My Gentle Barn (29 page)

Three tissues later I finally calmed down enough to pick up the pen. But as I lowered my shaky hand to the paper, Maurine grabbed my wrist, and my breath caught in my throat.

“Don’t sign that paper!” she practically yelled, my wrist still in her hand.

“What?” I said.

“I’m not selling this property.”

“What do you mean?” I said. Her stern tone had startled the sobbing right out of me.

“I’m not selling your dream out from under you.”

“We’ve thought long and hard about this,” Jay said.

“We can’t pay the mortgage,” I explained, “and they tried to take our car—”

“Don’t you dare give up on this!” Maurine said. “This is your dream!” She shook my wrist for emphasis, and then released me. “Don’t you ever give up.” She grabbed her coat and headed for the door and we followed after her.

“Where are you going?” Jay said.

“What do you mean you won’t sell our house?” I asked.

She walked quickly down the front steps and out the gate to her car, then said, “I won’t be involved in your failure. This is what you’re meant to do. You can make it work. You keep trying! You just keep trying!” She paused there for a moment, then went to her trunk and opened it. She reached in and pulled out a DVD. As she handed it to me, she said, “You watch this movie every single day for thirty days.” Before she shut her door she said, “And don’t call me again!”

As Maurine drove off, Jay and I simply stood there staring at each other, mouths open, not quite sure what had just happened.

Finally Jay broke our silence. “Well,” he said, “we might as well go inside and watch the movie.”

And we did. We watched
The Secret
every single, solitary day. Each time I watched, I felt things shifting and changing inside me, like old layers were sloughing off—layers of hopelessness, fear, false beliefs. In place of all that, something new and fresh was growing, tiny and delicate. A sense of hope and wonder. A burgeoning faith that maybe I would get to keep my dream after all. I’d worked and fought for it, but at the very root of my efforts had been the belief that in the end it would all be taken away, it would all fall apart because I wasn’t really supposed to have it in the first place. It was one thing to tell the at-risk kids they could have
their
dreams; it was another thing entirely to believe it for myself. Now this movie was telling me—each and every night—what I had always told the kids.
Well, of course you can have your dream. You just have to believe it
. A whole reorganization was taking place inside me. I started watching my thoughts and words. I started making new choices, speaking and acting in new ways, coming to understand that my very attitude could create my world.

But it wasn’t only the movie. The movie was reinforcing again and again the gift Maurine had given me—Maurine, our angelic real estate agent. I’d never had an adult tell me “This is what you’re supposed to do. Don’t you dare give up on it.” I’d been commanded by an angel to believe in myself.

We called the bank that had given us the car loan and we called the mortgage company. Instead of begging, we were simply finding out what steps we had to take to make this work, because now we understood we were supposed to make things work. The Gentle Barn was supposed to exist, was supposed to thrive.

We ironed things out with the bank on the car loan. But the mortgage company said they wouldn’t even talk with us until we’d made a $5,000 payment. Five thousand dollars all in one chunk. We worked hard to keep our positive attitude, doubling up on screenings of
The Secret
, but we couldn’t see where the money was going to come from. Every single penny we could scrape up went to feeding our children and our animals. There was nothing left on top of that. Where were we going to get $5,000?

Two weeks later, Jay and I were sitting in the office, answering e-mails, searching for new grants, and trying to figure out how to make ends meet. We were also attempting to hold on to our fledgling attitude of positivity, but it was challenging from behind such a tall stack of bills. We’d watched
The Secret
sixteen times, but we still had not come up with the $5,000.

I put one more bill on top of the stack, and the phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize.

“Gentle Barn,” I answered. “This is Ellie.”

It was a woman’s voice on the other end. “Hi, my husband and I found out about you from a friend,” she said. “We’ve heard so many good things. Is there any possibility we can come by and see your place?”

I hesitated for half a second, thinking I should tell her about Sundays, when we were open to the public, but something told me just to say yes. “Sure, when did you want to come?”

“We have time now,” she said.

I didn’t have any groups scheduled that day, and it would be another few hours before Molli and Jesse were home from school. It would do me some good to get out from under this pile of bills and into the barnyard. Besides, I could use a good hug from Buddha.

Forty-five minutes later, two people arrived at our gate, a young couple with that L.A. sheen—fit, attractive, and well put-together, making casual look elegant. I glanced at the woman’s clean, cream-colored pumps and hoped her shoes would survive the terrain.

With Cheyanne on my hip, I took them first to meet the cows.

When we were inside the cow barn, the woman said, “I’ve never been this close to a cow.”

I set Cheyanne down and wrapped my arms around Buddha’s neck. Cheyanne toddled over and laid her tiny hand on Buddha’s nose.

“Oh, that’s so cute,” said the woman.

“Obviously you trust this cow,” the man said.

“With my life,” I said. “Here, come give Buddha a hug.” Both of them hugged my cow and took my encouragement to lay their faces against her neck and really take a moment with it. Their faces melted into that easy, open smile I’d seen on so many people as they hugged Buddha.

