When I heard Jasmine’s urgent barking, I headed back out to the mesas. I could sense from the trail of her voice that she was on the move. Was she chasing coyotes again?

Jasmine and Coyotes had many close-up encounters through our years living on the mesas ~ spectacular, breath-taking, can’t-believe-this-is-happening-right-before-my-eyes encounters. So when I saw Jasmine bounding toward me, leading the way with a pack of wild dogs behind her, it took me a breath or two to translate what was happening.

I felt awed by the beauty while my mind patched together the story. Jasmine was running for safety, bounding toward home. My Mama Bear instincts kicked in.

Standing my ground, I clapped my hands in a drumbeat and sang out “hey hey hey.” Jasmine rushed past me through the open gate. The coyotes stopped in their tracks, looking at me, assessing the changing situation.

A pack of wild dogs and a human were joined for a moment in a field of curiosity, in a weaving of differing purposes, ways of being, and points of view. Then the coyotes circled around, dancing lightly on many paws in the desert sands. They trotted over the ridge and disappeared into the sagebrush meadow.

After closing the gate, I went into the house to find remedies for the cut on Jasmine’s back leg. When I came outside to tend to her wounds, I couldn’t find my dog.

Jasmine had hidden away somewhere around our house in a finite fenced-in three-acre space. No matter how many times I walked the perimeter of the fenceline and searched around in the nooks and crannies of the land, I could not find my four-legged friend.

Some kind of canine magic was going on. Wily. Mysterious. Discrete.

Jasmine did not want to be found, didn’t want to be seen, was not interested in human intervention. She’d found and made a healing den, a nourishing space to pause, rest, replenish and restore. She was doing exactly what she needed to do.

Around sunset, when it was time according to Jasmine’s inner Wisdom, she reappeared near the house. I went out to greet her, to meet up in the place where she was laying beneath the branches of a juniper tree. As I approached, she rose up on all fours. She stared at me intently with wildness in her eyes.

I spoke softly, walked slowly, and eventually sat quietly beside her. I reached out to touch her, pouring love through my hands. I wanted her to know there was nobody here to flee or fight. She didn’t have to render herself invisible. She could come out of hiding in her own pace and ways and time.

Eventually she walked with me back to the house, her tail wagging, her eyes happy and bright. She was ravenously hungry. I too enjoyed a homecoming feast.

Yet the question that had been gnawing on me all afternoon kept me awake much of the night. How could we co-exist on the land ~ Jasmine, Coyote, and me?

What is the part that each of us has in this communal place we call home? As unique individuals? As members of diverse species? As co-creators of life?

The next morning, I gathered up my medicine bundles and walked out on the mesas. I wanted to hold ceremony with Coyote to explore this question I couldn’t answer on my own.

I needed Coyotes’ input on how to weave harmony in our Relationships. Because my Mama Bear instincts didn’t only wrap around Jasmine. I loved the coyotes too. And the many many others living on the mesas. And in other places on the earth. And far beyond.

Sitting on a boulder with a view horizon to horizon, I gave offerings and made an altar for our ceremony. I reached out to connect with Coyote, honoring the wild dogs in the sacred smoke of the ceremonial pipe, and offered up my question as a prayer:

How can we co-exist on the land?

Somewhere in our conversation, Coyote let me know that they are hunters. They were very clear about not being interested in giving up their natural ways, in acquiesing to someone else’s agenda, in being forced to become something they’re not.

I offered respect, appreciation, and understanding. And I asked if Jasmine could please not be the target of their hunt. I asked if we could continue to walk about on the lands. I wanted the wild dogs to know that I understood we were moving around in their territory. I respected their deeply rooted connections in this ecosystem. They’ve been living and thriving here long before the contemporary houses and roads and humans showed up. I’d like to be a companion and co-creator in the ecosystem, perhaps a traveler passing through, not an intruder or threat.

I can’t say an immediate response came from Coyote in any form of English words. There was no binding contract to be made.

What we were doing was weaving a web of connection, fiber by fiber, breath by breath, step by step. We were sharing and clarifying of our purposes and passions. There was mystery in what would happen next. Boundless potentials and possibilities exist in what may unfold in the coming days, weeks, and months, in new seasons and cycles, in the generations to come.

That’s the wildness of the wilderness. That’s the organic, complex, dynamic nature of our earth, of our sun and moon, of canines and humans and butterflies and rocks, of our solar system and galaxy and universe(s).

Their natural and free nature is what coyotes know, live, and express. That’s what I wanted too. To join up with it all. Be part of it all. Remember the beauty, intelligence, wonder, and mystery in each and every being, in all of us.

That was my quest on the mesas way back when ~ to weave harmony in an intricate web of relationships between a curly-tailed dog, her person, and a wild coyote pack.

That still is my dream for the now and the future ~ to find our way home as humans to our genuine humanness, to our natural belonging and relationship with our earth, to heart-centered ways of living, collaborating, and connecting with ourselves and each other, with everyone and everything, in this extraordinary web of life.