I remember when Puck, my Corgi died. For weeks afterwards I could hear the click of his nails on the bare wood floors, as if he were still following me through the house.  I missed him with a physical ache, the way he’d throw himself at the front door each noon to protest the mail that attacked through the brass slot (his ferocity succeeded, for didn’t the invasion retreat before his assault, only to return next day?).  How could such life-force energy just disappear?

The fact that I could hear my dog’s nails on the floor disturbed me. Was it my imagination, forged in the fires of grief? And how was it that after two or three weeks it faded out and stopped?

They say that only humans have self-reflective consciousness, and therefore (according to Church tradition) only people have souls and enter Afterlife.  Nonetheless, a mummified cat from around 9500 BCE attests to the human longing for a pet to reach the next Life. The ancients entombed along with pets — food, maidens, soldiers, oxen and furniture for the next life. Right up to the Sixth Century ACE the rapacious Viking marauders took with them on their final journey a favorite dog or horse (not to mention the human sacrifice of the serving girl):  all killed and burned up with him on the flaming funeral ship.

But these traditions speak more to the efforts of the dying to hold onto the world and to those creatures that they loved than to the souls of animals.

Here are our main concerns:  Will we meet them in the Afterlife? Do they reincarnate as the Hindu/Buddhist traditions assert into “higher” life-forms? Furthermore, what is the soul, that quality which G. B. Shaw called the “life-force?”

I once asked my guru, “Where does the soul reside in us?”  He answered that the soul is, like water in a sponge, permeating every cell; for the soul or spirit, he said, is oneself.   I’ve come to believe that the soul is another word for love. And love transcends the very boundaries of death.

But where does it go when we die?

Once I was giving a talk on angels in Colorado, when a woman asked:  “Do dogs become angels when they die?” Then she told the following story:

She’d had a beautiful Shetland Sheep Dog in Idaho. It wore a red bandana round its neck, a hippie dog. When it died, she fell into a depression– inconsolable. She finally withdrew to a retreat center on the top of a mountain in New Mexico, where she spent her days reading, praying, walking and recovering from her loss.

One day she was hiking in the high mountains when a thunderstorm broke overhead. Lightning flashed. She knew she was in danger. Some 55 people a year are killed by lightning in the U.S. and those deaths are most prevalent in the high mountains. The woman had a poor sense of direction, and while hurrying to reach the safety of the retreat, she got lost. She was scared. Suddenly she heard a bark. She looked up. Through the rain she saw a Shetland Sheep dog with a red bandana around its neck, running back and forth ahead of her. When she took a step toward it, the dog ran down a path. If she hesitated, it came back, barking, inviting her to follow. As it ran down the slope ahead of her, she saw the dog’s plumy tail waving in great circles, like a pinwheel, just as her dog’s used to do. The dog led her to her own cabin at the retreat, turned and ran away.

Was it her dog? Was it an angel?

“That’s all an angel is,” wrote Meister Eckhart in the 13^th century, “an idea of God.”  And what is God—this word we throw around so casually and that so many reject and ridicule rebelliously? What is “god” but a word for this wild, mysterious, invisible, ineffable, unknowable and unfathomable energy of Love?

I have been privileged to know one perfect loving dog, one perfect cat, and now an exceptional horse, each one the full expression of unflinching love. I think our animals are angels, earth-angels, pointing out for us the steadfast path of love, loyalty, optimism, faith, joy, hope. They teach us everything important about life.

And when we grieve their deaths, it is love that we’re expressing in silent psalmody—our grief being a poem proportionate to our love.

May today there be peace within.  May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be.  May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others.  May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.  May you be content with yourself just the way you are.  Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.  It is there for each and every one of us.

Four days have passed, and today I woke up a wreck! I have no “peace within,” but storms and howling winds from the pressure-systems of TOO MUCH TO DO!  as I prepare to go to New York for six days. My eye fell on the quote that I had printed out and left on the table and it was so irritating that I thought I’d blog about how false chain letters are.

But something wonderful has happened.  Writing this, (and typing out the words of the prayer, being forced to slow down and read each word) I find myself simmering with laughter.  My inner sense is changing. I begin to trust that the world is exactly as it should be, and I can even feel a little faith in myself returning not to mention love for others beginning to bubble up.  Do you know the way tiny air bubbles form in boiling water,  the oxygen rising from the bottom until suddenly the surface of the water is a roiling, moiling mass  (if you are boiling milk, it overflows at this point, spilling all over the stove).    That’s how I feel and of course the moment that love for others overwhelms any other anxieties, then you are content.

