Whew! What a year! We’ve experienced so much loss, so many blessings, so much change and shifting that our lives remind me of a funhouse mirror.
My business partner, Rachel, and I closed our clinic just before Christmas in 2020. That ended 25 years of service together. During the quarantine I couldn’t work, so I focused on doing animal communication and shamanic healing full time.
The Michigan War Dog Memorial is a non-profit organization dedicated to recognizing the sacrifice of our four-legged warriors. (www.mwdm.org)
Kaiser
The MWDM gives every fallen Police K9 and MWD a full service with Color Guard, bagpipes, bugler, and many other things all free of charge to the handler. The MWDM Salute Team escorts the handler and the fallen K9s ashes into the service, a howling salute was done by Kaiser and a Missing Dog (Man) Formation is done. They have also allowed Therapy and Service Dogs to be honored here and the team escorts the handlers at those service as well.
Last year the MWDM Salute Team was there almost every weekend from May through the end of October paying their respects to fallen MWD K9s, Police K9s, Service K9s and Therapy K9s. We really want to honor them. A full size statue of Kaiser will be representing the team and will be next to a granite wall listing the K9 team members' names we lose too soon!
Kaiser was not just a team member on the MWDM Salute Team, but he was also a therapy dog that visited Seniors, Veterans, mentally challenged adults, Fire Departments, Rehab Centers and many other places. He was a gift from above that I will forever be grateful to have been chosed to be his person.
For the past six years, I have been serving animals and their people with shamanic healing, which addresses the spiritual aspects of healing both in-person and remotely. I am now working full time as a shamanic practitioner and developing a complete program of services, from individual healing to community ceremony to teaching shamanic practice, incorporating all of my life experience as a counselor, therapist, and educator.
I accidentally came across the Book of Lost Spells by British poet, Robert MacFarlane and illustrator, Jackie Morris. It was a sequel to the Book of Lost Words. Both of these beautiful books were based on the premise of words disappearing—the words that children use to describe the nature around them. They were created as a vision of recalling wildlife that might not exist soon, a statement of how precious our natural world is.
These books are so beautifully done, that I use them for meditation. In the Lost Words, Jackie Morris’ gilded art is mesmerizing in its detail. Whole pages are devoted to vines, grasses and seeds. My surprise when I received this book was its coffee table size. Easy to get lost in the world it depicts.
The duo expanded their repertoire into the Book of Lost Spells, which inspired a group of U.K. musicians, all successful in their own right, to come together to produce Spell Songs, a musical compendium of MacFarlane’s poems. The music on the cd reflects at times the mood of the poem, at other times, the movement of the animal or bird the poem describes. At the end of April, they gave a concert to benefit the Urban Nature Project of the London Museum of Natural History. It plays on YouTube until the 31st of May. It was one of the most well done concerts I have ever seen, performed in the great hall of the museum. It is a must see.
If you miss the concert, you can get the Spell Songs cd and book (they come together) and still be enchanted.
