Sometimes we have an animal at Earthfire that is so beautiful and vulnerable yet brave, that they just break our hearts. Faerytale moved everyone who met her, from tough football players to sensitive energy healers. Wary of all humans, she would never let me touch her, but she did feel safe enough to come towards me and take a piece of food near my hand. Even without the offer of food, when I stayed quietly nearby, she would come close to me with fear in her eyes, wanting a connection yet afraid of a connection.

There was something about her dainty, fragile beauty, her timid personality, that inspired people to want to protect her. When visitors arrived, she would begin darting about in alarm at the human energy around her, running behind her box and peeking out in a mixture of fear and curiosity, her body tensed for instant flight at any move they made. If a visitor so much as shifted their weight as they stood watching her, she panicked and they would often spontaneously cry out, “Oh, I’m sorry!” While Skitter found a way to move beyond his fears through Pimpernel, Faerytale didn’t seem to be able to do so. She lived in a state of fear, reminding me of humans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But how do we help a wild animal who won’t let anyone near her, who hides in her box every time someone approaches?

When Western medicine doesn’t have answers for our animals, we try alternative medicine. We invited renowned energy healer Donna Eden and her husband, psychologist Dr. David Feinstein to visit. He specializes in treating war veterans with PTSD and I asked if perhaps they could help Faerytale. They graciously agreed. The first thing David observed was that she was very traumatized. He said, “There is a lot of excellent work that has been done with animals and infants using energy psychology. When I can’t work directly on a patient, I use myself as a stand-in.” He explained: “The first couple of minutes I was just trying to keep a connection with Faerytale as I tapped on the points on my own body that calmed my amygdala. [Using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), where tapping on meridian points releases stagnant energy.] This creates a resonance from brain to brain. Then I told her she is so loved, so safe. As I tap on these acupuncture points, it is like a kind of acupuncture for the emotions. If I tap while reassuring the patient they are safe, it sends deactivating signals up to the brain to the amygdala, the part of the brain where fear is based. With a resonance between myself and Faerytale, when I reassure myself and feel those points, it connects with her and reassures her.”

At the same time, Donna was also working with Faerytale, doing what she calls “figure eights” with her hands in the air, tracing a specific energy system in Fairytale’s body.PTSD dis-integrates us. According to Donna, there are eight energy systems. In the figure eight system, one creates an invisible thread that weaves throughout all of them, so that they reconnect into one unit and the harmony that is created helps an animal to heal. Donna commented, “David, when you first started tapping on the acupuncture points, Faerytale was receiving it as a pulse, and it kept pulsing through her energy field.” She said to Faery- tale, “You are very receptive. You’ve just been so receptive all your life and it was too scary.” Faerytale slowly began to relax and eventually lie down as David worked with her, becoming much calmer. She seemed to be responsive to this loving, gentle energy healing. (A video of this is available on YouTube called Energy Healing Wolf.)

Afterthoughts: This may seem unbelievable to those of us not familiar with the field of energy healing, but there are two points to consider: first, animals, particularly the wild ones, are far more attuned to energy than we humans—they have to be for survival. And second, it offers an explanation as to why Faerytale had such a hard time adapting to life. Perhaps there are humans and other mammals who have nervous systems that are especially sensitive and if traumatized, have a harder time recovering.

A coyote and a football player: a mysterious connection

The years passed and we generally limited visits to Faerytale as it was all too much for her. Then one day a kind supporter, Judith, called us: could she bring a friend over to visit the animals? He was a very special childhood friend who loved them. We agreed. She arrived with this massive man who had been a famous, and famously aggressive, NFL football player. A little taken aback, we took him around to meet the animals. He stood silently overlooking the Wildlife Garden as he watched the wolves play, met Bluebell the Bison, and then we led him onto the bear enclosures. Our assumption was that he would be attracted to the large, powerful animals. Near the end of the visit, we took him to meet the foxes and coyotes.

Something extraordinary happened in the coyote area; he appeared to be inexplicably drawn to Faerytale. This huge visitor stood a respectful distance from her, as we had asked, and watched her run to her box and hide, as usual. As he continued to stand still, she peered out at him, then cautiously crept out of her box. He remained in place, transfixed, as she slowly, ever so slowly, crept towards him, startling, backing up, then creeping forward a little more. I don’t remember now how long they stood looking at one another, communing on some altogether different level, but it was a powerfully moving experience for Jean, Judith and me as we watched quietly in the background in wonder.

Our visitor continued to talk to Judith about Faerytale for the rest of his visit with her. I asked her later if he would write something about his experience with Faerytale. What we didn’t know at the time was that he was in serious mental decline from football injuries to his head. He never did write anything, though he spoke to Judith frequently over the years about the impact Faerytale had made on him. He is now in a nursing home and only sometimes recognizes Judith.

I ran into her at a Rotary luncheon I was speaking at and the stories I told reminded her of my request from so long ago. Because her childhood friend can no longer communicate, she was moved to write the following:

“Often trauma is so deep and so profound that it is not easily accessed. Beings struggle, day after day, to survive with a rope of fear and sadness strangling their souls.

