word sounds so creepy: blog. It reminds me of a scary "B" movie about an unearthly thing that manifests on our planet , expanding like an amorphous tumor, devouring a typical American town: The Blog. Come to think of it, that has happened on the web in recent years. We're overrun by blogs, the information superhighway equivalent of an afternoon talk show. Yet here I am, succumbing. The Blog wins.Remember the late 1980s channeling craze? Everyone had an invisible other-worldly companion who strayed from his evolutionary dimension to impart long-lost but sacred wisdom to an underemployed American who in turn enlightened the rest of us to the tune of million$ from book sales, workshops, and speaking engagments.Well, I, too, read those books, and I attended those workshops, and I actually altered my consciousness and opened to the greater realities of multi-level existence. But while I do work in harmony with multidimensional spiritual forces, my intention for this blog is to create a more practical conversation for spiritual people who embrace the unity of all life. It's for you. You realize you belong here when you recognize the depth in your dog's eyes as more than a plea to "take me for a walk" or your horse nuzzling your shoulder strikes a chord transcending the physical or the dream you had last night about your departed cat was not a dream at all but a visitation.In future posts I will provide information and share insights, tell you some of my life changing stories, answer your questions, and offer you the opportunity to do the same in a space of uncontained Light and Love. Welcome!