Blue Star Equiculture has been offered a $7,500 matching grant to help them through a difficult time, and I hope some of you will see the way to  help them. Five dollars is as good as a hundred. Blue Star is an extraordinary place,  a mystical and sacred place to me. it is officially a carriage and draft horse rescue farm and sanctuary, but is, of course, much more that. I believe Blue Star is the future model for keeping animals and the world and helping them continue their work with people.

At Blue Star, animals and people have the rights that both deserve. The animals are treated lovingly and well, the people are  treated with compassion and dignity. I think Blue Star is about compassion and encouragement, for  horses, for animals, for people.

We are living in a time of great unease and polarization, our love for animals is so deep that it is increasingly difficult to talk openly or come to rational solutions about what is best for them. The animal world is wracked with conflict and argument about how to keep animals in our world, and how to respect the people who live and work with them.

We need a new and wiser understanding of animals if they are to survive in our world, I believe Blue Star is the way, the path to help guide us. There, animals are rescued, healed, saved, they fulfill their working destiny, if that is their call. They are safe and understood, their real needs – not the emotionalized fantasies of humans – are known and met.

Blue Star has attracted an extraordinary family of people, young and old, who treat each other well, who have committed themselves to a life of service, to people, animals, to Mother Earth. The Native-Americans speak of this time as a crossroads for humanity, that, they say, is the message of the horses. We will either learn to work together in harmony or we shall all perish together in fear and division.

For all of the love of the horses, Blue Star is a profoundly human place, touched by the crisis and mystery and joy and travail of  human life. The farm was shattered earlier this year – and greatly distracted – by the death of its much loved co-director Paul Moshimer, the husband of Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach, a co-founder and director of the farm.

Blue Star is coming back with a vengeance, they have a powerful new board of directors, a committed and re-organized staff, exciting and detailed plans for the future. The Leo Walsh foundation has offered to match up to $7,500 in contributions, and they are in need right now. Paul Moshimer’s death stunned the farm, and they were understandably focused on healing and caring for the horses, not fund-raising. They  need some help.

It is important that Blue Star heal and thrive. It is important to every working horse,  to every animal in the world, and to every person who loves animals and wishes for them to remain in our every day lives. With sadness, I have to say the animal rights movement has failed them and us, it has become yet one more public institution promoting hate and fear and confusion, the new American cancer.

What can we do? We can do what we are doing. One thing at a time. We can help a woman in Oklahoma rescue a work horse on the way to slaughter. We can help a farmer named Joshua Rockwood fight off unjust charges of animal cruelty that threaten his farm.

We can help Blue Star be secure. We can help the beautiful horses there spend their lives in comfort and safety. We can help the very special people there fulfill their dreams to help build a better world. We can follow St. Therese’s idea of practicing the little way of love, free of fear and judgment.

Pamela Rickenbach, out of her grief and sorrow, has a beautiful vision for the future. We need it badly. So do the animals of the world, under siege as never before. All living things are sacred there, they are all given the opportunity to live their lives.

We can follow Pamela’s beautiful dream and the beautiful wishes of Pope Francis for a better understanding of animals:

“If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder,” he wrote, ” if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”

Here, a chance to be something other than masters and ruthless exploiters, to be  intimately united with all that exists, to be open to awe and wonder at the glorious partnership of people and animals in he world. Please help Blue Star match it’s grant if you can. Five dollars is as good as a hundred.