So this entry gives thanks to whichever friend sent that quote along to jog me back into myself on the fourth day.  I send it forth to you, and if you’re feeling really $#(*_)&&* today…   I suggest typing out each word slowly.  Sometimes slowing down is all we need.  Why do I forget that?

10,000 blessings, and love. Sophy

What makes the show outstanding is not only the brilliant script or the acting or the ravishing costumes that make you want to wear hats again and change into gowns for dinner; what is exceptional is that each of the characters is behaving as far as possible from the highest moral and ethical code, each one striving to do what is right when it is not always clear; and that it is in the clash of ethics that dramatic conflict arises.

The plot does not turn on uncovering a murderer or solving a senselessly rapacious and bloody crime, but on the tiny choices we each of us make in our daily lives.  Two sisters hate each other; the cook is terrified of going blind; the youngest daughter is involved in suffragette politics; the dowager Countess is challenged to be generous.

This is a long introduction for what I want to talk about:  the media’s fear of spirituality or prayer.  It’s curious.  I’m baffled by it.  On the one hand, the media  (by which I mean books, TV shows, films, newspapers) glomb onto Tim Tebow, evangelist quarterback, kneeling on the field to pray in public before a football game; and since the Broncos are in a winning streak his prayers are apparently being answered.  (On this topic, I refer you to a wonderful article by Dr. Brian Lee, “How would Jesus pray for Tim Tebow” that you can find at Tim Tebow | How would Jesus pray for Tim Tebow? | The Daily Caller).  On the other hand the media shy as if in terror from any expression of the spiritual.  Is the secular our fashionable religion?  But let me back up and give the context of what made me start puzzling about prayer, secular humanism and the media.

It’s curious for example, in Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham and his family do not attend church. This at a time at the end of the Edwardian age when it was a duty of the landowner to support the Anglican church. But there’s more. There’s even a reluctance to think about prayer.

Lord Grantham’s eldest daughter, Mary, is in love with Matthew Crawley, now serving in France during the WWI, at a time when the average life-span of a British officer at the front lines was about four months.  In Part I of the new Season II, we see her kneeling in her nightgown beside her bed, her hair pulled back in a long braid down her back.  Her sister, Edith, knocks and enters, looking for a book. “Were you praying?!” Edith exclaims in derision.   Coldly Mary hands her the book, closes the door and goes back to her knees.  She pulls out a photo of Matthew (who by the way is engaged to another woman), and now the camera pans to show her full-face, and we hear her prayer.  I don’t remember the exact words, but it is something like, “Oh God, I don’t know if you are there. I don’t know if I even believe in you, but if there is a God . . . .”

From this we know that Mary is a) intelligent enough not really to believe; she’s got an admirable, healthy skeptical streak, b) that she loves Matthew and is frightened enough even to pray to something she doubts, and c) her sister ridicules both Mary and prayer; the family, we realize, are not religious—despite the fact that the end of the Edwardian Age was a time of deep Anglican faith. We never see them on a Sunday morning attending a service.

Taking just this dramatic scene:

Why was it necessary for us to hear Mary’s doubt?  Would the scene have been less effective if, kneeling in front of Matthew’s picture, we saw her whispering words that we did not hear?  Why is the expression of doubt important to this story?

Of course concerning God, everyone has periods of doubt. That’s why we speak of faith—which kicks in, presumably, when we are stricken by emptiness.   Even the great saints struggled and wrestled with the mystery of God and their own persistent lack of faith: St. Augustine, St. Theresa of Avila, Mother Teresa, to name just three.   But in moments of our most intense need, does Doubt crop up?  I can only speak of my own experience.  I may go along for quite a while, self-reliant, proud, confident of my ability to handle my problems, but sure as night follows day I’ll be thrown to my knees by life, and then vulnerable, fragile, frightened,  I find myself pouring out my fear without hesitation or debate:  Oh, HELP!  Two simple words that translate into:  God help me.  Hold me.  Help.

In my anguish I have no time for doubt.  Afterwards my intellect creeps in and I can question everything. But not while in the grip of pain and need.

Downton Abbey is produced for an English audience, and England is largely secular today – unlike the period during the Great War when this play takes place. I can’t help being confused that not even the servants have a religious or spiritual life. And if they did, why is the media uncomfortable with that?