We went next to the horses, and I showed how to feed them carrots, with a flat, open palm. All along the way, I told the animals’ stories, and I explained our at-risk youth program, saying that the shared histories of abuse were part of the healing. The couple was warm and receptive and seemed genuinely moved by each and every story I told.

When we got to the upper barnyard, Jay came down from the office to say hello.

“This place is amazing,” the man told Jay.

We were standing outside the barn, where our pig Bodhi was asleep
in the straw with a goat resting near his head and a handful of chickens popping in and out of the open doorway. “I didn’t know they could all live together like this,” the woman said. “The different animals get along so well.”

“Actually, they get along better than humans do. They’re more forgiving and live more in the moment.” Then I added, “Besides, they know better than to expend energy trying to be right.” At this both the husband and wife chuckled.

When the tour was finished, I glanced down at the woman’s pumps. Not one scuff. It was like she had a fashion shield.

“Well, this has been wonderful,” she said.

“It’s always nice to see people are interested in what we do,” I told the two of them. I felt rejuvenated by their visit, touched by how affected they were by the animals and their stories. Here in the barnyard was where the magic was. Sharing the Gentle Barn with others felt like a better way to solve our problems than toiling and figuring from behind a computer and a stack of papers. “Thank you so much for stopping by,” I said.

“No, thank
you
,” the woman said. “You do awesome work here.”

“We’d like to make a contribution,” the man said, and he took a pen out of his breast pocket, then a checkbook, and he began writing. When he handed me the check I burst into tears. I handed the check to Jay, and his eyes filled with tears too.

On the check were the words “five thousand dollars.”

The generosity of strangers blew a gust of relief into our lives and stoked my burgeoning faith. We handed the $5,000 over to the mortgage company and, as promised, they entered into discussions with us about how we could keep our property. Jay redoubled his fund-raising efforts and—working around our toddler’s needs—I did whatever I could to help out. But despite all these efforts, for a good year we continued to struggle financially. My faith—still new and fragile—wavered as we approached the end of each month, racing against time to scrape together our mortgage and our car payment—only to start all over again the following month. It was like slogging up a muddy hill and slipping back to the bottom again and again. And no matter how many times we got to the top, the bottom always reignited our fear. The belief and trust that had been commanded by our angel seemed
to slip from our grasp when we were faced all over again with the possibility of losing the Gentle Barn.

I made sure not to show my concern in front of our kids or even the animals. Frightening our children would not help our cause, and the animals—who’d already been through so much hardship in their lives—did not need any of my burden on top of their own. The only exception was Buddha; I knew in my bones she could handle it. In fact, it felt to me as though she were asking to hear all about it, as a good mother would want to listen to her child’s fears so that she could quell them. And this was exactly what Buddha did for me, each and every time I spoke to her about my troubles.

Despite our struggles and the monthly press to pay our bills, deep down inside me things
were
still shifting and changing. With Buddha’s help, and with the help of
The Secret
, which we returned to again and again, I began to recognize a pattern. Every time we had reached the end of our rope, something miraculous had landed at our feet … even if we didn’t recognize it at the time as a miracle. Before long, when the fear would hit, I wouldn’t get stuck in it quite as long, for I had a new paradigm to anchor me, a new roost to fly back to. I had been given permission to have my dream; the Gentle Barn was supposed to be.

Finally, about a year after Maurine had refused to sell our property, my faith hit critical mass. It made no logical sense from the outside. Money was even tighter than usual, and we were behind a month on the mortgage. But I peered down that path to fear that I’d trod so many times before, and it just didn’t beckon to me this time.

“Ellie, I just don’t see it,” Jay said. “I see no way out of it this time. I have no idea where the money’s going to come from.”

“I don’t know, either, Jay. But I’m tired of being afraid. I think at this point … I believe in miracles.”

“Have you seen our stack of bills?” he asked me. “I’ve been trying all day to figure out how we’re going pay them. We’re worse off than we’ve ever been.”

“I’m just going to have faith,” I said. “A miracle’s going to find us.”

That was a Saturday in October 2007. The next day, Sunday, we went to the park in the morning with Cheyanne, who was almost two. It was just the three of us that weekend; Molli and Jesse were having a sleepover at my mom’s in the city. As we were driving home from the park, just topping the rise of the Sand Canyon hill, Jay said, “Ellie, look at that smoke.”

Sure enough, there was a plume of black smoke off in the distance. It didn’t look that close, but ever since our neighbors had warned us about the fire hazard out here, we had kept our eyes open and taken smoke seriously.

“We better go check it out,” Jay said.

When we reached our gates, we passed them and instead drove north up the road for about twenty minutes until we found the origin of the smoke. It was a reasonably small fire and looked well contained, surrounded by fire trucks.

“They got it,” Jay said. “They’re right on it.” And he turned the car around and headed back home.

We were having one of our windy days, and as we drove up our long driveway, our young pepper trees were swaying and the dust and hay were whipping all around. We had guests coming over to our house a bit later, a family we’d invited for a playdate—Stacy, Logan, and their toddler—and by the time they arrived, the wind had picked up even more and Jay thought the smoke in the distance looked thicker and blacker.