ENCOUNTERS WITH A SAINT

E S P í R I T U ?

THE HORSE GUY?

Coaching with Horses?

Story #134

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ENCOUNTERS WITH A SAINT

The conversation became more clear after she died

My younger sister died at 59 from cancer twelve years ago this Spring. We live in a world which in some ways is mysterious.?For the past twelve years Nikki has been showing up at unexpected times. I have not seen her but the ‘felt sense’ is very palpable and vivid. When this sense comes over me I stop whatever I’m doing and listen. This is not memory but a strange, instantaneous impression. I go on alert, anticipating something amazing about to happen. It doesn’t. Instead, a subtle nudge.

“I am alive. I have not ended.”

My brain wants there to be more than this. My heart knows if I really took this truth in it would alter how I live my life. The petty annoyances, the self righteous arguments and negative dramas of many of my day dreams would give way to more peace, deeper equanimity. Maybe I would float just a little over the events of the day and not be so easily drawn into them.

Then her impression dissipates and she is gone. I have yet to understand why she appears or what prompts her to leave. I’m unsure even of the appearing and leaving. Is she always here? Is it me who leaves and returns?

She and I had periods of many years when we were not close. Separated by distance but more so by ideology and beliefs, we each found our path and personal calling. Her path (and my other siblings’) seemed to me more fundamental Christian. I started there but drifted, finding more influence from eastern traditions. There was a largely unspoken wall between us easily concealed in the silence that had been a core part of our family dynamic. Toward the end of her life things softened between us, which I am thankful for. We reconnected. I discovered I had been wrong about her.

“Don’t take things to heart. Everything is perfect.”

This nudge has been as subtle as the wind from butterflies. Did I really hear this or am I imagining things again? If you’re looking at a human moment from the vantage point of eternity, this stance makes a lot of sense. Why sweat the small stuff? Everything is small. Here in the soil of earth, however, learning to be at rest in all moments, neither resisting or avoiding but kneeling to open and accept, is a rare but essential path.

This path of kneeling to accept and allow doesn’t get much press. Those brave enough to follow this way experience life in ways the rest of us may never taste.

“How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year–, not only a season in time–, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.” ( from The Tenth Elegy, Rainier Rilke. Stephen Mitchell, trans).

I visited my sister during one of her hospital stays toward the end of her life. Her ovarian cancer had spread to her brain. There she was, lying in bed with a strange skull cap on quietly singing praises to God.

She didn’t know I was there. I sat in a chair feeling like I had intruded on what felt like an intimate conversation between Nikki and God. I suspect she spent many times like this prior to her illness.?

Her spiritual path was not separated from her daily path; it was not a Sunday morning ritual. It was her life, ‘…her place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.’? I know only now, twelve years after her passing, Nikki was a saint.

I was with my sister during the last week of her life. She died three days after I left with close friends at her side. I wish she could have lived longer; we might have become even better friends. She visited us a few times while we lived in New England. A life long New Yorker, she commented once, “There certainly are a lot of white people here.” She was right! Her neighborhood was like the United Nations.

Nikki’s visitations seem to coincide with my increased time with horses. Many of our clients from the beginning have also reported visitations from deceased loved ones. They show up with messages, received not so much with our heads but more viscerally in our hearts. The horses themselves — those still with us physically and those who died — are frequent guests during meditation times. Boundaries of time, space and distance seem to fall away. The equine version of presence includes everything they experience here and now, within and without, earth-bound as well as ethereal. Joining up with them seems to open something in us as well.

Things happen that cannot be explained. Carl Jung once described the world as being infinite and ungraspable from the beginning.

I join Nikki in saying Amen.

Thank you for reading my perspective.

ESPíRITU

www.espírituhorse.com