Sometimes it is an angel, sometimes it’s another human who says just what you needed to hear at that moment.  Sometimes it comes—this acute awareness—when watching the surge of the sea against the shore, or the moon sailing through night-clouds in the high domed dark.  Everyone has such experiences, and then they pass, and we are left wondering:  Did that really happen?  And why can’t I hold onto the exquisite euphoria?

Here’s a story.  I’ve told it before (I don’t remember in which book).  My friend Ellen was just a little girl, when she was playing with her brother and sister, in the autumn leaves that the street cleaners had collected at the curb. The three children, were not allowed to cross the street, but they saw that all the good leaves were in a pile on the far side, and with the logic of children, they ran again and again across the street to carry armloads of leaves back to the pile at their curb.   Ellen, six years old, dropped her leaves midstream and stopped, innocent and guileless, to pick them up, when the car hit her.  She was tossed into the air, came down and was hit again, landing in the gutter, while the car raced off:  a hit and run.

The two siblings approached her gingerly.  She lay like dead. They could not get her to breathe and in their dismay they walked around helplessly.  It was a neighbor who called the ambulance and finally one of the children ran home to call their mother. She tore down the pavement to her daughter.   By then a crowd had gathered.  A mirror held to Ellen’s mouth showed she wasn’t breathing.

A man approached.  His face was radiant.  Everyone agreed he was amazing, with his radiance and calm.

“May I pray with you?” he asked Ellen’s mother.

She stared at him astonished.  “I’d be honored.”

As they prayed, the ambulance’s siren sounded.   Ellen’s mother went to the hospital in the ambulance, and my friend Ellen recovered, with no damage done.

But here comes the angel part. Or the skittish part—the part where we, each one, get to choose moment by moment:  Do we “believe” or do we deny?

Afterwards Ellen’s mother wanted to thank the kind man who had prayed with her and brought her comfort.  People thought he was the Episcopal priest at the nearby church.  But when she went to the church, no one had heard of him.  The man was never seen again.

Was he an angel? Was he a human who came along at that moment and carried out the duties of an angel? It depends on your point of view.

This is the time of year when we hear the story of a teenage woman who got pregnant. It’s not just that we hear of the story, but we identify with it. Or we are moved by it. Or else we are inundated and rage against it. Like Ellen’s story, you don’t know what to believe. After all, the virgin birth was a myth as old as ancient Sumaria, three or four thousand years before.

How did Mary know it was the Angel Gabriel who came to her?   How did Joseph reconcile the fact of Mary’s illegitimate pregnancy with her story, or with his privileges as her betrothed?  What do we choose to believe when angels are skittish and nothing can be proven or locked neatly in place?

“Mrs. Burnham,

���� I receive a quote of the day by email every morning. Recently, the following quote was attributed to you:

“To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses with which to receive our information. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.”

– Sophy Burnham

Is this quote correctly attributed to you? If so, could you please explain it to me in greater detail, because I don’t quite understand the point that you were trying to get across. Judging from the books you’ve written, you seem to be fairly religious with a belief in God. I’m just a bit confused. Thank you for your response.”

She goes on to say that the quote, taken out of context, left the impression that I was atheist or agnostic, which did not jibe with what she knew of my books; and she thought that many people might have thought the same.   The quote was from mqotd@starlingtech.com. (motivational quote of the day).

Here is my answer:

Dear Ryan,

Yes this is my quote. It comes from A Book of Angels. As you may know, that book is filled with stories of the Grace of God and of angels appearing in our lives, if we will only look. “Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear,” said Jesus (or something close to that), and I say, “May those who have eyes to see, just only observe,” and they will see the hand of God everywhere around them and in their lives.

However, I do believe that each individual gets the choice of NOT believing! Why not? That is our right. And it’s also part of the wonderful game of hide-and-seek that God is playing with us all the time: “Now you see Me, now you Don’t.”  I know people who have never had a mystical moment in their lives, never even imagined the possibility of having a direct line to this Mystery that we call God (however we understand that word). But instead, they put their faith in the sayings of their pastor or preacher or parent with the same rigidity as a member of a political party deciding that he is devoted to one party, and violently hates another, simply because someone told her to; without once looking at the ideals and voting record to see what that party said or did. I think God wants a personal relationship with us. I think God loves the ones who doubt—and loves the idea of being wrestled with—and loves winning by the demonstration of a thousand little miracles every day, until the person who doubted is swept away by spiritual awakening.

