Finding Your Herd

And running with them into the storm.

This morning I was having coffee with three brilliant, funny, compassionate women – because I’m lucky like that – and we were talking about all the crazy stuff: ancestors and aliens and astrology, all the “a” words (and also Walmart, but that’s another story) – when one of us (

Robyn

!) reminded us about buffalo running toward a storm.

Well, not exactly reminded, because I didn’t know about this. Turns out that buffalo, when they see a storm coming, run toward it, not away from it. They also don’t stand still. They actively move toward the storm. The simple reason for this is that this means they spend less time in the harsh weather.

I think we can all agree, “that’ll preach.”

It’s like walking out into the ocean. If you try to stand firm in the sand against the waves, boom. You’re down. If you continually run away from the waves, you never make it out into the deeper water. But guess what? Dive under a wave and voila! You’re on the other side of it. (Of course, more waves come and it may take a few dives to get where you want to be … which is, in fact, much like life.)

Honestly, as a white woman sitting here writing in a pretty little mountain town, it’s a little hard to know which direction to run right now to be going toward the storm. But the storm is blowing hard across our nation and across Gaza and through our own hearts and minds.

I wonder if one buffalo was all by itself, instead of in a herd, it would still have the courage to run toward the storm? I don’t know.

One thing we can be doing right now is finding our herd. The ones we trust to stay with us in the storms. And while we’re doing that, let’s make sure we’re pulling the vulnerable ones into the middle of our herd, so they know they’ll be surrounded. Especially in the ICE storms …

There’s no running away from these storms we’re facing. Who’s in your herd?