Animal Consciousness- What the goats taught me about being left and being chosen

Mother's Day, Lake Sai Farm

The horses came first.

They were the first teachers on this land — the ones who required me to tell the truth about myself before I was ready to. You cannot be dishonest around a horse. They feel everything you have not said. Everything you are carrying but will not name.

Then came the fall. A serious riding accident. Weeks alone on the floor of my house, crawling from room to room, crying with every movement my body made. The chiropractor worked with me three times a week for two years. Slowly, I learned to walk again — but not without pain. Until the day he told me he couldn't adjust me anymore. My bones were too fragile. My neck might break.

I refused surgery. Something in me knew there was another way.

That searching led me to goats.

Rhada and other does by the lake. @LakeSaiFarm

I read that raw goat milk could rebuild bone. That Chinese medicine had understood this for centuries. I found a few pregnant does from a national judge here in Georgia, brought them home, and waited.

The first doe born on this farm was Rhada.

She arrived in the middle of the pasture. Her mother abandoned her there.

We raised her on the milk of other goat mothers. She decided, from the first day, that we were hers. She cried loud when she was hungry. She jumped on our backs when she was happy — the way baby goats do, jumping on their mother's back as a game. She knew her name. She knew what I said. She had her goat temper and her gentle sweetness and she was funny in the way that creatures are funny when they are fully and completely themselves.

She was a loner in the herd. So was I.

Rhada produced beautiful kids. She loved them with a fierceness that moved me every time I watched it. She inspired me — as a herd guardian, as a mother of this place — to do better for all of them. I hired an ADGA appraiser to evaluate their structure. I did milk testing for all our does for years.

Rhada received the Superior Genetic Award from the American Dairy Goat Association.

Her babies found families who drove for days to come and get them.

Her milk rebuilt my bones. Regenerated my nerves. Gave me back my body.

I resonated with Rhada in a way I did not fully understand until later.

Her mother abandoned her the day she was born and went to care for another doe's kid instead.

My mother cared for her sons. She saw me differently — as something less deserving. She took what I had saved for college and gave it to them. She took opportunities from me that I spent years learning to grieve and then to release.

Rhada and I understood each other across that particular wound. The one that asks: why not me? Why was I not the one who was chosen?

We both survived it. We both found another way to be loved.

Today — Mother's Day — Rhada has passed. Old age, naturally, on the land where she was born and never left.

I am grateful for everything she showed me. About love that does not require explanation. About stubbornness that becomes joy. About what it means to be someone's whole world, even when you were the one who was left.

From the deepest sorrows, I have learned to sit with others in theirs.

That is the only kind of healing that matters — the kind that was earned, not studied.

I love you, Rhada. My beloved mother.

I will see you soon in the light.

Love All · Serve All · My life is my message.

— 房凌安 | Suhela LingAn · Lake Sai Farm

author of Akashic Language: Animal Soul Contracts and Transformational Healing Modalities