‘Sure, they’ll have no luck for it.’
I realised this week, people who love and care about me get to say that line a lot to me. I also realised they have good reasons to over use this (oddly perceived) comforting line with me, but my third realisation this week is: well, I don’t want anything bad to happen anyone who has hurt me in life. Well you just wouldn’t have luck for that kind of want! Wishing ill on one does not make our own lives any better: it doesn’t work like that.
Last week I stood in the yard, trance-like, as I watched a tractor in ‘the field next door’. The field I ‘did as I was told’ and visualised the sanctuary there, and the horses running free, horses once abused, once tethered, once being whipped to drive on, on a sulky. The field that was going to safeguard Hilltop Sanctuary. It stopped being ‘a field’ in the last few months when I would tell the ponies, the donkeys, the foals, now and then, ‘not long now before ye are running next door!’but a big blue tractor drove over my ‘not long now’ and left me crying out loud in a yard that isn’t mine. It was promised that I had as good a chance of any other interested party to buy the field and I believed no one else would take it from a sanctuary. It seemed to be a rational thought process.
The thing is, I don’t want anyone to be without luck at my expense or to pay a price for their wrong doing by suffering a loss or having harm done to them, I just wish Iuck would find me and the rescues sometimes. And if I’m honest, I had a moment of deciding to go to the owner’s house and smashing a window for giving the field to someone who doesn’t need it. For not telling me himself after I had laid ‘my cards’ and all my rescue dreams at his feet – for him to ‘walk on’. Don’t worry that thought lasted a second! Anger is a secondary emotion after all – and in this case it came from a huge feeling of loss. I am good at managing that emotion. We all can go from Buddha to Bull McCabe depending on the trigger or the perceived loss; it’s important to try pacify the bull when that red flag appears. Or just remove the red flag. The field is gone for this year. There! The flag has gone: acceptance.
There was a time people behaving badly towards me would nearly ‘dig my grave’. Now it just pinches momentarily now and then. Someone once said to me, ‘what people think of you is none of your business!’ I get that; I just wish they wouldn’t wish you badly. Like the ladies who don’t really know me but nearly are clapping their hands at the thoughts that myself and all these rescues might have no where to go. And a friend’s response is that good old reliable karmic one: ‘they won’t have luck for it!’
I once had a job I loved as a Guidance Counsellor in a secondary school which was the perfect career balance to go with the other avenues I was pursuing in life but a group of female teachers decided I was someone they didn’t like very much and whilst I tried to stay, their really awful behaviour became too much. And again I was wrapped up in friends’ words of ‘they’ll have no luck for it!’ But despite their vicious and malicious behaviour, I did not want luck to part with them, I just wanted it to be equal. But luck is best visualised as short and long straws. What ever one you draw, has nothing to do with you: it’s the luck of the draw.
So whilst I’m not feeling very lucky these days, I guess if I was to reframe my life – it would look like a train that came off the tracks, but if you look closer, you might see someone picking up her bits and pieces, and deciding to not get back on the same tracks, but take that road less travelled and help animals who also had no luck when it came to humans in their lives also. I feel lucky everyday I am with them. And maybe I should thank all the people who contributed to my ‘derailment’ – because you brought me here to them: the rescues.
We grow up on many fairytales and parables, that drip feed us as children: if you are nice, well good things happen nice people and if they don’t, it’s momentary: the happy ever after is just around the corner. The alternative more realistic tales should include endings where it’s not always princes and castles but ups and downs, and that’s OK too.
Life is not a Fairytale, and there is no karmic code: good things will only happen nice people. The Banshees of Inisheerin takes ‘being nice’ and dismantles it: it’s not always enough to make someone like you, and sometimes bad things will happen nice people.
No, I don’t have the field now and I can’t say to the rescue gang ‘not long now’. We’ve drawn the short straw. Yes, ‘there goes that dream.’
We’ll just have to create other ones.
The Reluctant Rescuer 