Animals as Guides for the Soul by Susan Chernak McElroy In all things, even in the most recondite mysteries of the soul, nature is the first and finest of teachers. — Thomas Moore Eleven years ago, diagnosed with advanced neck cancer, I felt I had found the key to a healed, whole, and soul-filled life when I discovered the then-fledgling mind/body movement. Today, I have my health back, my heart healed, and my soul intact, and while much of my survival can surely be attributed to the mind/body connection, I believe my healing was actually the result not of a union but of a trinity: mind-body-nature. In short, I was healed by animals. Perhaps not by them, but in relationship with them. If I have learned anything these past 11 years, it is that we grow our bodies and our souls not in a self-absorbed vacuum, but in relationship. In our give and take with life, we come to know ourselves in the deepest and holiest way. Many people believe that relationship means only "people-to-people." Certainly, our culture would have us believe so. I know better. Very early on in my cancer odyssey, I discovered little that I could borrow from the human world of disease and death to sustain and help me. My doctors were terse, my family terrified, my friends confused and distant. Books offered statistics about my condition that were utterly morbid. If this were all I knew of relationship, I'd have had good reason to drown in a rage of hopelessness and fear. But I had led a blessed life: from the time I was born, my life had been rich with hundreds of other relationships that spoke of grace, humor, and acceptance in the face of challenge. These were the gifts of my relationship with animals. From Boots the cat to Louie the rat to Keesha, my dog, I had models of "courage under fire" that were pure, good, and sustaining. The answers about life and death that I was seeking, I found best answered by animals I had known and comforted in death. In their faces, I could see a path that led to peace, surrender, and completion. In holding their bodies in my arms, I could understand the finality of physical death, and in committing their remains to the earth, I understood that each of us is called home in our time. Animals taught me that death is not bad or wrong, but inconceivably mysterious. When I feared that my disease would eventually imprison me in my bed, I looked to the animals I had known in physical distress. In particular, I remembered my own dog, Keesha, who had died of cancer many years before. In her last hours of life, when she was too weak to walk without falling, she rested beside my sofa with a huge grin on her face, devouring a bone the butcher had sent her. Her spirit that last night was as fresh and alive as on the day I had brought her home as a wiggling, face-slurping, six-week-old puppy. More than any human, Keesha showed me that life could be enjoyed to the last instant. No matter what was lost along the way, what still remained — that wonderful spark of life — was worth celebrating. As my health returned and my immediate fears of dying subsided, I found that animals were more and more becoming mirrors in my life. My dogs, cats, birds, and farm partners reflected back every moment of anger, sadness, and duality that my life beamed out to the world. If I needed lessons on how to get along better in the world, my chickens would show me how beautifully they coexisted with cats, dogs, donkeys, and wildlife. Their willing acceptance of others — especially other species — challenged me daily to redefine the concept of "enemy" in my life. When I saw God in the faces of animals, my confusion about God vanished. On the days that my relationship with my husband felt like slavery and my publisher's demands like unspeakable burdens, I took my resentments to my animals and they taught me the difference between service and slavery, work and drudgery, duty and bondage. Animals have been our partners, our slaves, our prisoners, and our mates for centuries. They are food, clothing, transport, living test tubes, entertainment, and companionship. There is a totality in what they give that compels me to look at what I give more closely, and the end result is more compassion for myself — and more for the animals. When my search for God took me into confusion and doubt, I looked again and saw the very face of God there, there, in the faces of my animals. My animals, in turn, showed me the face of God waving on delicate grass strands in pastures where they fed, in the branches of trees where my chickens rested, in the slab of rock where my cats sunned themselves. If God is alive anywhere, God must be most vitally alive in God’s creation, and God’s face, there, is one of harmony, power, beauty, and love. When I saw God in the faces of animals, my confusion about God vanished. My fear of God vanished. My questions about whether I was accepted by God, loved by God, vanished. A reader of mine said, "Sometimes the hand of God is a paw print." Beyond what some religious scholars would have us believe, is there anyone who has looked deeply in the face of an animal and not seen a soul? If so, does this tell us something about the animal, or about a person, whose eyes can see so little in the presence of so much? Last week, I watched a coyote hunt for a meal in a snow-swept pasture. The winds took the temperature well below zero, and fingers of snow blew like a sandstorm over the landscape. The coyote trotted along, cocking her head to the snowdrifts. Now and then, she would stop, arch her back, and pounce, thrusting her nose deep into the drifts. Without fail, she'd surface with a rodent crunched between her teeth. Life, I thought. She has a lease on life with that vole. It will take her through the cold, bitter, cruel winter night. But the coyote was not nearly as serious as I. Trotting along the edge of ice-cloaked survival, she found room to rejoice and play. Between each tiny hunt, she would scamper and dance on the snowfields, bark, twirl, laugh open-mouthed into the snow, and leap high into the air. I watched her play-bow to a sage bush, chase her tail, and attack a ball of snow. When, I asked myself, do I trust life that way? When do I trust enough to play? The face of God looks my way through coyote eyes and says, "There is room and reason to rejoice." When we embrace animals in our sphere of relationship, we open our souls to a vast soul-university of learning. If we keep only to the realm of human experience, we will live our lives in spiritual day school — a nice place to start, but then what? We are more than our minds and bodies. We are a piece of the fabric of creation, and have at our fingertips the wisdom of the whole tapestry if we but reach out and touch it. Touch it, there. It is a cat's tail. It is a dog's moist tongue. It is the fire in the eyes of an owl; there, a sacred tapestry; there, the face of God in your animal's eyes. Susan McElroy is author of the NYT bestseller Animals as Teachers and Healers, and Animals as Guides for the Soul. She is a regular contributor to Vegetarian Times, and offers lectures and seminars on the spiritual and healing aspects of the human-animal relationship. You may reach her at PO Box 13501, Jackson Hole, WY 83002, or e-mail her at <info@brightstarfarm.com>.