Coyote Wisdom

A woman called me for a phone session about her horse. We’ll call her Nancy. We had a lovely session, funny, enlightening, hopefully helpful.

A few weeks later, Nancy e-mailed me and said “Joan, I was driving down an old highway and I noticed that a coyote had been hit by a car and was on the side of the road and was going in circles – his hind end wasn’t working, he was neurological.” She said she felt so awful, she didn’t know what to do and she pulled over. She remembered that she had a gun in her truck and she put the coyote out of his misery.

Now being half city chick living on a farm, I jumped a little in my seat as I read this. Knowing it was the kindest thing to do, it still left me with the question, would I have had the guts in that moment? Anyway enough about that…..Nancy was writing because she was really plagued by the whole event. She was so sad for the coyote.

She wondered if she had done the right thing and couldn’t get the sadness out of her system. In Ted Andrews book Animal Speak: “There is always hidden wisdom where the coyote is concerned”. Ted Andrews considers the Coyote to both be Wisdom and Folly.

I reminded Nancy that she helped this coyote – she then asked “Did the coyote’s spirit call me over to do this?”

I don’t know that the Coyote’s spirit specifically knew she had a gun in the back of her truck and was calling out “Hey Nancy, help me!” I do know that the Coyote needed help and that Nancy’s Spirit knew she needed something in that moment in time in order to grow and their Spirits were a perfect match for that need for that moment. Sometimes that’s all we are for another being is part of a Divine match. We don’t even know the impact we have on someone or a group of people.

Nancy and I continued an e-dialogue over this situation. In the thread, I reminded her that the sadness was her version of sadness as she processed the event emotionally. While a coyote is family driven – and tend to mate for life, a coyote isn’t going to carry that sadness onto the next plane.

While their grief would exist, it’s balanced out by their survival instinct. If it isn’t balanced, in the wild, the grief could get the better of the coyote, as in falling prey to someone else out there. Which is probably why we don’t see that many woe is me coyotes.

I said to Nancy – is it possible that you are just personalizing this loss through your filter?? What if the concept were true that the reason you feel the Coyote so strongly is because that Coyote is just trying to say “THANK YOU – you helped me. What can I do for you now?”

Sometimes the Coyote message is about deception – how we deceive ourselves……do we do this through our emotional life?

I said to Nancy – what if that Coyote is joyful? What if that Coyote is now in that eternal state of bliss? All this seemed to make sense to Nancy – the consuming haunting feeling vanished. She and I knew at that moment she has a coyote Guardian Angel – a friend for life. A totem if you will. Some well earned grace for helping the Coyote.

It’s easy to filter through our own emotions. Animals don’t process that way. They may weigh in with a few more sophisticated emotions if they have been domesticated and living in our homes, barns or our yards. When it comes down to it – it is very simple. They know the freedom that leaving this body provides.
I wrote this a couple of months ago. In April I held my Animal Alchemy class. Each of the students pulled an animal card for the weekend to meditate on or to relate to or to have that energy come in and assist with the healing work we were doing. One woman pulled the Coyote card.

Oh you would have thought she pulled the Jack the Ripper card. In this age of needing to come off as Spiritually Correct, nobody likes to think of themselves as deceitful, cunning or as a trickster (unless their doing a magic act in Vegas). Yet, sometimes deceit is necessary for survival. The judgment that deceit, cunning and trickster were fixed states of being and were bad or wrong was amazing to me.
And by focusing on that, the concept of creativity, mystery, family and nurturing were all overlooked. When the spotlight went on the latter, well, those were good qualities. What if being cunning or deceitful saves the lives of your family? Is that good or bad? What if you come from a vicious family? Is that good or bad? Once again – it’s simply our filter now of concepts.

Deceit, cunning, trickster, family, creativity, mystery, family and nurturing only hold the value I give those concepts.

There is another piece in this and that is many people fear or dislike Coyotes because of their predatory nature. Somehow, we are deceiving ourselves to not take some responsibility for displacing them. Yet, it’s easier to dislike them.

What if the coyotes are just being coyotes? If it is that simple, why can’t we see the wisdom in that? Those coyotes continue to be great mirrors.