"It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear.  The one who says nothing good comes of this is not yet listening." 

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Years ago, I had a client whose small dog had recently been snatched by a coyote from her backyard. As we talked, I learned that her husband had also died in a rock climbing accident and her cousin had drowned in a lake during a family reunion.

 
 "I hate nature!" she sobbed.  "Only awful things happen outside."

Over the months that we met, I became concerned about the many ways this lovely young woman was limiting her life because she now feared the outdoors.  She stopped taking her young children to a park to play.  She didn't walk her surviving dog.  Vacations to places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon became out of the question.

Then, one winter day, she told me something surprising.  She said she'd gotten up that morning and gone to the kitchen, as usual, to get a cup of coffee.  But, today, instead of sitting down to read the newspaper, she'd walked over to her patio doors to look out into the backyard.
 

Fox close-up. Photo from dreamstime.com

And, she'd found herself gazing straight into the eyes of a fox.

He was sitting in the middle of her yard, facing her house, with his bushy tail wrapped around his front paws.  His orangey-red fur was startling beautiful against the white snow.

"He didn't move when he saw me," she said, her eyes gleaming with the wonder of it all.  "He sat perfectly still and stared back at me for a very long time.  It was as if he had been waiting for me."
 

 
 "Did he tell you anything?" I coaxed.

She hesitated, wondering if I would think she was crazy if she told me that the animal "talked" to her.

"He stared at me with these bright, intense eyes.  Honestly, I couldn't look away."  She glanced up at me to see if I was buying it.  And, of course, I was.  "It seemed that he wanted me to come outside," she said.  "And, the weird thing is that I wanted to go.  I wasn't afraid."

After that, my client began to relax a bit, to "dip her toes into the water," so to speak.  During other conversations, she told me that the fox had seemed very much like her late husband.  The voice she had "heard" in her mind and the presence the fox emitted had the same feel as her husband's when he was alive.

Nature does occasionally do damage.  But, nature also heals.

May you benefit somehow today from the healing power of Mother Nature.