How a 'violently abused' horse's recovery is helping grieving humans: 'Look at what love can do'
“He’s my soulmate,” says psychologist and grief counselor Joanna Cacciatore about Chemakoh, the first of several horses she rescued. Many of her bereaved clients have also found deep connections with the horse, and this led her to the idea of opening the Selah House Respite Center and Care Farm, on land embraced by canyons, pine thickets, and the iconic red rock mountains.
It is a unicorn of a place where people can come and find solace after suffering the death of a loved one — often through bonding with an animal, such as Chemakoh, who truly seems to understand.
While the idea of care farming in general is rare outside Europe and Australia — where the “green” approach to therapy uses the natural healing power of land and animals to help people deal with issues ranging from spectrum disorders to PTSD and addictions — Selah is rarer still. That’s because it is the first care farm to focus on treating the traumatically bereaved.
“This farm is a place where people can go in their trauma and grief and get some space, and just be with their authentic emotions,” Cacciatore says, adding that the name comes from the Hebrew word selah, which means an interlude to pause and reflect. “There aren’t very many places like that in the world, where you can have that space and freedom to just be.”
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