As Marcie at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary (1) arrived, she had already lost everything - their freedom, their community, their family, their youth, every lamb that she had ever had, all they ever felt for anything , all of which they had ever trusted all that she had been familiar.
you reached this new world with nothing but - for the short time before she became blind - the ability to work with their own eyes of this incredible land of open vistas of the vast sky, free people and people who them life wanted to see this free country Experience billion captive animals will never, and after they eat it all in all fibers up to the last breath. And maybe they saw all this with the ability to believe what she saw. Like all animals was not Marcie determined by what was there, but by what was missing - the visible and invisible amputation of a life in slavery - mutilated bodies, broken spirit, wounded soul, unlived life, the ability to feel pain, full to the brim, the ability to be happy, entirely unfulfilled. In the years of their captivity on a small farm where they mitansah repeatedly how their lambs were killed, was it has taken so much that when she was rescued and taken to a place where they could finally start in life, there was not much, what could build a life.
In its first year on the Lebenshof than to see her, could she fled from anyone who looked like they had abused - for every human in the vicinity - and for the rest of her life she avoided anyone who looked like them - each ewe, each ram, each lamb. The''hidden''her big, beautiful, undulating Even among the goats, sheep striking way of strolling amid the surge faster, leaner, thin, light- Goats, secure in the belief that they are well camouflaged among these creatures, which looked at nothing, sounded, moved, behaved as herself, you went about with them, seeking food, camped with them, ignoring the fact that they , to everyone's opinion except their own, ill-adapted to it - too fast, rowdy, mischievous, cheeky, unpredictable for them - and awarded them their many crimes, like the times when they left them far out on the field, their locating calls ignored and they went home without. But for reasons that had held the for her, she remained steadfastly loyal to them for the rest of their lives. Whatever Marcie saw in goats they learned of them received, it was obviously something they wanted. We did joke that she thought she was a goat. But rather the opposite was true: what they had to be attracted to the goats, was not an imagined similarity, but the perceived difference. She seemed to want to be someone who was completely unlike her, was totally different, unlike the helpless victim she had been her life.
She joined the goats, and shared their deepest moments of peace with them. You they could rest with them in the sun to see in a trance-like state, almost solemnly, as if they jointly a great symphony, listened to and in fact they were doing this: listening to the rustling of the leaves in spring, the rustle of insect wings, the costing over the surface of the pond scurrying wind, the scent of the wind. Such moments of peace they shared with the goats. But in the moments of sadness and grief she was alone. And she had moments of deep sadness caused by some invisible vibrations, others through events that even we could see and understand, such as the times when the smell of newborn lambs and their mothers torn from slaughtered on a neighboring farm, filled the air and the old pain in her wake, called a pain the time did not diminish, but seemed to take every spring new thorns. Those were the times when she pulled away mostly, adopted separately from their herd, and got lost in her blindness was unable to find home. Since the presence of people put them in terror, was the only way zurückzulotsen them home for us is to get the goat in the hope that they would respond to hearing loud enough for Marcie, and they flock to the sound to follow back. The goats, she confided, but people awoke in her nothing but horror - the horror to which they remembered, and the horror that they expected to learn from our hands.
We understood their fears and gave us great effort, not in the room where she felt safe to enter. What we did not understand, then, to understand to this day and completely, is why she decided to reduce the physical and emotional distance between us and every day a little closer to us get hold until there was no distance, until our nose literally touching. She received nothing in addition through our area. Nothing that they had not already been plentiful, as they shunned us - food, shelter, friends, sweets, all easily accessible to them if they accept us or not. So why she decided to trust us, if her life people had added their unspeakably cruel to the taste of the flesh of their children's sake, that a lamb fur spots, a handful of wool's sake? Why she endured our area if they could just as easily have us ignore?
It's hard to say. But the fact is that they are not only accepted, they looked forward to. If one of us had stayed in their opinion for too long in the house, she knocked her foot against the door and called out to us. We came out every time, with treats in hand - because that's how we thought what she wanted. And the rest of their lives''twisted''so as to come to us on the porch, several times a day. Then, in her final year in us, they extended their guard hold up in the night. She began to wait for Chris, on the porch composting, quietly, patiently waiting while it lasted - until midnight, until the following morning, Chris was safe to return from work. She waited without complaint, without asking for treats or attention or company or any of the pleasures which, as we thought, she encouraged them to knock on the door every afternoon. They anchored just at the front door, holding her lonely late-night vigils, away from the safety their flock away from their property, under the open sky. And nothing could give way to move - not Buto boisterous barking, not disturbing the removal of the goats, not the rain, not snow, not a thunderstorm. She stood there like a good mother wedged between heaven and earth, with a mixture of courage, confidence, expectation, hope and resignation, her massive body firmly anchored between the big, bad, dangerous world and the home of her fiancée protege and she did not stir until Chris was safe at home. Only then did she finally got up, left the porch and walked to their stables, there to spend the rest of the night, the benefit of reliable testimony, that Chris and Michele were both alive and healthy.
It was not a''Plan''. It was a much simpler, much wiser, much more deeply felt truth. Marcie wished us life. She asked, several times a day, the treat-in-the-hand proof that we went well, and they guarded the porch at night until she was sure that her two men were alive and healthy. It was not hard to understand. What most of us will probably never understand how Marcie was able to forgive their tormentors so completely that they members of the human family would be close.
Joanna Lucas,''Portrait of Marcie ... A Beautiful Soul ''; slightly modified version
(1) sanctuary
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