Clairity 2: Claire Teaches Me to Let Go

It has been just over a year since Princess Claire joined our family. She runs our home pretty much. And more than anything, she likes visiting our nearby mountain property, which is full of wildlife to chase. Claire was feral when we found her. My wife and I have become so fond of her that we can’t bear the thought of her running away. So when we go to the mountain, she stays on leash. Claire drags us around until our arms are sore or she is out of breath, or both. But she loves it so much that she gets to accompany us almost every time we visit our remote property. Today started just like any other of our trips to the mountain.

The Universe Holds Class

I was already expecting the unexpected. After all, I was meeting a dowser on our mountain. Yeah… a guy with a tree branch that walks around chanting and finding underground water. I was more than a little skeptical, but the well digger had been adamant that the dowser was going to save me money by finding the best well site, and the service only cost a couple of hundred bucks. So I parked my doubts and arranged an appointment with the guy at 9 AM on a Wednesday morning. I had been pleasantly surprised when I had spoken to him on the phone earlier in the week; he had sounded professional, and most importantly, not crazy. Today, I was making my best effort to stay open to the possibilities and enjoy what I expected to be a benign walk on the hippie side. The skies were deep blue and I soaked up the sun’s warmth as our puppy Claire and I sat on a large rock near the entrance of our land, eagerly awaiting the arrival of our dowser.

At about 9:30, I began to get annoyed, despite my best intentions to stay open to the flow of the day. The dowser had himself set the appointment time and date. At 9:45, I decided to call him. He answered the phone, and mumbled about having had a “rough morning.” From his barely coherent replies, I gathered that he was running late, but the appointment was still on. He didn’t know who I was, even though I introduced myself as his 9 o’clock appointment. He would be there in twenty minutes, he said, and again asked me how to get to our property. “Use google maps,” I said, irritated since I had emailed him the address twice. My mind took the few bits of information I had and started to build a worst case scenario. What kind of person becomes a professional dowser, anyway? Is this guy drunk, or worse, on drugs at 9 am on a Wednesday? And now I have him headed to meet me alone on our land, where he will see all of the expensive farm equipment I have lying around. He called again at 10:30 and said he’s lost. He had taken a wrong turn near our property, and couldn’t tell me where he was. “Go back to the mailboxes at the start of the gravel road,” I told him, “and I’ll meet you there and lead you in.” Now I was on full alert. As I drove down our 1/2 mile of steep mountain drive to the main road, I imagined what I would see waiting for me: probably a run down old pickup truck full of empty beer cans and old clothes, and a long-haired meth-head who was planning to rob me. But I was wrong… way wrong. I pulled up to a new-looking white Subaru carrying a bespectacled, chubby, white haired elderly gentleman. Ouch. My paranoia had gotten the best of me yet again. As I led him back to our land, I had a stern conversation with myself: “You’re ridiculous. You have GOT to stop judging people. Let this be a lesson to you. This guy’s not drunk… he’s probably senile. Just a harmless old guy, and you had your guard up and your 9mm locked and loaded?!”

He drove behind me to the land. We got out, shook hands, and I rebooted the first part of my day. The dowser seemed to be quite benign and actually, pretty normal. He would have fit in better at a Sunday church pot-luck than a dowsing.

Pre-Judging, Judging, & Even More Judging

The dowser looked in his 70’s, and was a bit portly. He wore a pair of wrinkled cargo pants and a red flannel shirt. He squinted through his round, metal rimmed glasses as he took in his surroundings, leaning on his car to steady himself. I pointed to the well site on top of the hill, and he could see that walk up was steep; His cane and a noticeable limp made me question whether he could make it. But he adamantly refused a ride on our ATV. This time, I have him figured out, I thought to myself. He was just a slightly senile retiree that was making a little side income with this dowsing gig; no harm, no foul. I’ll be out a bit of money, but this should at least make for a good story later.

With Claire on leash, we started the uphill climb at a snail’s pace. Between gasps of breath, my new acquaintance elaborated on the 11 types of bedrock in Western North Carolina, and the electromagnetic fields generated by these rocks. “It’s not magic,” he said. “I could teach you how to do this in five minutes. In fact, I’ve taught 300 people how to dowse, and only one of my students couldn’t get it.” “Taught,” I asked!? “Yeah, I’ve got a PhD in Sustainable Agriculture,” he said. “I was a professor at NC State.” Oops. It had taken me less than three minutes to fall into the next judging trap. Despite appearances, the dowser was not a dottering old man, but a pretty smart guy it turns out. He went on. “My love is permaculture. In fact, I’ve hiked 4500 miles in my life, and I have lived outdoors for an entire year.”

On and on he went like this, unknowingly demolishing my cynical and ill-formed pre-impression of him. He was not trying to impress me; he was teaching me. I beat myself up for my sheer inability to remain open to this or any other new experience. I started to let my guard down at this point, as evidence was pointing to the dowser being an actual expert in something.

