What a Cow Taught Me About Presence, Compassion, and the Divinity We Share
Adi and I have been splitting our time between Galveston and Sovereignty Ranch lately, and I will be honest with you about how that split actually breaks down. I love the beach, the salt air and the slow rhythm of water that asks nothing of you but your feet in the sand and your attention on the horizon. Adi loves helping her friend Mollie at the ranch, and if you know anything about the two of us you probably already know that we are spending considerably more time in the Hill Country than we are watching the Gulf. Mollie is gearing up for a big festival called Confluence beginning April 23rdand she needs extra hands, and Adi, like always, is the first to raise hers. I go along the way Ricky went along with Lucy, with love, with mild protest, and with the quiet understanding that arguing ultimately always ends up as a loss in my standings column. So I go, reluctantly dragging my feet and doing my best to put on a game face. This is how most of my greatest adventures begin, not with my own ambition but with Adi pointing toward the horizon and me driving her to the Hill Country.
On the last night of our stay, Mollie called. A cow had fallen into a ravine and her husband Elias was out pulling her free with the tractor. She asked if I would come and do Emotion Code on her. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the work of Dr. Bradley Nelson, Emotion Code and Body Code are energy healing modalities built on the premise that trapped emotions, unprocessed feelings stored in the body from past traumas, can manifest as physical pain, illness, and emotional distress. Through muscle testing and intention, a practitioner identifies and releases these trapped emotions, allowing the body to return to its natural state of balance. Dr. Nelson spent decades as a chiropractor before devoting his life to this work, and what he discovered is both simple and profound. The body keeps score, and it is always willing to tell you the truth if you are willing to listen.
Off I went, to do Emotion Code on a cow. Yes, my life has become an episode of Green Acres meets Hill Country Medium. I want you to sit with that sentence for just a moment, because I certainly did as I walked across the ranch in the dark toward the milking barn. There are things you simply cannot prepare for in this life and this was one of them, and yet something in me felt completely calm, as though this was exactly where I was supposed to be going on this particular evening on this particular patch of Texas earth.
What I have learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, is that the places Adi leads me always have something waiting that I didn't know I needed. This week that something had four legs, a gentle face, and a name. Her name was Rosa, and she was lying in the hay beside the milking barn when I first saw her, and she looked at me the way that only the suffering can look at you, with a kind of quiet hope that asks nothing and everything all at once. She had impaled herself on a fence coming out of the ravine and her body was exhausted from the trauma of it all. I sat down beside her in the hay, and we looked at each other for nearly fifteen minutes in a silence that needed nothing added to it. Mollie had mentioned it before I walked over, but it wasn't until I was down there beside her, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her, that I truly understood what was lying in that hay. Rosa was pregnant. There were two lives in that barn asking to be seen, and I told them both, I see God in you, and I meant it the way you mean the most important things, quietly and without the need for an answer.
Rosa has not gotten to her feet yet, and she may not. That is the truth of it and there is no softening that truth into something easier to hold. We are all God's creatures, every last one of us, and when we begin to see the divinity in each other, in the broken and the struggling and the quietly enduring, that is precisely when miracles find their opening. Rosa needs a miracle, and I am here to hold space for that, nothing more and nothing less. What I can tell you is that sitting with her in that hay I was reminded that the most profound thing one soul can offer another is simply to stay. No answers, no fixing, and no noise. Just two souls and the quiet miracle growing between them in the amber light of a barn on a Texas night.
I walked in as someone doing a service for an animal and I walked out carrying something I didn't arrive with, the quiet understanding that presence is the most sacred thing one being can offer another, that compassion has no species, that divinity does not reserve itself for the convenient or the comfortable. God had not placed me in that barn to heal Rosa. He had placed me there to be reminded of something I had been moving too fast to feel. I went to the ranch reluctantly, as I always do, and I left changed in the way that only unexpected moments can manage. That is the thing about letting someone else point toward the horizon. You never quite know what is waiting when you get there, and that, it turns out, is entirely the point.
David
P.S. If you enjoyed this piece and want to buy me a cup of coffee, I am eternally grateful for you!
The purple flowers had come up through the cracked earth in defiance of the drought, without ceremony and without asking anyone's permission, as if they had decided that the absence of rain was not a reason but an excuse. They grew along the pale limestone bed on Sovereignty Ranch where water had once moved and might move again someday, and their color was the color of something you had almost forgotten and then found again, the way you find a letter from someone you once loved tucked inside a book you had not opened in years. The cedars stood dark on the ridge above and the sky held the kind of blue that is beautiful and gives nothing.
You could walk that dry bed and feel the rock and the powder-pale soil under your boots and know that the land had been waiting a long time, holding everything it had ever been given and asking for more in the only way land knows how to ask, by enduring. The ranch sat in those hills like a bowl the rain forgot, and someone was tending the soil anyway with the kind of patience that does not require a promise in return. And you understood, standing there in the dry air with the flowers purple and alive at your feet, that this is what the human spirit does when the conditions are wrong and the odds are long and the sky withholds what it owes, it blooms anyway, it makes something beautiful out of the waiting, and it does not ask permission from anyone.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.