It happened again. Another bunny fell down our window well. That means in the past two months, three babies have fallen about 5 feet down to an enclosed area, where they could have died if we hadn’t found them. In order to live, they had to accept help from a human. When I shared this story on the phone with a couple of friends, I equated the experience of the bunnies to that of a human stuck in a cave with a bear extending its paw out to help you. Would you let it touch you? Would you let it help you out?
Well this little bunny was far more fearful than the first one and it was not going to let me touch it, medicine song or not. No song was going to help it relax enough to let me lift it up out of the well. Quite honestly, if I was in its position, I don’t know if I would let an animal help me! Since, I didn’t want to traumatize the little thing, I put some lettuce in the window well along with a towel for it to cuddle against during the night and left it alone.
The next day my husband had an idea about using a box as an elevator. So I brought the baby more food and sent it visual images about being very carefully lifted up in a box. When it was time, my husband and I went to the window well together. The bunny was against the wooden frame of the well, being very, very still. My husband gently scooted the box underneath it, with the open side of the box solidly against the wooden frame. We thought for sure the bunny would be leaping all around the inside of the box, but instead it settled in quietly. My husband slowly lifted the box up to the top, where finally the open end of the box was exposed to the ground. The bunny got out the box slowly, then turned around and looked at him for a few seconds before it bounded off into the woods behind our house.
Having just gotten home from SpiritQuest, I laughed as I told my husband that the word must be out in the neighborhood about rites of passage opportunities for bunnies. I figured the new test of becoming an adult bunny might very well be based upon your willingness to fall down a window well and see if you are rescued. If you let the lady sing to you and lift you up, you have earned your right to be considered an adult. And perhaps now they would add that if you let the man lift you up in a box, this is also worthy of a young bunny’s passage into adulthood. We laughed together at the idea that we were now intercessors for rites of passages for bunnies.
Then I got serious. In the rites of passage ceremonies I have personally experienced, I discovered within me a willingness to be humble enough to 1) surrender completely to Spirit, 2) receive help however it comes—from within or without, and 3) die to a fearful part of myself so that I can experience the Divine in more of my life. So I pondered, what it was that I could learn from these bunnies, and what I have deemed their rites of passage experiences.
I wondered, how often Spirit sends help to me that I don’t recognize as help? How often am I too afraid, because of all my prior conditioning, to recognize that help may not look like anything I could have ever imagined before. I asked myself, “What if help looked like a bear putting out its paw for me to grab?” “Would I grab it?” “Would I recognize help when it was being offered?”
“Hmmmm,” I reflected. “Do I have the courage to take this even deeper?” “Where in my life would I rather do it myself and die trying than receive help—specifically, the only help Spirit seems to be sending?”
Have you ever gotten to one of those questions in your life where you didn’t have a fast answer? Well, that’s what this question did to me. When I don’t have a quick response, I know I’m on the edge of discovery about myself that is going to be very significant. Well, this one must be really important because I am still reflecting on it.
So how about you, is there a bear in your life?
What a marvelous story. I think many of us are afraid to grab the helping heand because we don’t know if it will help us or eat us. We just have to trust that Spirit has sent us the aid we requested when we fell down that rabbit hole.
I fell down that rabbit hole and the hand that Spirit sent to me was the Creation Meditation. It has helped me out of the rabbit hole I was stuck in. I have used the Creation Meditation to clear out fears, doubts, self-esteem issues, feelings about my mother and father, family of origin issues, respect, dependence, self-love, health, responsibility and many others. It has changed my life. These meditations have pulled me into a whole new world outside the limitations of the rabbit hole I was trapped in. However, I am now lost in a new world where I don’t know what to do.
No longer do I wake up feeling like I have a gun to my head urging me to do, do, do. Now I can’t even formulate what I want to do with my day when I get up. I have many unfinished projects I can’t seem to focus on because all I want to do is bask in the peace and calm of this new world and meditate all day. My meditations tell me this is a time of learning a new way of being in the world but I still need to focus on getting SOME things done. So, I’m feeling lost and ill at ease finding my way about this new world. But it is much better than being in the rabbit hole.
Ariann
I’ve had a really similar experience. In the last few weeks, we’ve had three hummingbirds fly into our house. The first one flew in through the open back door and headed straight across the house for the big, high picture window. I was getting ready to take my kids to a birthday party, when my 5 yr. old daughter told me there was a hummingbird in the house. I thought she was joking until I saw it trying to get out the front window. An older neighbor happened to be passing by and I yelled down to her “Do you know how to get a hummingbird out of the house?” She yelled back that we should get a long pole and duct tape a colander to it, then lower that down over the hummingbird and guide it outside. After some frantic running around, my 8 yr. old son and I found an 8 ft. pole, a colander, a tiny bit of duct tape and some twisty wire (the kind that comes in toy packaging — thank goodness my son saves everything!) The pole still wasn’t long enough for me to reach the hummingbird, so I had to get out the step ladder. The little bird kept collapsing onto the tiny window ledge to rest, and I couldn’t see it from below, so my son guided me from farther back. Eventually, the hummingbird latched onto the outside of the colander, long enough for me to usher it out the nearest open door. Whew!
When it happened the second time, we were like a well-oiled machine. We had our contraption put together and the hummingbird out the door in about 5 minutes.
The third time, the hummingbird arrived in the evening. This time, it didn’t go straight to the front window, but flew around the highest part of the ceiling. There was no way to catch it. When it landed somewhere it was too high to reach, even with a ladder. Eventually, we left the doors open and went downstairs to watch a TV show. When we came back up about an hour later, the poor little thing was still flying around, but much lower. I was really afraid it would die in the house. I kept yelling at my kids to go to bed, partly because the bird seemed to move to an easier place to catch it when it they weren’t there making noise, and partly because I didn’t want them to see it die. I almost got it once or twice. The poor thing was so exhausted, it flew behind a cabinet and got stuck. I had to get a flashlight and didn’t even see it back there at first. Then I saw a handful of feathers way down on the floor between the wall and the cabinet. I was sure it was dead. I was tempted to leave it there for my husband (he’s the one that refused to get a screen for the back door!) but something told me just to be brave and get it outside. After emptying the shelves of breakables, I moved the cabinet and got a little box with a lid that I keep for catching and releasing large bugs. I gently scooped the hummingbird into the box and put the lid on. Then I heard it peeping. I called to my kids that it wasn’t dead. I carried it outside and set it on a table. I took the lid off the box, but the bird just lay there, this pathetic little ball of fluff. I carefully tipped the box over. The hummingbird got its bearings and took off.
I kept thinking there had to be some meaning in this experience, some lesson to take away — but I couldn’t come up with one, until I read your story. The funny thing is, after each instance, I saw a hummingbird hovering outside a window where I don’t usually see them — outside my bathroom window, outside my office window, outside my son’s bedroom window — as if they were each saying, “Thanks, I’m okay!”