I know people who are atheist because someone told them to be. I know people who are believers because they didn’t have the imagination to ask the important questions that give rise to doubt. I know people who say they believe in Christ ,affirming, “I am Saved,” and in the next breath continue to hate their so-called enemy (most un-Jesus-like) or believe the world is plotting against them, rather than everything being orchestrated by angels.

Now look that that quote again. What I am saying is what Christ taught: simple as that: “I am telling you this that I have seen with my own eyes,” I am saying, “but don’t believe me because I tell you it is so. Believe because you discovered it for yourself. Go out and look for yourself. Travel the road. Question.  Examine. And pray, constantly and without stopping—pray sincerely that God show the Mystery to you. I promise, it will be shown. And then you will know, not because I told you, but because my finger pointed the way and you found it for yourself.”

Does that help?If not, write me back. I am here to help everyone on the Path.

10,000 Blessings, and may angels surround you,

Always with love,

Sophy

At the risk of blowing my own horn, what she said was that the voice itself as much as the words was what was bringing healing and encouragement. And so I just want to remind you to modulate your voice so that you’re speaking not only words of hope, but in the musical tones of peace and joy.

At this time of year when people get stressed and opposing points of view become strident it is especially important to think of your voice and how you are saying something in such a way that the other person can actually hear it.

I like to think that Christ had a beautiful voice. I like to think it was not sneering or pitched in such a way that it hurts your ears. I like to think that he spoke with music.

Also, are you interested in Sounds True? www.soundstrue.com

Since my book, The Art of Intuition: Cultivating Your Inner Wisdom, Tarcher, 2011), takes the opposite position — ALWAYS Trust your intuition– I feel obliged to argue.

First, O’Toole is not totally wrong.  Sure, some people have better intuition than others.  But intuition can be developed.  The more you listen to your intuition, the more you will hear. The more you trust and act on it, the more you will have. The problem is in discerning intuition from intellect–your own weird thinking.

I propose that what O’Toole is talking about is our tendency to over-ride our intuition by reason and analysis.  Imagine:  an FBI agent comes up to you, asking about your next- door neighbor who has just gone on a AKI-assault-gun rampage; and what are you going to say?   He may have given you the heebie-jeebies, but that’s not going to give the FBI information.  Now Reason and Logic step to the plate:  “Gosh,” you say. “I don’t know.  He seemed perfectly ordinary, a little quiet maybe.  He was soft-spoken, always smiled at me. Went to church with his mother.”  No point adding that underneath this facade you felt him smouldering—you have no evidence for that gut reaction, (except the hindsight, now, of his spray-gun killings and the bloody bodies lying in their gore on the sidewalk). Interviewed by the police or FBI, you’d naturally override the intuition, which tells them nothing except that you disliked him.

The case for intuition is still open.

But I’ll trust mine every time.  We call it premonition, prescience, second sight, clairvoyance, a hunch, a gut feeling, the bolt from the blue (and scientific tests show that intuition arrives with physical signals: the gut churns, the hair rises on your arms or neck, your skin goes cold  with sweat, your heart beats faster).  Intuition is the signal from your higher Self.   The problem is, it will tell you WHAT, but never WHY.  (Why does he give me the chills?  Why should I run right now?   It’s easy, therefore, to override the message.  (Nothing wrong with him. No danger hiding in that bush).

O’Toole asserts that intuition is flawed because so often the people she interviewed thought the serial killer “nice.”  But let’s ask another question:  How many friends did the killer have before he shot up Virginia Tech, before he kidnapped a child, or tortured women in his homemade basement dungeon, or became the Beltway Bandit, hunting his unaware victims with telescopic scopes?

Frankly, if he had a lot of friends then I’ll  revisit my views on intuition; but I’ll lay bets that while the neighbor may have reported the killer as “a quiet guy, low key, he didn’t swear,” he probably in practice kept his distance: just an intuition.  Just an inner guidance that maybe he didn’t like him and for no reason he could put his finger on, and therefore no reason to report that to the FBI.

Last words:  TRUST AND CULTIVATE YOUR INTUITION.  It  may save your life.

I was talking to my friend Sonia Meyer, the novelist, about the deep connection that we humans have with our horses.

