02/27/2025
https://www.facebook.com/100064859373563/posts/1047673287404641/?sfnsn=mo
Story time
The name of the rescue,
it raises questions.
Mainly: "Are you in Arizona?"
No, in fact, we are not in Arizona. I've never even
been to Arizona.
One and half decades ago,
there was this paint mare from Lincoln County (that's also where I'm from) in West Virginia that needed help.
She was not the first horse I ever rescued. . .
but she was where the line ended up drawn in the sand.
I did not want to start a horse rescue. As awesome as it may sound in theory, this work is tough. It's actually awful. If one knew the price beforehand, no one would pay it.
You have to be tough as nails and be okay with playing a sounding board in order to succeed in it.
It is sad and hard, and it is usually done for free.
It eats up all of the spare time you could have. The price is too high.
People tire of hearing you ramble about horses pretty quick when it's not a happy story you have to tell.
You get asked why you do not spend your time saving people, instead (You can't save people, anyway, that's what Jesus did).
Some other rescues may work against you and malign you.
Previous owners threaten you, despise you and likely would murder you if given a get out of jail free card. Declined adopters revile you in emails and via phone calls.
Well meaning Horse People work against you while trying to work with you.
Rescue is 40% about animals and 60% about the people it takes to get the animal safe or the people you need to get out of the way to aid the horses.
The last part is the hardest.
There is no college degree to prepare you for this. No sociology or psychology class to give you enough insight. You learn as you go, and if you fail, you are aware animals pay the price with their lives. You depend on people to do what is right solely because it is in their heart to do so. There is too little money to be donated to make it easier.
You depend on qualified people to want to work for no pay when too often only those unable to accomplish the needed tasks are willing to help. And when you find someone willing and qualified, you will do anything but sell your first born to keep them because you KNOW the cost is too high to lose them.
And you. . .you remember your "self" cannot ever take priority.
I'm so getting off track here.
But that does a fair job of telling about what Animal rescue really is when done right and well.
So,
Back to the story of the Phoenix and the name.
Normal every day people do not end up champions of Animal rescue, generally.
Broken people with fortitude who can't be bullied do. That's not to say all people who feel they rescue are those things. I said champions of rescue, and I mean that.
They are often those who have gone through enough to end up in a pile somewhere, a pile of ash, but decided they would rise out of it.
They are usually Broken people wandering in a life that seems to have lost purpose. They are people who have been to the brink and somehow did not go over the edge. They are those who have lost too much and want desperately to have meaning in the blankness left behind.
There are exceptions to everything, but they are few.
These people are fortunate, and they stumble into a calling and find a spark.
They probably didn't know they could even see or feel one, anymore.
So it is with me.
Life Long animal girl. My first word was "horse," I hear.
When circumstances wrecked my entire life, and then losses added up around me too high to see over, I found myself wandering. I couldn't find a way out of the sadness. So I just stopped being anything. I did all of the things regular people do to get by. Ate, drove, finished a degree, had more children, cooked and read books.
And still I was this pile of Ash, but I wasn't going to live there forever.
Then, at the time, I Felt sad or nothing.
But it began to change when I found a road to somewhere that made sense to me. And it helped saved me.
Like I said, there was this paint mare tied to a tree in Lincoln county, WV. People kept saying how I loved horses and should help her over and over and over. But I did nothing at first.
I was like everyone else who hears a sad story they feel powerless to change.
She wasn't the first, but the few others prior had been reactions, like seeing a kitten in the middle of the road you either have to swerve to go around or get out for.
This one was different.
I somehow knew she would lead to a journey. I did not want to take it. I knew there was no going back from it if I went to get her.
Hopeless and a lot like me, she was on a rope in the pouring rain. I imagine, could she have talked to me, she'd have said she felt sad or nothing at all, too.
And in a rainstorm, with vague permission, through a flooded creek. . .I got her and loaded her on a our little real colored trailer.
I never looked back.
We were too late for her, and only after she was buried on my farm 2 months later, could I give her a name.
The name, Phoenix, was, in a tragic way, about her and me and so many who came after, horse and human.
It still is.
The act of going for her, when I did not want to and when I was scared of what it would mean, what kind of road it would put me on, it helped me find a spark, a something out of the nothing.
Still, for long time after that, It was mechanical. And yet, that spark grew.
It helped heal.
It created change, but it wasn't overnight.
It was this evolution of knowing if I kept at it long enough, in time, I wouldn't only want to feel things, I WOULD feel things again. I'd believe in things again.
So I did; I do.
The name Heart of Phoenix seemed a simple thing then, but it is so much more than that now.
It tells you about those behind the name.
Not just me. . .But most everyone working to save the lives of those without any power of their own to change their existence, it tells you about those who did so when they personally felt finished and broken.
Rescue is empowering in a way that little else can be. It allows fragmented people to go in, pick up the nearly destroyed and entirely revolutionize lives for the better.
In that, there is so much healing for the rescuer, I cannot relay it sufficiently.
And so it is that "Phoenix" is so very fitting to all of us in rescue, both the creatures we rescue and to us, the rescuers. . .
