2nd Year Anniversary Meditation

It's around this time of year, when August slides into early September, that I generally feel the melancholic sense of vibrant Summer taking its sudden turn into the slow descent that will arrive at Winter. The days are still hot, but the insect sounds have changed, and the feeling of something about to end is omnipresent in the air.

This is also the season when the last embers of Ranger's life glowed. And on the approach of this second anniversary of his passing I have been feeling these bittersweet last Summer days even more intensely - almost like a large dark cloud appeared out of nowhere in my life and is just hanging in the periphery of my consciousness, daily.

Up until August this year, most of this second year without Ranger physically with me has been a good year. There are so many blessings in my life, my farm & house, my two beautiful horses, my new puppy, my cats, my birds and my bunnies! I feel the happiness of farmlife and the joyousness of all my animals all around me. I have done many things this year in Ranger's honor to help other animals, and I feel he is integrally a part of all the things I'm doing in my life now.

It's just a couple of days a way now from Ranger's second Angel Day anniversary, and like last year the approach to the day is somber and marked. Unlike last year, gone are the continuous big displays of strange-acting butterflies, birds and dragonflies around me. There have been conspicuously very few signs this last year. Last August at this time I was in Chicago at the Healing Hooves Healing Hearts Butterfly Release. And the orange monarch I released in Ranger's name - followed me all the way home to New York. Now I know it wasn't the same butterfly, but I'll be darned if a large orange monarch did not tail me consistently for the next few weeks. And I have photographic and video evidence of this strange spectacle.

I feel solemn, contemplative, peaceful, grateful and sad. There is a hollowness somewhere in me that has its own tone of resonance. I felt the hollowness today as Gunther, my new puppy, and I traversed the same paths in Luther Forest that Ranger and I did years ago. I had flashes of memory of Ranger's great big smile as he immersed himself in paddling through the stream, up and down and up and down. Through the sun dappled forest leaves, I could see/remember Ranger darting all about through the forest canopy. I had a sense of Ranger being very large and expansive on this walk with Gunther and I. Like he was everywhere, all around me in that forest. But there was also the hollowness, the place I can never return to. The place of being immersed in the moment with his physical presence, that day seems far away to me now.

Gunther has become a farm dog since I adopted him in May of this year, and while I could tell he was intrigued by the forest scents and somewhat amused by the stream - that he was not really that engaged by this experience. It was novel to him, and he was enjoying sniffing out new things and skipping along the forest path with me. It was towards the end of the trail, that I realized that I'll probably never come back to this trailhead again. I'm glad we went to the Luther Forest trail in honor of Ranger today, but I had a strong sense that Gunther and I need to seek out new forest walks together.

I realized today that Ranger continues to be with me in largely new ways. I hadn't realized until today, that so much has changed, so much is new since he left his physical form. I take a walk with his spirit almost every morning. But there's nothing on that walk that is remotely like any of the walks I took with him when he was alive. On this walk, I feel him large, in the wind - and I always say "Look how beautiful the mountains are, Ranger..."

As I write this, I come to my own internal answer I have been seeking out - this time of year is hard for me because it marks an inevitable return of some sort. A revisiting of an end and a beginning. The next few days I took off from work, and hope to meditate, listen, revisit some of our favorite spots, do some things in Ranger's honor and journal.  Gone are the jagged sharp edges of grief, but I still do feel a lump in my throat, a wistfulness and a sense of needing to turn inwards and connect with him more deeply during this marker of his transition.

Beautiful artwork credit: http://www.hollydoesart.com/2019/09/summer-to-fall-transition-piece.html