“It’s at such a deep level,” she said, “it’s unlike any other relationship–deeper than with a dog or cat.  It’s the same as with a marriage. It operates at the same subconscious level that makes a marriage succeed or fail.  Why does any marriage work?  There are always difficulties, why do some come through?   It has something to do with the level of the connection.  That’s how deep the connection is between you and your horse.”

I thought of my horse, Spring, now nine years old, and knew she was right.  If something were to happen to my horse, I would not buy another. It’s not any old horse I want – but her, this one beautiful part-Arab, who loves me as much as I do her.  We are connected, one soul.

I grew up with horses.  We had horses when I was a kid.  But I’ve never known a horse that would lift her head, ears pricked, on sighting me across two pastures, or one that would walk across the pasture to meet me, or drop her head into her halter as Spring does.  She walks beside me to the stable, and I can feel her whole being thrum with joy, like a purring cat, content to be with me.

One day I was grooming her lovely hind quarters, when she switched her tail round over me, as if to swish away a fly—but instead of swishing back and forth, then dropping her tail, she held it over me, enveloping me in her embrace.  You might think this was just an accident, but she has done it several times now, hugging me with the only part of her body that can move.

I think Spring was brought to me as a special gift of God, in this period, the Second Journey of my life.  My children are grown.  My grandchildren are born. I have a horse. My horse leads me in love to God.

“We are born with God in our souls,” said my friend Sonia Meyer, “and only education interferes with that.  The more you try to explain it rationally, the less you know.”

Returned now to Washington, I feel different—interior-ly different.   Every day five or six of us rode out in small groups, to observe the wild buffalo, kudo, elephants, giraffes, wart hogs, or the flash of brilliant bird life soaring over the high grasses.  This is a place disturbed by nothing more than the hoofbeats of frightened tsessabe or zebra.  You feel you are looking at a landscape untouched by human hands:  no paved roads, no growl of motors, no construction projects, no cement, no litter, no beer bottles or plastic bags, not even a jet trail to mar the endless deep blue sky.  I think the land must have looked like this ten thousand years ago, or 200 million, when God first breathed out love on it; and it puts us humans in perspective, as insignificant.

I should add that the Macatoo Safari camp (you can find it on www.Africanhorsebacksafari.com) has room for only 14 guests and a staff of about 33, including the stable hands that care for some 45 horses. So there were no more than 50 people in a no-hunting concession that covers almost 800 square miles.  But it was not only that, nor the simplicity of living in a tent, cradled by the whisper of the wind in the grass that has changed me.

It was not only the daily exercise of riding two or four or six hours a day; nor the luxury of being waited on—no cooking to do, no shopping or sweeping or washing up—no duties.  No, it was something else extraordinary.

We had no internet, no email, no telephone, fax, printers, cell phone or ipad.  For a week I was out of communication:  no news of war, violence, suffering, destruction, despair.  Slowly I could feel myself relax.   Outside my tent at night the elephants tramped and crashed through the trees, and at dawn a family of baboons, howling and calling to note the break of day, swung through the treetops or playfully slid down the hard canvas of the tent roof, just for fun.

As the days passed I realized I was very happy, happy the way I was as a child, when I lived in the apple-green days of golden timelessness.

I write this now on the computer.  Outside my office I see the traffic pouring past, streams of cars.  I am back in Washington, available to phone calls and email and people who want to link up professionally, to dunning pleas for charity or calls to attend events or buy unwanted products, the restless urgency of balancing bank accounts not to mention the fact of  making calls myself to impose on the patience of others.  I drift restlessly, trying to recall that sweet hot smell of African sage, when I felt myself both insignificant and also a part of something whole.

I have had these sensations cruising sometimes in the open ocean.   Not that many years ago I bought a shack on a mountainside in New Mexico. It had no running water, no electricity (well, okay, one bare bulb hanging dangerously on a wire from the ceiling—safer to use the kerosene lamps), no plumbing (but a terrific two-hole outhouse in the woods), and of course no telephone or fax or internet access. I was happy, before I put in the modern conveniences and opened myself to the suffering we call “news.”

Do we all need such periods of pilgrimage, moments when we wrench ourselves away from the obligations of modern life?  (Most of it is trivia.  Let’s be honest.  Most of it can wait another day. Except there’s comfort also in the structure that communication gives. We feel important. Needed.)

I wonder if I dare to take such a reprieve once every year. It doesn’t need to be with elephants and giraffes.  Can I abandon the internet and settle (even for a short time) into the diurnal rhythm of the stars and sun?

Wow! Thank you so much Bonnie!