As we walked, he explained the process of dowsing to me. He considered it science, not a parlor trick. In fact, he had taught hundreds of others how to dowse. He also seemed to have a profound knowledge base on geology, including soil architecture of our area, its tectonic history, and the physics of subterranean water accumulation. He laid out how water gets trapped and pools over bedrock, and that dowsing was just looking for cracks in the bedrock. I was now in awe. He marked two spots that he considered good for well digging, and we started walking downhill to our cars. At this point, I was listening hard to absorb his knowledge as he spoke. Claire was pulling me ahead, and I was a few yards downhill from the dowser when he called out to me that he was about to collapse.

I turned to see a wobbly man losing his footing. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I jumped to him and did my best to hold him up; not an easy task, since he was a rather large man. I knew I had to get him to the ground safely, so I led him toward a ditch embankment nearby where I thought he could sit. Suddenly, the dowser went limp, and despite my best efforts, I could not support the both of us. As we collapsed into a heap, I put my body under his to soften his fall. When the literal dust settled, we were both sitting in a wet ditch, with him on top of me. My getting up would have entailed dumping him over into the ditch, so I stayed put, supporting his head so he could breathe. My doctor side kicked in, and I started thinking of all the things that could be happening: this guy was overweight and in an age group that made him at risk for a heart attack, or a stroke. The dowser was mumbling incoherently, and his pulse was very weak. As I cradled his head with one hand, I got my phone out with the other and dialed 911. I then called two of my neighbors for help.

While I waited for help to arrive, I had time to reflect on how the universe had created this adventure for me this morning. From the beginning, I had been very skeptical and suspicious of this guy, and had assumed that he was up to no good. I had planned to keep a safe distance from him. Now, he was on top of me, and I was making sure he stayed alive. In the span of an hour, I had gone from jumping to all sorts of incorrect assumptions about another human to cradling him as I would a sick child. I like to keep all but a few people well outside of my personal space. When help finally arrived in the form of my neighbors, I had spent a solid 30 minutes with the douser being as physically close to me as any other human being had ever been. The Universe had literally forced me to get close – real close – to what I was pushing away.

My two neighbors helped lift the dowser off of me and put him in one of their ATV’s. He was speaking more clearly now. I had learned that he was a diabetic, and he had taken his insulin this morning but skipped breakfast. He was not inebriated; he had low blood sugar. How could I have missed that?! They drove him to the entrance of the property to meet the paramedics, who had just driven up. They confirmed that the dowser was going to be ok. All was returning to normal. Until I realized that I had let go of Claire’s leash when the douser had fallen on top of me. She had been running loose the entire time I had been caring for the Dowser.

To explain the level of my horror, we had lost dogs before, and we were now very careful to always have them on leash when away from our home. Once, our dog Cindi escaped and was gone for three days, returning dirty and dehydrated. Another time, I had let our other dog Zeus off leash at a local park and he took off chasing a deer; after two nerve wracking days of looking for him, he showed up at an animal shelter. So I would not have ever taken my precious Claire’s leash off on 120 acres of wilderness full of snakes, coyotes, bears and wild boars. When I realized I had let go of her leash some time ago, I frantically yelled “Claire! Claire!!” She was right behind me… sitting down, a few feet away. She had not run off. She looked at me sideways, puzzled as to why I was yelling.

The Lesson

As I reflect on the events of the day, the lessons the universe provided me were plentiful, but one simple message stands out: Let Go of Control.

I was wrong about the dowser, over and over, until the universe dropped him on top of me and I had no choice but to see him as he was, both of us completely helpless and vulnerable. It was as if the universe turned up the volume gradually until I started listening. I kept judging and trying to control the situation, and the universe kept hitting me over the head. Eventually, my unwillingness to let the day unfold resulted in my being helpless with a huge guy on top of me. And in case I still didn’t get the message to let go, inadvertently letting go of Claire’s leash sealed the deal. Turns out that I didn’t have to fear losing her the moment I let go: she stuck around.

The Origin of Judging

The reason we judge is FEAR, plain and simple. Gary Zhukov, author of the profound book The Seat of the Soul, boils it down to this: all of our behavior arises from one of two things… fear or love. Which emotion is the basis for judging? To me the answer is obvious: judging is entirely fear-based. Judging makes one close down, hold people at a distance, and contract into a defensive posture. Fear powers judging. If I think about the emotions I am feeling when I judge, none of them are positive; I feel fear, repulsion, loathing, and shame.

Imagine instead how my day would have gone had I approached it with love instead of fear? Had I remained open to the experience, assumed the best about the dowser instead of the worst? I probably would have seen the signs of his illness much sooner and avoided our brush with disaster, at the very least. Had I consciously approached the day with love, I would have saved myself much anxiety and stress. I would have recognized much earlier that the dowser was not a threat but an learned, gifted individual that had a great deal to teach me.

We think that judging and controlling protects us from bad things happening. We are only partially correct. It prevents us from experiencing good things as well.

Gaining Clairity

For her part, Claire continues to teach me to let go. Every day we return to our mountain property, she gets to run free. I still get nervous when she is out of sight; but she reassures me, again and again, when she pops her head up over the next hill.

Remain open in love, and lessons start to magically appear everywhere.

Faramarz Hidaji, M.D.

Blissfully free, Claire enjoys a run on her land