For six months my body has held the tension of an attachment so strong its feared letting go. In many ways, our life journeys are all about letting go of our earthly attachments, those things that keep us bound and tethered, preventing our souls from soaring through the clear air of our truth. Yet, some attachments, those formed by love, are so fiercely imbedded into our being that we cannot imagine taking another breath without them. When the physical body leaves, though, love remains.

That is the concept that has held me up for the past six months as I have wondered each day if one of the greatest teachers and loves of my life will survive her next birthday. To tell you how she has transformed me from a life filled with fear to love, from dis-ease to healing and from the limited sight of the ocular, to see through the eyes of the soul, would take me hours that I cannot now count. She is still here. She will always be here, I know, even when she is not. We are bound together beyond the corporeal. Together we share love in the purest form.

What a gift it has  been to share this part of my journey with her, to yield the leash and allow her to guide my hand. She is like no other love I have known, and I will, inevitably, miss her form when it is time for her to return to the home where all souls one day go. My face will miss the silky down of her fur, my eyes, the soft wisdom of her gaze, and my hands will hold onto the feel of her pull, urging me forward.

These past months, I have struggled to hold the finite limits set on life, to reign them in and never let them go. I have attempted to deny the inevitable giving way, even though my heart knows that together, Daisy and I have traveled the end of our life path together. The rest is bonus time. The gifts we have shared cannot be measured through time and its limitations. They will continue when her body returns to the earth. She was my guardian for 5 and 1/2 years of this life, and I have no doubt I will feel her love long after she travels across the rainbow bridge.

Today, as I struggled through a morning of inconclusive exams at the veterinary office, then brought Daisy home to watch her eyes hunger for food that her throat would not swallow, my body gave way the trappings of tension I had been holding. There were tears, there still are as I write. There will be more. That is how we heal. But for now, Daisy is still here, barking her guardianship for the surrounding world to hear. And that is enough.

Before I wrote this post, I walked into another room and the feather shown below dropped from the ceiling from an unseen source, directly into my path. Although it is small, there was no way I could miss it. As Doreen Virtue often reminds us, the gift of a feather is a sign of love from our guides and guardian angels. What a perfect gift for this day.