Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Golden Hearts & Golden Hands - The Return of the Divine


(Over the weekend I shared one aspect of the story below with another animal-lover involved in the rescue community.  We first met a year ago while stopped for lunch in her North Carolina town.  I thought of my recent experience as she shared discouragement in relation to the various attitudes she encounters towards animals.  As I heard myself relating what follows I wondered why I had not written of this experience. Whatever the case and cause, I decided this was another of those simple stories that I need to share, yes, need to because whether others consider or even read what I write, I need to be reminded daily of these things. )

It was the afternoon of June 11 and exhaustion suddenly overcame me.   As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw an eye, a woman’s eye.  She had not appeared to me for some time.  This time though her eye was closed.  Within seconds she vanished then returned again with her eye open.  The eye was quickly followed by a raccoon’s masked face which was joined by another. Two raccoons whose faces struck me as young remained in my field of vision then vanished as a golden hand its palm facing upward extending from me as if I were offering my hand to someone or something.  

I had seen raccoon eyes and the eye before but never a golden hand.   I noted this series of images before returning to work.  

Just over two weeks passed when I was returning from my morning walk and heard my name called.   It was Judy from a few houses down standing in the yard calling out that she had an emergency.   She was animated as she called me but not in a panicked way. 

As soon as I heard her say, “two baby raccoons” I smiled inside knowing this was connected to the vision.   Curled up in a plastic milk crate by another neighbor’s side door were two very young raccoons fast asleep.  Three of us agreed it was wise to leave them in hopes the mother would return.  I was relieved yet curious and torn. This was the time of day usually reserved for my writing, time easily filled with distractions.  It was all I could do to stay focused and not intervene yet not intervening felt right.  

The next morning I discovered the raccoons were gone.  Judy and I both cheered and I went about my day wondering how this was connected with the vision.  

I learned the prior day’s events were a prelude to the rest of the story when Judy called again.  The raccoons had been found in the yard of our newest neighbor who swiftly hired an animal trapping service.  A man had already arrived and for several hundred dollars caught one of the babies and left baited traps for the remaining one which had climbed a tree.   A third neighbor asked the man what he would do with the baby and was told he would abide by federal guidelines. When asked if this meant he would kill it, he only reiterated that he would follow guidelines.  This neighbor looked up the guidelines and found them fuzzy to say the least.  I then learned one local trapper uses the raccoons he traps to train his hunting dogs.  This made me sick.  

If you don’t know me you may think this dramatic, but I was heartbroken.  In the two weeks between the vision and this day, a baby robin Judy found and I had been feeding died, one that I was taking to Walden’s Puddle the area rehabilitation center for injured wild animals and Jerry had just found a baby bat dead in our yard.  I noted in my journal “Sometimes life feels unbearable.”    

I weighed whether I was to intervene and call the neighbor.  What if he was upset and told me to butt out?  This was someone I would be living next door to for who knows how long.  Judy persisted and called someone in the neighborhood that traps feral cats for spaying.  I was in my raised beds trying to dig my sorrow away when Judy and Cici arrived with a trap.  I feared it was too small but agreed to set it overnight in hopes of beating the business man to the other baby.  

The next morning my trap was empty and I felt panic.  To ignore calling the neighbor felt like I was ignoring the vision.  I had to reach out to my neighbor.  

I suspect some people in small towns, like the one in which I grew up, think urban folk don’t know their neighbors.  This may be true for some neighborhoods but not Westwood.   Six households in my little neck of the woods have been occupied by the same residents for going on twenty years with Judy having lived there much longer and the neighbors on either side of me for around eight years each.  We have an unofficial neighborhood watch when it comes to one another.  Our watch includes animals.   We’re accustomed to raccoons and opossums navigating our yards at night.   The new neighbor wasn’t.   He was frightened; concerned the raccoons would try to nest under his house. 

I offered to pay half of the fee he had already paid if he’d give me the baby assuming it had been caught.  He confirmed it was trapped and the trapper had been alerted.  When he heard of Walden’s Puddle though he quickly told me to get the baby if it was still there.   

Can you feel how elated I was when I found these dear eyes looking at me?  

