Making Friends With The Beast

This past weekend an unexpected turn of events requiring a jump start, a borrowed phone, and eventually a tow truck earned us an extra day of vacation and we ended up at the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, WA. The farm was started by a man who trained animals for Disney productions including bears, Bobcats and elk. It's now a wildlife preserve where they allow you to feed wheat bread to some of the wild life. Where else in the world do they let you feed the bears!?! We drove through the first area with llamas and yak, the llama were friendly and at one point one of them stuck its head into the car through the window looking for more bread. 

The look on my eleven-year-old's face was priceless. The yak were a bit more intimidating being rather muscular in build but were eye level with us in our Subaru Impreza and that was fun. The Kodiak bears were next and one of them even put on a little show for us so we would feed him. I couldn't help but wonder about his history. Next was the "no feeding zone". This area had black bears, tigers, lions, Bobcats, wolves, raccoon and several others. 

The intense part came when we entered the elk and bison zone. They use a type of cattle guard to keep them in (they can't walk across it but you can drive through) and the signs say not to stop your vehicle in the area as damage will occur to your vehicle. I was amazed at the size of these animals. They walked right over looking for bread. When they headed our way I had the kids roll the windows half way up. As the first elk attempted to put his head into our little car I was a little bit terrified. We had a horse growing up and I knew how strong she was so having anything larger than that and not super tame that close to my family seemed cause for concern. The boys held pieces of bread out the window and it tried to catch them before the boys got intimidated and dropped it.  Then the bison came over. If the elk was intimidating the bison was down right scary! They were huge! For a moment I questioned my judgement in driving into this situation. In the end we enjoyed it so much that we drove through one more time before heading home. We got a little braver the second time and really enjoyed it. We also got to watch an elk stick its head into a Ford truck behind us as we slowly drove through. So funny to watch. 

As I've been thinking about this experience I see some parallels with grief and other ongoing challenges in our lives. We see it from a distance and it looks doable but when we get up close it's downright scary. There are times when we need to take a break from thinking about and dealing with our challenges before coming back to them. When we do we'll get a better look at them and have more of an opportunity to examine them up close and maybe even marvel at the intricacies of our situation as we would marvel at the long black tongue of the bison that just slobbered on our car window. (Yep, that happened.) We can, in time, make friends with the beasts that are life's greatest challenges and find the beauty and joy in life between the moments of uncertainty. As scary as it is sometimes we must learn to make friends with the beast.

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