The Promise

I was alone, parked in the large van waiting for my drug dealer boyfriend to return from partying in the nightclub. We had just had another fight, and I was crying…again. I was 26 at the time.
Lost in emotional pain, my face soaked from tears, I got the shotgun from under the bench seat.  He always kept it loaded. Resting the butt of it on the floor, I put the end of it in my mouth. I can still feel the cold, smoothly rounded steel of the double barrels against the roof of my mouth and the awkwardness of the size of it. A profound sadness filled my heart as my finger lingered on the trigger.

At that moment, my sleeping black lab, Sarah, awoke.   She got up, walked over, leaned against me and looked deeply into my eyes. Piercing my soul, her deep brown dog eyes, filled with so much love, pleaded with me to stay, to not abandon her.  I heard her clearly say inside my mind, “You promised you would never leave me.”   She was an abandoned 4 month old pup hiding in the bushes four years earlier when I found her.  I had made a promise to her then that she would always be safe, loved and with me always…that I would never leave her.

Still leaning against me, her eyes never leaving mine, she watched as I put the gun down.  I lay down on the van floor, wrapped myself around her, sobbed and sobbed until I was silent & empty. She lay there with me for hours, never leaving me.  

Beneficent forces of love exist.  I experience it most clearly in my relationships with animals and nature.  It is part of what the Indigenous people call “The Original Instructions” which teach humans how to love and live in harmony in themselves and with Mother Earth.  The instructions are still here.  I am dedicating my life to partnering with them, and bringing my life’s training, both professionally and experientially together in powerfully, unique ways to guide you in doing the same.   May you fall into reverence, and step through the doors that open because of it.