BAILEY

It happens every single time.

When instinct and intuition beckon me to move away from something, moving toward it is always the wrong decision. This is a core truth which I willfully ignored when I felt my energetic curtain close recently yet agreed to track a terrified dog on a big-time run.

As a practicing animal empath, I recognize and absorb the feelings of dogs and their people. This serves me well except when I’m feeling compassion fatigue. The first to go are my people skills. I become impatient and sharp-tongued and have no time for anyone’s opinions or life challenges other than my own – and really, only my own as they relate to the dog I’m tracking at the time. If you’ve been the recipient of or witnessed this unkind behavior, please forgive me. Being my best is sometimes not all that great. I apologize for hurting you or causing you pain.

Messy human-being here. Work in progress.

Although the two words are interchanged frequently, intuition and instinct are not the same. Intuition is an ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. It’s an insight or a thought, not a reaction. For me, intuition is a recognition of patterns that plug me into an alternate way of seeing, thinking, and feeling. While it’s beyond what some people consider normal, we all have the power to tap into the pure intuitive flow.

Instinct is a natural reaction, not a thought. Instinct is when we respond automatically to a situation without having time to think about it.  For example, in 1962 my young, beautiful, and painfully shy 98-pound mama responded instinctively when her three-year-old daughter Carol slipped out of sight and into a family friend’s new Beetle, then pushed the shifter into neutral. As the car rolled down the steep gravel drive toward our crackerbox Four-Square, Mama thwarted the disaster by rooting herself like a tree, arms forward and legs planted. Help came quickly, but Mama would have stood there all day.

Did she think it through? No. That’s instinct. We’re all born with it.

The message was crystal clear, but how could I say no to this track? The new owner was frantic. Bailey, a low-key country dog unaccustomed to traffic, had been given to a family who lived thirty feet from a loud, busy, and fast two-lane road, a county and a world away from the only home she had ever known. Two days later, Bailey slipped her collar and bolted across the road into thick woods. Six days after she ran, I was called in to help get her home. But my impatience with what I judged as the owner’s unwillingness to commit to the rescue effort led to one misunderstanding after another. Within thirty minutes of our meeting, my leaving the track was the only thing we agreed on. Assisting anonymously through private channels was all I could do and even that effort fizzled within 72 hours.

I was out.

But Bailey stayed safe, and she didn’t go far. What is thought to have kept Bailey close was a precious ginger sprite of an eight-year-old boy in whose bedroom she slept those first two nights. It didn’t take Bailey long to choose her new best friend or to begin to bond with the family who welcomed her into their lives, but now she was frightened. No amount of coercion or bacon would get her back across the road to home base until she was good and ready.

As the crow flies, Bailey was usually within fifty yards and never more than about a mile from that red-headed boy and his family. Jess placed her son’s dirty clothes in the yard right alongside a smelly food trail so Bailey would pick up his scent and follow it onto the back porch and through the kitchen door. However, Bailey would only come so far, never all the way into the house, and she usually tiptoed up late at night when the blue road and the house were cool and still.

By the end of the twelfth day, an exhausted and thinner Bailey made her final decision. Her heart led her across the road in the quiet evening and onto the back porch. Once there, the good dog used her best howling voice to alert the family. “Please open the door, “she bayed. “I’m home to stay.”

Bailey didn’t have to return to a wide-porched farmhouse on a busy road. Her thorn-thickened trail led to many peaceful farms where willing people looked out for her and offered her roots. But she did.

Driven by instinct, Bailey ran. But driven by love, Bailey chose as her new pack a family who lived on a fast road with a ginger boy to call her own.

And that is the power of love. So it is so.