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The
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Several years ago I decided to make my year-round home on an 8,000-acre Spanish land grant that used to be an old cattle ranch just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a peaceful place, and sometimes deafeningly silent, with ancient energies that communicate to me in nameless ways. I live there with people who take care of me, and friends who come and stay, as well as nine dogs, three horses, ducks, platoons of birds, a pond, streams, deer, elk, bears, mountain lions, coyotes, and a host of spectacular plant life. But the most important being on the ranch is my little dog, Terry. I “acquired” Terry in Malibu, California, where I lived for fifty years and still keep a place for meetings. She and I grew closer and closer during the few years it took me to distance myself from Malibu, with its easy access to the movie business, and to shift my life to the high desert wilderness. But as with all events that are life-changing, I woke up one morning and knew in my soul that the city par tof my life was over. I was moving on to a new adventure that would lead me to realize that perhaps Terry had acquired me. The love that has come to me through Terry is an exultant confirmation that love exists in many realities and forms, all of them longing to be acknowledged through wisdom, humor, simplicity, silence, and the wordless language of the heart. Have I discovered that I am capable of unconditional love? Sometimes I lie in bed holding Terry, overcome with the wonder of it all. She has slowed me down, letting me understand that time is just an invention of man as she takes me to a world where everything is known concurrently. Her tolerance gives me peace. Her free spirit gives me courage.Her playfulness entertains me beyond all comedy I’ve everknown. Terry negotiates my life as though she has traveled it before, and she knows my thoughts as though she were part of me. We communicate in a game that is sometimes playful and at other times profoundly serious, because we both realize it is the basis for my newfound ability to feel and accept love without reservation. I have had many female friends whom I enjoyed because they understood the power of allowing others just to be, the power of patience, and even the power of subservience at certain times. But I’ve never had a girlfriend like this. She is my confidante, my sense of home, and my deepest venture into the intimacy of myself. She has taken me on a road away from this world into a new world of happiness and inner peace. The happiness comes from what I’ve found; the inner peaces comes from what I did not even know was there before. With Terry I understand for the first time what it means to weep for the sheer joy of it. Her purity humbles me. Her warmth brings me comfort, and her breathing is a reminder that God has created involuntary acts so that we need not always control and manipulate our surroundings to survive; simply by being we can also evolve. When Terry stirs in her sleep, it always makes me smile.When I hear her moving through her dreams I long to join her there, and I wonder if she can remember her dreams in the morning. I wish I could understand the dimensions of her life that she seems so fully able to appreciate in mine. She always seems to be telling me something, something that I haven’t yet touched, or something that I am unwilling to embrace in the world I understand.Terry weaves her bouncing spirit through the threads of my life. I hug her with my heart. She is my heart and part of my soul, playing through the shadows of all my concerns and lighting them up with her bubbly prancing. Excerpted with permission from Out on a Leash ©2003 by Shirley MacLaine, published by Atria Books, New York, NY. Available in stores or visit www.simonsays.com Want to read more from The Share Guide? Subscribe to our Free Health Newsletter. Get articles, interviews, and other info not available in the magazine. And it's free! Looking for more info on animal health? Check out Share Guide's Holistic Health Directory READ OUR SHIRLEY MACLAINE INTERVIEW
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