Yippee-Ki-Yay Coyote
June 7, 2024 (Horoscope-Aquarius)
You should spend some quality time with animals today, your pet, if you've got one, or someone else's, if not. You might need to reconnect with the animal inside you in some small way.
Painting by Debbie McCulley
This morning while walking the dogs, I startled a young coyote, or rather we startled each other. Our back fence runs along an arroyo. We are the second house in from the corner, and I was headed toward the plancha or dip-a sloped, concrete apron in the road designed to allow traffic to pass through the arroyo during and after storms. Until the monsoon storms come, the arroyo is a dry wash and highway for wildlife. It is lush with tall grasses and flowering desert plants. When the storms arrive in July (God willing) the plancha will fill with rain water, making the dip a favorite, fleeting water hole for local kids.
Our neighbor’s 8-foot, budding bougainvillea blocked the view of the arroyo until I entered the plancha where the coyote and I met face-to-face. The dogs lifted their muzzles and tucked their tails, sensing a predator. I sensed a kind of communion I hadn’t felt in ages. “Good morning, sweet girl. Thank you so much for showing yourself.”
Plancha
The coyote cocked her head, curious and alert as she kept a wary eye on me while trotting over the plancha into the arroyo on the other side of the road. Not twenty feet ahead was a much larger coyote that I assumed was the mother. She sat half-hidden in the creosote waiting on her pup. She didn’t appear the least bit anxious at my presence or my voice as I tried to coax her pup to stay just a moment longer with the dogs and me in the domestic world, such a far cry from the wild.
The pup, whose inner workings knew her rightful place, bounded toward her mother. I laughed out loud at her antics, and a Great Horned owl answered from a bushy Eldarica Pine. As the two trotted off through the arroyo together, I was reminded that I am most comfortable in untamed spaces, and it was the arroyo that sold me on our house three years ago. I immediately claimed the add-on off the back of the house as my office as it faces the arroyo. We recently hung a shade cloth off the eve of the room to protect my garden, which consists of several tomato and pepper plants along with sweet basal and some rosemary that isn’t doing well. I can no longer work in the dirt because of lower back pain, so all my plants are potted, and Ron built a few wooden stands so that I don’t have to be on the ground. Out the window next to my desk is a cherry tomato plant that appears to grow an inch or two every day. There are currently four yellow blossoms facing the rising sun. By mid-July, I will be out there every morning picking dozens of tomatoes for bruschetta and salsa until the first frost. Lining the chain-link fence separating our carefully tended city plot from the messy desert arroyo, we have planted melons and cucumbers that have begun to snake their way over the rocks in the backyard.
Our backyard from the wash.
This is a far cry from the life I lived before chronic illness took its toll. A house in town, the arroyo managed by city crews, and the garden on stilts are compromises I have begrudgingly come to accept. But there are things I miss: hiking the Huachuca Mountains to watch the monsoon storms charge in from Mexico; climbing Red Mountain in Patagonia on the Fourth of July to the fire lookout tower where one can hear the first responder sirens coming from the parade miles away; running the dewy banks of the San Pedro River searching for mountain lion tracks.
In my dreams, I still hike canyonlands and run along the crusty mountain ridgelines, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, my ears twitching—my snout close to the ground. I soar steady and slow above the cottonwoods that line the San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers, my keen hawk eyes searching for prey. I wake up believing I can do anything I set my mind to. And oftentimes I make it through the morning powering through, the residue of a dream still fresh in my bones. This is how I see myself in the conscious world: a woman capable of great things.
By noon aches and pains or swelling or the thunder blanket of exhaustion hit, and it is time to retreat to my dark cave with a blanket and the dogs. My body surrenders and I am swept up again in dreams. These (day) dreams are often frenetic and very much centered in a physical, busy world, one in which I cannot seem to keep up. I wake up sluggish as though coming off a rough day at work.
For years, decades really, I was alone with this sickly part of me that eventually became me. It was a lonely place to inhabit while my peers zoomed by with their careers and grand adventures, and I moved slowly, a tortoise in life’s race. But now, with more years behind me than lie ahead, my friends have begun to show signs of age. Their bones, joints, and inner workings are not what they used to be. Old childhood injuries are reemerging; shapeshifters demanding the full attention of their hosts. The complaints are endless as conversations are hijacked while at parties, out to dinner, or meeting for coffee. There are medications with terrible side effects, doctors who give bad advice, soaring medical bills, and overall wonderment as people blurt out, “My God, what is happening to me?”
I am now the sage, the mother coyote, my friends seek out when they need to find a doctor or a shoulder to cry on. “How do you do it?” they ask.
Today’s horoscope reminds me of how I do it. The mother coyote and her pup remind me how I do it. Through it all, I have rescued countless animals. Mainly dogs and cats. Their needs supersede my own, and I delight in their playfulness and contentment. I walk the dogs miles each week, immersed in the natural world albeit, for now, it is in the city. I am the primary caregiver to this menagerie of rescued souls, a role that I thank God each day I can manage and manage well.
So, if your joints ache or your lower back is screaming, take on a new friend in the form of something furry. Then give me a call, and we will walk together.
