I’m working peacefully at my computer when I glance out the window and see a six-foot cedar post. I stand to look more closely and come to find that my neighbor is erecting a coyote fence between her property and mine.

Immediately, my mind goes into emergency mode. It’s alarmed about the fence placement, which seems to be on my property, not hers. But there’s a subtler disturbance within me that I can’t quite identify.

Feeling my inner panic, I call on the Beloved. I need this counsel to calm me down, to advise me on what to do. I head out on my daily walk. As I make my way down the trail my mind keeps returning to the fence, and I keep drawing my attention back to my mantra and the image of my Beloved. Slowly I calm. I can appreciate the cirrus clouds skating across the sky, the chamisa bushes with their downy winter coats.

I come to see that this fence is not a personal strike against me. Ever since our neighborhood association won a court case against Dee (see The Divine Court), she has been erecting fences all around her property. Night and day, sun or rain, she is out there building her fortress.

Arriving back at my house, I walk around the side to get a closer look at the construction. Indeed, Dee has put up five or so main posts and filled in one section with cedar fencing. I hear her working there now.

Behind the blockade, her dog barks. “Good dog,” Dee says. “Good dog.”

My heart aches with the thought that my neighbor would encourage her dog to bark at me.

Back inside my house, I call the title company to ask what to do. I immediately reach an officer who recommends that I use my survey to check the measurement from my house to the fence line. I pull out my longest tape measure and head outside. It turns out that the fence is within her property. I simply didn’t realize that my house sits so close to her line. Relief washes over me.

As I settle in for the evening, I chop carrots and broccoli for a stir-fry. But I still feel uneasy. It’s as though that fence represents my neighbor’s hatred of me, and I have trouble reconciling that.

I have always tried so hard to be nice. My whole life that is the identity I have most fostered. I stop and look out at the sunset, blazing a thousands variations of red, pink and orange. Suddenly I recognize how limited that identity is. Nice Lesley—how little room there is to act in that matrix.

It is pure ego—a desire to be liked at all cost. The truth is, sometimes I am not nice. I can manifest meanness, thoughtlessness, selfishness, any number of lower tendencies. Over the years with this neighbor I have pretty much shown my worst, until recently, when I have come to view her as soul and her combative acts as mere tendencies.

I bring in the Beloved, feel the loving power fill my being. This, I say, is my true identity. I am not nice Lesley. Instead I am the Divine Power. When I align with my Beloved I take on the omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of this Divine force. It is the power of all creation. It has the ability to negotiate any situation with love.

I see that this experience with my neighbor is not about her and me, fence and property. It is about the unseen forces acting behind these outer manifestations. The opposing force wants to draw me away from my Beloved. When I stay strong in the love, I realize yet more of my Divine Self.

In subsequent days, the fence construction continues and I simply let it. I come to see the fence as a beautiful reflection of an important boundary between my higher and lower self. I need not react to, nor fight, nor run from that lower vibration. Instead I can simply let it play out its karma behind its little coyote fence, while I enjoy spring, its chirping birds, cobalt sky and sun that warms my cheeks.

Above all, I bask in the Love that I am.

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