Every January people think about New Year’s resolutions. I never did get that, maybe because I think of life as a choice, and I’m glad I get them.
Or I used to be.
My work as an intuitive, as one being on the planet, is about choice. How can we grow as a society by recognizing that the world, and everything in it, is alive, conscious … and free to choose its path? Everything.
Humans are not guardians and caretakers. We are equals. Equals to everything from our chairs to our cars, our homes and businesses, the land and water around us.
Equals to the animals who are part of our multi-species families.
They get to choose. We get to live with their choice. With them.
Sure, it’s cut and dried in theory. In practice, it’s fascinating and exciting, because that’s when participation in the great dance of life helps us hear, for example, what a hurricane thinks about its work, or what little tweaks would please and invigorate our homes and businesses.
But choice can be painful, and we’re living that now in my family.
My beloved eldest dog, Murphy Brown Fritz, has, in her own words, chosen to ‘walk the mystery’ and to refuse surgery that would complicate but possibly save her life. For a short while, anyway. Maybe. Nobody really knows. I tried to find out, and I couldn’t.
At 13.5, she’s had a long and fascinating journey to wellness, one that I walked with her, that we all did as a family. This fabulous life I shared with this stunning dog has inspired my work as a writer and intuitive, my view of the world and the human-animal bond, my work with my crystal partner, Fallon, my sense of humor. Together, Murphy and I got well and went out into the world to do our work.
But we now know that Murphy’s journey is ending. She has a tumor on her spleen, and there are no easy choices. Remove her spleen and she may live, a few weeks or years, we don’t know. But if it’s a bruise or a tumor that is the spleen’s own way of dealing with a lifelong platelet disorder, maybe, just maybe, surgery is not the answer. And right now it isn’t, anyway, because this all started because she had a mild cough and UTI, and she has an infection to beat first.
That we even know about the tumor is because the intuitive in me kept insisting there was something more. Now there’s another part of me that asks why I insisted on finding out.
I thought science would give us an answer, a time frame to plan our year, an answer of some kind, a clear path: if you do this, then that happens.
But science doesn’t give answers like that.
Love does.
This surgery for Murphy would be complicated. And we had a deal. Through the ups and downs of our journey to wellness our deal was that we would fix what we could because the larger journey to wellness was healing our wounded souls. We got well together. That done, we agreed that I wouldn’t ask her to do any more, but she’d get whatever she wanted. No matter what.
And she got it. She’s been healthy and vigorous for most of her amazingly long life.
But science and thoughtful care take you only so far. Love and choice do the rest.
Stunned and griefstricken at this news last week, I had sense enough to give this choice back to Murphy. “What do you want to do?” I asked her.
“We had a deal,” she said. She thinks her time is close anyway, and she doesn’t want the complication of surgery. At least not now. We are exploring her options, to give her more information. But right now she thinks she will live longer without the surgery, and she could very well be right. She wants to “walk the mystery” as freely as she can. I’ll be there with her, as will Alki and Grace the Cat. Our medical team. And our intuitive team, which includes guides and dragons and Fallon and the entire Alchemy West Committee and the one intuitive in the world I trust when I need to step aside and ask for help: Debrae Firehawk.
Murphy’s defied the odds before: the little dog no one expected to make it to 3 is 13.5. In my less rational moments I want to grab her and run as fast as I can, to outrace whatever it is that’s taking her from us. In other moments I’m arranging supportive care. For all of us.
We’ll be chronicling our journey, wherever it leads us, and we invite you to share it at our magazine, Bridging the Paradigms.
For this month, we’re just pointing us all back to New Year resolutions. Forget them. Instead, ask yourself what you will do with your choices. What do you want your year to look like? What will you do if things change? How does love choose its way? How do you honor love’s choice?
This choice terrifies me. I guess the important ones should. Everything I believe about how we should live our lives comes down to honoring Murphy’s choice. Find out everything I can. Explain it to her as best as I can. And then let her choose her path.
When I could throw everything in the universe at a tumor that may be killing my beloved dog, would I take her choice away to suit mine?
Can I? Should I? What does love look like?
It looks like choice. Her choice. We’ll find out where that takes us.
Oh, and another thing. There’s a new “energy” system, something that showed up here about five years ago. I kept trying to give it away. It kept coming back. Fallon and I have been using it at times during our intuitive consultations, when it has shown up and clients have agreed to experience it.
When I say I am not a healer, I mean it. I am not a healer. Fallon is. But I can use this new “energy” in a new way, and I will. So I can say for now that I’m a healer, but that word has no real meaning in the new paradigm. A new word will come.
This “energy” is something very new in the world. Very right. A new paradigm for vibrational work. For healing. For choice.
Murphy chose that as her option. Fallon and I are on it. As are Alki and Grace the Cat. It does not promise a cure for Murphy, whatever that means. It just helps create space for choice, for Murphy, for the tumor, for us.
Can’t define the energy right now. All I know is that it’s about love and choice.
So this New Year I resolve to honor choice. Whatever that looks like, wherever it takes us.
What choices will you honor this year?
© 2012 Robyn M Fritz