I talked with Animal Communicator Jeannie Lindheim last week about Simon, my third communication – we’ve done Frieda, Rose (and briefly, Toots). I am very comfortable with Jeannie. People tend to measure animal communicators in spectacular and contrived ways – do they know things they couldn’t possibly know? But I don’t measure Jeannie that way. I don’t feel she is literally exchanging sentences with my animals, I think she is absorbing my questions into her very intuitive perspective about animals and extracting something in a very spiritual way. I don’t know how it works, nor do I really need to know. It isn’t a circus act, or fortune-telling. No tricks requested or performed.  It’s an exchange of images and feelings, an intuition sometimes, a perspective, a way of thinking.

Jeannie understands the animal mind, I believe. She has a sense of how animals think in the real world, and does not emotionalize or trivialize them. She is clear, direct, confident. Helpful would be the word that comes to mind.

She did a communication with Simon, and as usual, I was excited and my questions full of human-style drama. Simon was not excited or dramatic. His neglect was a big deal to me, not really to him. It was part of life. Animals are free of human style emotions, I believe, and so, I think, does Jeannie.  I asked him about his suffering, near-starvation and neglect, and he said he always knew he would endure, would survive. He did not think much about it, or remember it much.  It was cold, wet, he was hungry.  He never thought he would perish. When he first saw Bedlam Farm, he said “wow. ” Open sky, grass, things to see, other donkeys. He said he felt as if he was lifted up on a cloud. She said he was very grounded, very secure, full of himself. He saw himself as a huge, handsome, powerful creature. When he came to farm, he was expansive, opened up. He felt as if he could breathe again, and he grew stronger every day. He knew from the first he would stay. This, he knows is his home. He is grounded to the place, to the earth, to Lulu and Fanny. He does not like the dogs.

An image that kept cropping up was of another man, before that awful time on the farm. A man who was said, who came to say goodbye, who was crying, who hugged him. Simon remembered  being surrounded by many children, and they were sad, hugging him, also saying goodbye. My guess was that Simon was recalling his time on his original farm, with the farm family. I believe Simon was on a farm with a family before, as he loves people so much and that Jeannie was pulling that memory out of him. The sad man man crying would have been the original farmer, I suspect, in his original home. He had no recollection of the people on the second farm, where he was neglected. I have heard rumors that a donkey like Simon was the beloved pet of a Vermont farm family which went under and he was sold or given away or perhaps dropped off temporarily,  to the farm where he suffered.

Simon said he loved his walks with me, but he wanted to walk side by side, not with me in front of him, or behind his head. He wanted me to walk alongside of him. He loved being with me, doing things with me. He wanted me on his right hand side. She said he loved braying, it felt wonderful, it came out of every part of his body. He is very pleased with himself, sees himself as large, strong powerful. He knows every inch of the barn, where all of the food is kept.  He is very strong, very sure of himself. He loves to eat, be brushed, have his ears rubbed.

Of all the things Jeannie told me, I was most affected by his stoicism and acceptance, the hallmark trait of animals, much as we would project our stuff into their minds. And by his memory of the sad goodbye with a man who seemed to have loved him deeply. I was struck by his memory of many children being around him, as Simon loves children, and is drawn to them. He does not like dogs, and challenges them when he sees them, as I suspect they were not in his experience.

Simon is now fused with this place, part of it, Jeannie said. Nothing else in is life really matters to him much. The next communication, tomorrow, is with Orson.

— Saturday, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Talk and Signing, “”Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die.”

– Monday, noon. Talk, Adirondack Community College, Scoville Auditorium.