Yet another neighbor helped me get the raccoon to a carrier she had and with the raccoon in the front seat I made the thirty minute drive singing most of the way.  I sang and this dear, dear animal made a chirping, purring sound in return like one of my cats when she’s extremely content.   It seemed the raccoon was singing back to me.    

I’ve heard of Walden’s Puddle for years but had never taken an animal there.  As I handed over the raccoon and made a donation, a woman walked in with a severely dehydrated fawn in her arms.   It had been in the middle of the highway when she came upon it in her car. It didn’t budge even when she got out of her car and walked up to it.  The staff immediately took it and I walked out knowing I had found heaven on Earth.  

I drove away thinking of the song “We’ve got to get back to the garden” knowing Earth is the garden and Walden’s Puddle is a special part of this heaven that’s Earth.  

I called the neighborhood network to share my success and thank them for their help only to learn the trapper was not only upset someone had gotten the raccoon but was now trying to catch the mother.  The neighbor had signed a 7 day contract and for whatever reason couldn’t or didn’t tell the man to not return even though the man had been paid in advance.

I called a trapper associated with Walden’s Puddle to see what he charged in situations such as this.  Three hundred dollars was the discounted rate since the mother wasn’t in an attic or crawl space.  (I’m  in the wrong line of work!!)  I stopped at the neighborhood hardware store to look into the cost of a large humane trap.  I learned Dwight and his sons at Hillsboro Hardware are part of my tribe too as they shared of rescuing bunnies from their yards so their dogs couldn’t get them.  

And as I paid for a trap, I heard playing on the store radio, “We’ve got to get back to the garden.”   The Universal ipod confirmed my journey.  I’m one of those people that know a line to a song but never the entire song and when I think I do I discover I don’t know the real lyrics at all.  Before leaving the parking lot, I looked the lyrics up on line to read as you probably know the line that goes:   We are golden.   

My neighbors are golden as is my new neighbor.  He agreed that if I used my trap, I could trip his rendering it harmless each night.  

Three mornings later I awoke to find the adolescent mother in my trap.  Unlike her baby she was initially very upset.   She growled fiercely as I consoled her.  I squatted by the cage and said:  I know it’s scary. Life on Earth gets hard.  When humans don’t understand the heart, it gets hard. Life gets hard and the heart gets hard.”   I made the chirping sound the way its baby had talked to me hoping it would understand.  That’s the language your baby made.   It’s your first language.  I love you and am so sorry for what people have done to you.” 

At first as I spoke, the raccoon’s ears trembled.  Then I realized I had my journal in front of me, like a shield over my heart. I lay my journal aside and something shifted.  You may think it was in my mind but I saw the shift in the raccoon’s eyes.  

I drove again from Nashville this time with a raccoon in my back seat and although it never chirped to me, it never growled after that first time.  

What I ‘got’ during this drive and what I underscored with my friend over the weekend is something I repeatedly am taught by the animals I encounter.   I was so happy loving this animal yet suddenly I realized there was a deeper love than mine in the car.  This animal I realized loved me more than I could fathom, more than I loved it.  We shared a bond that went beyond the moment.  I knew it appreciated my caring for it but most of all for caring for her babies.  

She seemed to say, “Thank you for extending the golden hand of your heart to my child and me.” 

The animals come here because they love us so.  They keep coming to Earth because they have a hope in us that many of us don’t even have in ourselves.  They are here partnering with us in this time of an unfolding great Mystery involving the waking up of the Divine Feminine.   They offer themselves to us in hopes that we might realize who we are. 

Who are we?  Many of us are golden.  We carry a golden heart from which we can at any moment extend a golden hand.   This is our first language when young yet we like the animals trade trust and love for defensiveness and hostility, masking our fear like the mother raccoon’s initial growl masked her trembling ears.  

What I know about myself, which may or may not be true for you, is when I stop extending myself be it to people or to the animals my heart starts to disconnect then gradually tune out and harden.  

All of us with golden hearts must continue extending ourselves, offering a hand to one another, those we don’t know or think we know, to the animals and to Nature.  To do otherwise means we miss our reason for being alive.  To do otherwise, means we miss our role in this return of the Divine.
-Dawn, The Good News Muse 17 July 2012
For more information on Walden’s Puddle here’s the link:   Walden’s Puddle

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