Wyoming Retreat

Over Labor Day weekend I took my favorite drive up to Wyoming (highway 287 between Fort Collins, Colorado and Laramie, Wyoming). The pillars of rock, distant Rocky Mountains, the changing sky and energy of the area always carry me to a solid inner place. I spent two nights in a tipi on the land of longtime spiritual mentor and friend Dawn Eagle Woman. She has named the space Anahata Sanctuary… Anahata is the Sanskrit word for the heart chakra and means “unhurt.” The land is a space held for safely nurturing, opening, healing and listening to your heart.

One morning during my solo retreat, I was journaling when my heart was pierced by a disturbing scream which sounded like a woman but not quite human. The sound repeated as it circled the tipi moving farther away then again closer. I stepped outside and walked in the direction of the frantic cry. On the sagebrush covered hillside above the tipi, no more than 100 yards from me, I witnessed a coyote chasing a fawn and the mother deer chasing the coyote. The twin of the fawn was behind its mother. When the coyote saw me it spooked and ran away giving the fawn the opportunity to escape and rejoin its twin while the mother doe continued to chase the coyote away. My heart was struck by the courage of the doe. The sound of the deer scream still cuts through my heart when I remember it… almost human, mystical, there has to be a soul in there, certainly some form of love between mother and child.