Tag trust

Injury, pardon, and restoration

Nancy Crowe
Maggie & Quincy 12.22.18 AKW edited clean bill

Maggie and Quincy at Summit Equestrian Center, December 2018. (Photo by Allison Wheaton)

First came months of construction noise and upheaval at Summit Equestrian Center. Even the best improvements are a hard sell to our animal friends.

Then one night a fox breached the coop, taking a chicken and all but one duck. The coop was fortified against further invasion, but the survivors — two sheep, a handful of chickens, and Quincy, the last duck standing — were shaken.

As an animal Reiki practitioner and animal communicator, I sat with them, listened, and offered healing energy to help them recover in whatever way they needed. Quincy roamed around the enclosure eating, drinking, washing, shaking out her feathers, and nipping when a chicken got too close. She was determined to take care of things and find that “new normal.”

A few days later, she couldn’t walk.

Maggie, the sweet-faced black sheep who loved chin scratches, had grabbed hold of Quincy and pinned her to the ground. It was over quickly, but the result was a duck with a fracture. After her vet visit, Quincy was moved to a safe spot and given pain meds, some special supplements, plenty of Reiki, and even a little weekend “hydrotherapy” at the lake with director Allison Wheaton.

But we were mystified. The sheep, chickens, and ducks had all gotten along before, and sheep — especially female sheep with no lambs — aren’t generally aggressive. Why on earth would Maggie attack Quincy?

Gradually, I pieced together accounts from Allison and others with what Quincy and Maggie themselves relayed. In the heightened vigilance generated by the construction and then the fox incident, an anxious Quincy had gotten under the feet of an equally anxious Maggie. It startled Maggie so badly that a violent defense seemed like the only option.

You may not think a sheep could be appalled with herself, but I think this one was. I gently suggested she move carefully in the coop and, when the time was right, try to find a way forward with Quincy. As for Quincy — helping her heal was my first priority. Only when she recovered enough to return to the coop did I encourage her to consider working things out with Maggie … and then only when she was ready.

Though Maggie kept a respectful distance, Quincy was still nervous around her. Maggie also didn’t come to me for chin scratches as before, although she did share the Reiki energy I offered for short durations. She’d either stay where she was or move toward me, then walk away. She was reconsidering how to be and move about in her world, and I let her know that was OK.

We had been preparing for a major fall fundraiser at Summit Equestrian, and with that successful event behind us, things quieted down a bit. The construction moved closer to completion, and as the holidays approached, Quincy moved around with ease. Maggie, for her part, started venturing to the fence to say hello and accept a brief chin scratch.

One day as I shared Reiki with the inhabitants of the coop, I looked up and noticed Maggie and Quincy nose to bill just a few feet away from me. There was not a hint of confrontation in the stance of either. It could have been a “hey, didja smell that new feed the chickens got?” or a simple “Good morning.”

It was one of those animal moments you don’t want to spoil by so much as noticing, but Allison later confirmed the two had been hanging out.

How did they get to that point? When I asked them, Quincy and Maggie both showed me how each had moved toward the other a little bit at a time … sometimes a very little bit … rebuilding trust and parity in a way that worked for both of them.

A beautiful prayer traditionally attributed to St. Francis includes a line about bringing pardon where there is injury. It’s one thing to pardon, or forgive — to free oneself as much as possible from the effects of the injury. This can be done regardless of the injurer’s actions or attitude. It’s quite another for both parties to reconstruct what is broken so that it is better and stronger than before.

A duck and a sheep showed us how to do both.

Leaning unto a new understanding

Nancy Crowe 2 Comments

TrustintheLord

No arguments here; trusting in the Lord is a good idea. Challenging at times, yes, but still a good idea. It’s the “lean not unto thine own understanding” part of this passage that, until recently, left me puzzled.

Our own understanding, I reasoned, is how we get through life — understanding the need to steer clear of a hot stove, our neighbor’s need not to hear our stereo, and the relative insignificance of the things we worried about last month or five years ago. We are put on earth to learn, grow, and understand in order to be better earthen vessels of God’s love, right? So why would we not lean on that while we trust in the Lord? Are the two mutually exclusive, as the verse seems to suggest?

The passage above is the King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version, which was our regulation study Bible in seminary, is not much help, wording it: “Do not rely on your own insight.” The Living Bible even kicks it up a notch: “Trust the Lord completely; don’t ever trust yourself.” Yikes.

Not trusting ourselves, our intuition, and what we have learned hobbles us in life and decreases our ability to trust and serve God. If we trust that God put us here — gifts and flaws and all — for a reason, and we do not trust ourselves, are we really trusting God?

More doubts creep in: “What if I’m not doing it right? Look at all my mistakes . . . sure, God forgives, but I can’t forgive myself. Of course I can’t trust my own understanding.”

So we look to someone or something else — a parent, therapist, partner, our work, our politics — to measure and determine our worthiness. Talk about slippery slopes and shifting sands.

Clarity on this Proverbs passage eluded me for years until a friend and I were talking about prayer — not the talking, requesting, praising, or thanking part, but the listening part of prayer. We talked about the importance and challenge of letting Spirit reach through the clutter of our minds, especially the mental chatter that cuts us down, and speak to our hearts. That’s when she mentioned the “trust in the Lord with your whole heart” verse, her new favorite.

And that’s when it all clicked. That still, small voice that lifts us up — not the one that tells us we’re not good enough, nothing we do makes a difference, and that some other human being always knows better — is what we can trust. It comes directly from God to us . . . but how do we know which is which?

Doreen Virtue explores this in her book “Divine Guidance: How to Have a Dialogue with God and Your Guardian Angels.” Divine guidance comes from God and God’s creations, including our higher self, angels/ascended masters, and our loved ones on the other side, Virtue says. False guidance comes from our or others’ lower self (or ego). Our higher self is set at the factory, so to speak; it is perfect, whole, and complete, just as God created. The ego is created not by God but by ourselves as we and those around us operate under the dark illusion that we are separate from God.

Virtue includes charts that break down the distinctions between the higher and lower self, and between true and false guidance. True guidance, for example, is gentle, loving, empowering, says the same thing repeatedly, and most often emerges in response to prayer. Even if we are being warned about something, that information is given calmly, constructively, and in a way that encourages us to respond rather than react. False guidance is anxious or angry, critical, disempowering, switches topics and perspectives impulsively, and comes in response to worry.

This all fits with what I have learned and experienced about intuition, our God-given communication and navigation tool. The ego is easy to hear; it’s loud, in your face, and always has a fire to put out or someone to please. Clearing that clutter to tap into our intuition can require more conscious effort, such as prayer, meditation, or exercise (or all of these), though some intuitive insights seem to come out of the blue. In either case, intuitive or God-given information is delivered in an uplifting way. Human beings may reprimand, condescend, or rebuke; God is greater.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart” — not just with thine brain. If we can hear God with our hearts and put these overloaded brains of ours to use following through on that guidance, our paths may not be smooth or straight — but they will be our paths, and God’s.