"Letting the Bunny Go" by B.E. Jackson

 – smelling the verdant breath of spring

I was standing between it and freedom.

B.E. Jackson grew up among story tellers—writers, actors, and musicians—and learned early the importance of treating an artistic career like the business that it is. After receiving a degree in Psychology, she pivoted to helping people recover from trauma and addiction through equine-assisted activities at her ranch in rural Arizona. In 2012, she published a how-to/memoir on her life with animals, entitled Herdmates to Heartmates: The Art of Bonding with a New Horse. She is currently working on two novels.

Author’s Talk

On Letting the Bunny Go

B. E. Jackson

I was a month into a temp job at the local behavioral health clinic when he called me one morning from an unfamiliar number. He’d locked his keys and phone in his car and wasn’t sure what to do about it. I hadn’t heard his voice in months. My son. My only child. Estranged but not too much so.

I told him I had a new job and couldn’t just leave, but had a lunch break coming up and could he wait until then? Turned out he was a short walk from my office, in a town where everything is reachable on foot in under an hour. 

He sat across from me in the visitor’s chair while I tried not to notice what looked like black Sharpie squiggles all over his face and neck. I prayed they weren’t tattoos. 

At seventeen, he’d announced he felt depressed and suicidal and we had taken him to a counselor who’d recommended antidepressants. At eighteen, he’d graduated in the top two percent of his high school class, with numerous scholarships to choose from. At nineteen, he’d walked away from a four-year scholarship and begun living an urban nomad’s life, couch surfing at friends’ apartments while keeping his parents well out of the loop on his whereabouts, let alone his intentions. 

Using the phone we paid for, he would call us occasionally, mostly to request money be sent to Western Union offices in Tucson or Flagstaff. He spent an entire summer sleeping in his car in the Coconino National Forest. 

I am an animal behaviorist by avocation, if not by trade. I’ve spent decades studying the psychology of dogs and horses and have helped people build better relationships with their pets and livestock. I had foolishly thought this skill would transfer, would make me a stellar parent, one who could raise a stellar child to stellar adulthood. I hadn’t taken into consideration Nature—both human nature and the other, larger kind. 

It is Nature that has so much to teach us, if we will only listen.—B.E. Jackson