This rope has threads twisted to the breaking point with power and might. Yet within this twisted mass is a “snag”...an unravelling...a frayed end sensitive to the wind.

My large friend, abused in childhood, brain damaged in the NFL, stood quietly in the Garden at Earthfire with small, bound and frayed Faerytale, the coyote. The wind whispered and ever so slowly the threads of their pain knit together...in peace and comfort.”

Judith is a fiber artist, so thinking of threads came to her naturally. But it also made me wonder at all the threads intertwined here. What had happened to Faerytale? Perhaps she was abused in some way, even though she was only a few weeks old when we acquired her. Perhaps she had seen her mother killed in one of the cruel ways coyotes are treated in the West. Or perhaps it was past collective trauma for all the coyote exterminations that echo down through the generations, affecting some more than others.

What universality causes two hurt beings to recognize and connect to one another, even across species, providing one another with some measure of comfort or healing?

But Faerytale did change

For several years now, we have held retreats with Rose De Dan where she works to build a bridge between people and the animals, using shamanic ceremonies. Over time she has seen a dramatic change in Faerytale.

Rose writes:

“We see each animal as an ambassador for their species and treat them with the dignity appropriate to that status. Each year I greet Earthfire Animal Ambassadors who are old friends and make new ones. During the four days of the event, I have the opportunity to observe how my animal friends have evolved and changed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Deli- cate coyote Faerytale is one who has changed quite a bit over the years—most dramatically in the last two.

“Faerytale has always been very, very shy, darting away when people came near her, and she always refused to venture out of the safety of her home to join us in the wildlife garden. But one year we made a special effort to try to help her. As a group we all sat quietly in the meadow, pulling our energy in and doing our very best to become part of the natural world— to be as non-threatening and open-hearted as possible so that she might gain confidence and trust. And for the first time ever, she came out!

“Our time together was magical. We were blessed to witness Faerytale’s gradual transformation as she shifted from moving around us to moving among us. She was shy and tentative, but she was bravely facing her fears. When we said good-bye to her and left the garden, we all felt that we had done something important to help her trust and connect with people. And she had changed us as well.

“The next year Faerytale had blossomed into a different coyote. She came into the meadow with confidence, and spent far more time walking among us, often coming quite close. I could feel her smiling—she was enjoying her time in the meadow with us.”

It is a fascinating topic; how animals grow and change as they age. I have seen it often now, in many different species.

Faerytale is Gone

I didn’t want to bury her. It was too final. In my grief I wondered how a coyote could be loved so much that I was touched to my core by her brave, responsive, feminine, ethereal spirit. I had fourteen years of knowing she was just outside in her enclosure, available anytime I wanted to visit, which was never nearly enough, because I seemed to be constantly pulled elsewhere by human worries and responsibilities. We often don’t live our lives to the depths we are capable of. We don’t always open ourselves to the riches that living deeply brings, to us and those around us. Our technological, unnecessarily complicated lives can pull us away from what is really important. Even as she lay dying, I was in an online virtual meet- ing, unaware, only a few feet away in the office, talking about marketing and fundraising. She passed quickly. One evening she was fine, the next morning she was having seizures.

She seemed cold, so Jean covered her with his wool sweater while we waited for the vet. I had known she would be leaving soon: last fall she appeared frail and grizzled, and January is cold, dark, the harshest time of year. But death never seems real until it arrives, and with it a dreadful finality. The lives of all who met her are richer because of the gentle, beautiful teachings she gave, simply by the grace of her presence.

We have had quite a few coyotes here at Earthfire, and their personalities differed dramatically. Pimpernel demanded human attention, stroking, and massage. Her energy field was huge, remarkably unrelated to her physical size. Faerytale was shy, gentle and fearful. Wil- low was deliciously wicked, delighting in herself, with assessing intelligence shining from her golden eyes. There is a “coyoteness” just as there is a “humanness,” but that is only a partial truth. There is no such thing as “just a typical coyote,” any more than there is “just a typical human.”

We live in a lavishly varied world, each being a unique expression of the creative life force, lending its particular vibration to the ever-changing symphony of Life. This is the generative nature of existence—an luminous web of life forms with their distinctive notes and essences, transforming moment to moment as some leave this Earth and others arrive. But oh, how I wish some of those notes would stay forever, even though it is not in the nature of things! A friend of mine conceived of life as a magnificent waterfall pouring into a pool, the spray rising in a myriad of iridescent droplets, each a life sparkling in the sun, to eventually fall back into the pool. Faced with the vividness of personal loss, that image of being part of a larger pattern is a bit of a comfort.

The famous playwright Goethe was also a brilliant scientist with insights that are only now being verified in quantum mechanics. In one of his meditations on plants he “saw” a field of information, an archetypal plant that held the possibility of plant, the coming into being of plants, infinitely flexible, out of which it was possible to develop all plant forms, past, present and future. He had a similar insight with animals.

“When I closed my eyes and bent my head representing to myself a flower right at the center of the organ of sight, new flowers sprung out of this heart…There was no way of stopping the effusion that went on as long as my contemplation lasted, neither slowing nor accelerating.”

(Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature, Goethe’s Way of Science)