Lessons From the Elephant

A tale of impossible roads, invisible ropes, and what happens when we move anyway.

I am not an elephant. But I can eat one.

Years ago, I lived in a tiny town of 137 people, tucked into the foothills of a small mountain range. It was an area of natural beauty, yet heavy with hardship. The kind of place where stories linger in the soil—where people both hide and seek at the same time.

Everything was far apart. If you didn’t have a car, you stayed put. Even the closest Walmart (a poor excuse of one, really) was a 40-minute curve-hugging trek.

One rainy morning, driving to a client’s home through a Spring downpour, I saw a woman walking on the side of the road. She wore a skirt that looked like a homemade quilt, a sagging canvas sack, and a floppy yarn hat—none of it waterproof. All of it matching.

I pulled over. “Do you need a ride?” A ridiculous question, really. She looked at me, soaked to the bone, and said, “Why yes. I think I do.” Her name was D. “Just the letter D, hun.”

She got into the passenger seat, and I felt a flicker of unease—stranger, rural road, wet morning—but it passed. She smiled. “You’re an angel.”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “But I’m sure the next car would’ve done the same.”

“No, they wouldn’t have. You weren’t the first one to pass me today.” She explained she needed to get to the other side of the lake. “I’ll go as far as you’ll take me,” she said.

“I’ll take you all the way there. I can make time.”

I saw her eyes soften. “You see?” she said. “Angel.” She told me she was living in a half-collapsed trailer on her nephew’s land. Her husband and best friend of 32 years had died suddenly. She was so undone by grief that she sold almost everything she owned and asked for a place to disappear. No running water. No distractions. Just survival and silence.

She used to own a boutique, she said. She missed the racks. The hum of women sharing stories over clothes. But she didn’t miss the clutter of it all.

“How were you going to get there today?” I asked. “In this rain? On foot?”

“I didn’t need to know that part,” she said. “Because you were always going to be my angel.”

I laughed. “It’s pouring. Why not wait for tomorrow?”

“No,” she said. “I needed to come today. I was blessed with this beautiful rain. If the sun had been shining, you might not have stopped. But here we are.” She wasn’t wrong.

Then she said something I’ll never forget. “Not everything is what it looks like. And you’ll never know how you’ll do something… until you’re already doing it. How do you eat a whole elephant? One bite at a time.” She laughed at her own cliché. So did I. But it landed deep.

When I dropped her off, she blessed me again, and vanished into the mist. I never saw her again.

And her message was exactly what I needed to hear. I was in the thick of trying to figure out how to uproot my family from that mountain town and return to the city. It felt like a calling and an impossibility all at once. But as it turns out—it wasn’t impossible. I couldn’t map out how it would happen. I just started packing.

Later, while unpacking in the city, I opened one of those over-polished marketing emails from a well-known mindset coach. Buried inside was a fact about elephants: When baby elephants are trained, a small rope is tied around their ankle and staked into the ground. They tug and pull and learn that they can’t move it. As adults, those massive elephants are still held by that same tiny rope. They don’t test it. They don’t even try. They believe they can’t… so they don’t.

I thought of D immediately. Her handmade skirt. Her soaking wet courage. Her trust in timing.

Some things look enormous until you take the first bite. Some things hold us captive, not because they’re strong—but because we’ve stopped checking if we’re free.

The elephant isn’t the problem.T he illusion is. And the only way through is forward.

One bite. One brave step. One soaked skirt in the storm.

I’m not an elephant. But I’ve learned to eat one. Over and over again.

If this resonated with you, if you're on the edge of a big decision, or a mysterious calling—reach out. Let’s talk about your next brave step, and maybe sit together in ceremony one day. You already know where the rope is. Let’s see what happens when you let it go.